TERMS STARTING WITH
01 32
0/1 knapsack problem "application" The {knapsack problem} restricted so that the number of each item is zero or one. (1995-03-13)
0>3TD
0 c fX>
0 is the cardinal number of the null class. 1 is the cardinal number of a unit class (all unit classes have the same cardinal number).
0 Michael
0
0 {zero}
TERMS ANYWHERE
140 Journey
10 ordinary dreams) are usually in the great mass experiences of the vital plane, a world of supraphysical life, full of variety and interest, with many provinces, luminous or obscure, beauti- ful or perilous, often extremely attractive, where we can get much knowledge loo both of our concealed pans of nature and of things happening to us behind the veil and of others which are of concern for the development of our parts of nature. The vital being in us then may get very much attracted to this range of experience, may want to live more in it and less in the outer life.
10 ^
260 Suprameniallsation
270 Symbol
© 2022 - Savitri
204 Purificaiion
208 Rajayoga
20 Book
^20 Infinite
a 1 ::: --> A registry mark given by underwriters (as at Lloyd&
aard-wolf ::: n. --> A carnivorous quadruped (Proteles Lalandii), of South Africa, resembling the fox and hyena. See Proteles. html{color:
abandon ::: v. t. --> To cast or drive out; to banish; to expel; to reject.
To give up absolutely; to forsake entirely ; to renounce utterly; to relinquish all connection with or concern on; to desert, as a person to whom one owes allegiance or fidelity; to quit; to surrender.
Reflexively: To give (one&
abeam ::: adv. --> On the beam, that is, on a line which forms a right angle with the ship&
aberration ::: n. --> The act of wandering; deviation, especially from truth or moral rectitude, from the natural state, or from a type.
A partial alienation of reason.
A small periodical change of position in the stars and other heavenly bodies, due to the combined effect of the motion of light and the motion of the observer; called annual aberration, when the observer&
abide ::: v. i. --> To wait; to pause; to delay.
To stay; to continue in a place; to have one&
abigail ::: n. --> A lady&
ablution ::: n. --> The act of washing or cleansing; specifically, the washing of the body, or some part of it, as a religious rite.
The water used in cleansing.
A small quantity of wine and water, which is used to wash the priest&
about ::: prep. --> Around; all round; on every side of.
In the immediate neighborhood of; in contiguity or proximity to; near, as to place; by or on (one&
abreast ::: adv. --> Side by side, with breasts in a line; as, "Two men could hardly walk abreast."
Side by side; also, opposite; over against; on a line with the vessel&
abroad ::: adv. --> At large; widely; broadly; over a wide space; as, a tree spreads its branches abroad.
Without a certain confine; outside the house; away from one&
abscond ::: v. i. --> To hide, withdraw, or be concealed.
To depart clandestinely; to steal off and secrete one&
absentation ::: n. --> The act of absenting one&
absenteeism ::: n. --> The state or practice of an absentee; esp. the practice of absenting one&
absenter ::: n. --> One who absents one&
absquatulate ::: v. i. --> To take one&
abstain ::: v. i. --> To hold one&
abstinence ::: n. --> The act or practice of abstaining; voluntary forbearance of any action, especially the refraining from an indulgence of appetite, or from customary gratifications of animal or sensual propensities. Specifically, the practice of abstaining from intoxicating beverages, -- called also total abstinence.
The practice of self-denial by depriving one&
abuse ::: v. t. --> To put to a wrong use; to misapply; to misuse; to put to a bad use; to use for a wrong purpose or end; to pervert; as, to abuse inherited gold; to make an excessive use of; as, to abuse one&
acacia ::: n. --> A roll or bag, filled with dust, borne by Byzantine emperors, as a memento of mortality. It is represented on medals.
A genus of leguminous trees and shrubs. Nearly 300 species are Australian or Polynesian, and have terete or vertically compressed leaf stalks, instead of the bipinnate leaves of the much fewer species of America, Africa, etc. Very few are found in temperate climates.
The inspissated juice of several species of acacia; -- called also gum acacia, and gum arabic.
acanthus ::: n. --> A genus of herbaceous prickly plants, found in the south of Europe, Asia Minor, and India; bear&
accede ::: v. i. --> To approach; to come forward; -- opposed to recede.
To enter upon an office or dignity; to attain.
To become a party by associating one&
accession ::: n. --> A coming to; the act of acceding and becoming joined; as, a king&
accident ::: n. --> Literally, a befalling; an event that takes place without one&
accord ::: v. t. --> Agreement or concurrence of opinion, will, or action; harmony of mind; consent; assent.
Harmony of sounds; agreement in pitch and tone; concord; as, the accord of tones.
Agreement, harmony, or just correspondence of things; as, the accord of light and shade in painting.
Voluntary or spontaneous motion or impulse to act; -- preceded by own; as, of one&
account ::: n. --> A reckoning; computation; calculation; enumeration; a record of some reckoning; as, the Julian account of time.
A registry of pecuniary transactions; a written or printed statement of business dealings or debts and credits, and also of other things subjected to a reckoning or review; as, to keep one&
accroach ::: v. t. --> To hook, or draw to one&
aceldama ::: n. --> The potter&
achillean ::: a. --> Resembling Achilles, the hero of the Iliad; invincible. html{color:
acknowledge ::: v. t. --> To of or admit the knowledge of; to recognize as a fact or truth; to declare one&
acquire ::: v. t. --> To gain, usually by one&
acre ::: n. --> Any field of arable or pasture land.
A piece of land, containing 160 square rods, or 4,840 square yards, or 43,560 square feet. This is the English statute acre. That of the United States is the same. The Scotch acre was about 1.26 of the English, and the Irish 1.62 of the English.
acrimonious ::: a. --> Acrid; corrosive; as, acrimonious gall.
Caustic; bitter-tempered&
actinometer ::: n. --> An instrument for measuring the direct heating power of the sun&
actively ::: adv. --> In an active manner; nimbly; briskly; energetically; also, by one&
actuality ::: n. --> The state of being actual; reality; as, the actuality of God&
adagio ::: a. & adv. --> Slow; slowly, leisurely, and gracefully. When repeated, adagio, adagio, it directs the movement to be very slow. ::: n. --> A piece of music in adagio time; a slow movement; as, an adagio of Haydn. html{color:
addendum ::: n. --> A thing to be added; an appendix or addition. html{color:
adder ::: n. --> One who, or that which, adds; esp., a machine for adding numbers.
A serpent.
A small venomous serpent of the genus Vipera. The common European adder is the Vipera (/ Pelias) berus. The puff adders of Africa are species of Clotho.
In America, the term is commonly applied to several harmless snakes, as the milk adder, puffing adder, etc. html{color:
adding ::: p. pr. & vb. n. --> of Add html{color:
addition ::: n. --> The act of adding two or more things together; -- opposed to subtraction or diminution.
Anything added; increase; augmentation; as, a piazza is an addition to a building.
That part of arithmetic which treats of adding numbers.
A dot at the right side of a note as an indication that its sound is to be lengthened one half.
A title annexed to a man&
addression ::: n. --> The act of addressing or directing one&
address ::: v. --> To aim; to direct.
To prepare or make ready.
Reflexively: To prepare one&
adessenarian ::: n. --> One who held the real presence of Christ&
adj. 1. Not imprisoned or enslaved; being at liberty. 2. Unconstrained; unconfined. 3. Unobstructed; clear. 4. Ready or generous in using or giving; liberal; lavish. 5. Exempt from external authority, interference, restriction, etc., as a person or one"s will, thought, choice, action, etc.; independent; unrestricted. 6. Exempt or released from something specified that controls, restrains, burdens, etc. (usually followed by from or of). 7. Given readily or in profusion. freer, thought-free, world-free. *adv. *8. In a free manner; without constraints; unimpeded. v. 9. To make free; set at liberty; release from bondage, imprisonment, or restraint. 10. To disengage or clear something from an entanglement. 11. To relieve or rid of a burden, an inconvenience or an obligation. freed. set free. Released; liberated; freed.
adjoin ::: v. t. --> To join or unite to; to lie contiguous to; to be in contact with; to attach; to append. ::: v. i. --> To lie or be next, or in contact; to be contiguous; as, the houses adjoin.
To join one&
ad libitum ::: --> At one&
adonis ::: n. --> A youth beloved by Venus for his beauty. He was killed in the chase by a wild boar.
A preeminently beautiful young man; a dandy.
A genus of plants of the family Ranunculaceae, containing the pheasant&
adopted ::: imp. & p. p. --> of Adopt ::: a. --> Taken by adoption; taken up as one&
adoption ::: n. --> The act of adopting, or state of being adopted; voluntary acceptance of a child of other parents to be the same as one&
adopt ::: v. t. --> To take by choice into relationship, as, child, heir, friend, citizen, etc.; esp. to take voluntarily (a child of other parents) to be in the place of, or as, one&
advancer ::: n. --> One who advances; a promoter.
A second branch of a buck&
advance ::: v. t. --> To bring forward; to move towards the van or front; to make to go on.
To raise; to elevate.
To raise to a higher rank; to promote.
To accelerate the growth or progress; to further; to forward; to help on; to aid; to heighten; as, to advance the ripening of fruit; to advance one&
advantage ::: n. --> Any condition, circumstance, opportunity, or means, particularly favorable to success, or to any desired end; benefit; as, the enemy had the advantage of a more elevated position.
Superiority; mastery; -- with of or over.
Superiority of state, or that which gives it; benefit; gain; profit; as, the advantage of a good constitution.
Interest of money; increase; overplus (as the thirteenth in the baker&
adventure ::: n. --> That which happens without design; chance; hazard; hap; hence, chance of danger or loss.
Risk; danger; peril.
The encountering of risks; hazardous and striking enterprise; a bold undertaking, in which hazards are to be encountered, and the issue is staked upon unforeseen events; a daring feat.
A remarkable occurrence; a striking event; a stirring incident; as, the adventures of one&
adverse ::: a. --> Acting against, or in a contrary direction; opposed; contrary; opposite; conflicting; as, adverse winds; an adverse party; a spirit adverse to distinctions of caste.
Opposite.
In hostile opposition to; unfavorable; unpropitious; contrary to one&
adze ::: n. --> A carpenter&
aegicrania ::: n. pl. --> Sculptured ornaments, used in classical architecture, representing rams&
aerie ::: n. --> The nest of a bird of prey, as of an eagle or hawk; also a brood of such birds; eyrie. Shak. Also fig.: A human residence or resting place perched like an eagle&
affiance ::: n. --> Plighted faith; marriage contract or promise.
Trust; reliance; faith; confidence. ::: v. t. --> To betroth; to pledge one&
affinity ::: n. --> Relationship by marriage (as between a husband and his wife&
affix ::: v. t. --> To subjoin, annex, or add at the close or end; to append to; to fix to any part of; as, to affix a syllable to a word; to affix a seal to an instrument; to affix one&
affy ::: v. t. --> To confide (one&
a game in which a blindfolded player tries to catch and identify one of the other players. The game has been around for at least 2000 years and probably longer. It is known to have been played in Greece about the time of the Roman Conquest.
aggrieve ::: v. t. --> To give pain or sorrow to; to afflict; hence, to oppress or injure in one&
agistment ::: n. --> Formerly, the taking and feeding of other men&
agistor ::: n. --> Formerly, an officer of the king&
agist ::: v. t. --> To take to graze or pasture, at a certain sum; -- used originally of the feeding of cattle in the king&
agitator ::: n. --> One who agitates; one who stirs up or excites others; as, political reformers and agitators.
One of a body of men appointed by the army, in Cromwell&
agnate ::: a. --> Related or akin by the father&
agreeability ::: n. --> Easiness of disposition.
The quality of being, or making one&
ahem ::: interj. --> An exclamation to call one&
aiblins ::: adv. --> Alt. of Ablins html{color:
aimless ::: a. --> Without aim or purpose; as, an aimless life. html{color:
airing ::: p. pr. & vb. n. --> of Air ::: n. --> A walk or a ride in the open air; a short excursion for health&
alamire ::: n. --> The lowest note but one in Guido Aretino&
albuminin ::: n. --> The substance of the cells which inclose the white of birds&
album ::: n. --> A white tablet on which anything was inscribed, as a list of names, etc.
A register for visitors&
alcaic ::: a. --> Pertaining to Alcaeus, a lyric poet of Mitylene, about 6000 b. c. ::: n. --> A kind of verse, so called from Alcaeus. One variety consists of five feet, a spondee or iambic, an iambic, a long syllable, and two dactyls.
aldebaran ::: n. --> A red star of the first magnitude, situated in the eye of Taurus; the Bull&
alectoromancy ::: n. --> See Alectryomancy. html{color:
alength ::: adv. --> At full length; lengthwise. html{color:
algaroba ::: n. --> The Carob, a leguminous tree of the Mediterranean region; also, its edible beans or pods, called St. John&
algol ::: n. --> A fixed star, in Medusa&
alimony ::: n. --> Maintenance; means of living.
An allowance made to a wife out of her husband&
alkarsin ::: n. --> A spontaneously inflammable liquid, having a repulsive odor, and consisting of cacodyl and its oxidation products; -- called also Cadel&
allegiance ::: n. --> The tie or obligation, implied or expressed, which a subject owes to his sovereign or government; the duty of fidelity to one&
alley ::: n. --> A narrow passage; especially a walk or passage in a garden or park, bordered by rows of trees or bushes; a bordered way.
A narrow passage or way in a city, as distinct from a public street.
A passageway between rows of pews in a church.
Any passage having the entrance represented as wider than the exit, so as to give the appearance of length.
The space between two rows of compositors&
alleyway ::: n. --> An alley. html{color:
allhallows ::: n. --> All the saints (in heaven).
All Saints&
allot ::: v. t. --> To distribute by lot.
To distribute, or parcel out in parts or portions; or to distribute to each individual concerned; to assign as a share or lot; to set apart as one&
all-possessed ::: a. --> Controlled by an evil spirit or by evil passions; wild. html{color:
all- ::: prefix: Wholly, altogether, infinitely. Since 1600, the number of these [combinations] has been enormously extended, all-** having become a possible prefix, in poetry at least, to almost any adjective of quality. all-affirming, All-Beautiful, All-Beautiful"s, All-Bliss, All-Blissful, All-causing, all-concealing, all-conquering, All-Conscient, All-Conscious, all-containing, All-containing, all-creating, all-defeating, All-Delight, all-discovering, all-embracing, all-fulfilling, all-harbouring, all-inhabiting, all-knowing, All-knowing, All-Knowledge, all-levelling, All-Life, All-love, All-Love, all-negating, all-powerful, all-revealing, All-ruler, all-ruling, all-seeing, All-seeing, all-seeking, all-shaping, all-supporting, all-sustaining, all-swallowing, All-Truth, All-vision, All-Wisdom, all-wise, All-Wise, all-witnessing, All-Wonderful, All-Wonderful"s.**
all saints ::: --> Alt. of All Saints&
alogian ::: n. --> One of an ancient sect who rejected St. John&
alone ::: a. --> Quite by one&
alquifou ::: n. --> A lead ore found in Cornwall, England, and used by potters to give a green glaze to their wares; potter&
aluminium ::: n. --> The metallic base of alumina. This metal is white, but with a bluish tinge, and is remarkable for its resistance to oxidation, and for its lightness, having a specific gravity of about 2.6. Atomic weight 27.08. Symbol Al.
amassette ::: n. --> An instrument of horn used for collecting painters&
amber room ::: --> A room formerly in the Czar&
ambidexterity ::: n. --> The quality of being ambidextrous; the faculty of using both hands with equal facility.
Versatility; general readiness; as, ambidexterity of argumentation.
Double-dealing.
A juror&
amethyst ::: --> A variety of crystallized quartz, of a purple or bluish violet color, of different shades. It is much used as a jeweler&
ampere ::: n. --> Alt. of Ampere
The unit of electric current; -- defined by the International Electrical Congress in 1893 and by U. S. Statute as, one tenth of the unit of current of the C. G. S. system of electro-magnetic units, or the practical equivalent of the unvarying current which, when passed through a standard solution of nitrate of silver in water, deposits silver at the rate of 0.001118 grams per second. Called also the international ampere.
ampyx ::: n. --> A woman&
amylene ::: n. --> One of a group of metameric hydrocarbons, C5H10, of the ethylene series. The colorless, volatile, mobile liquid commonly called amylene is a mixture of different members of the group.
amylose ::: n. --> One of the starch group (C6H10O5)n of the carbohydrates; as, starch, arabin, dextrin, cellulose, etc.
amzel ::: n. --> The European ring ousel (Turdus torquatus). html{color:
anacharis ::: n. --> A fresh-water weed of the frog&
analemma ::: n. --> An orthographic projection of the sphere on the plane of the meridian, the eye being supposed at an infinite distance, and in the east or west point of the horizon.
An instrument of wood or brass, on which this projection of the sphere is made, having a movable horizon or cursor; -- formerly much used in solving some common astronomical problems.
A scale of the sun&
anatreptic ::: a. --> Overthrowing; defeating; -- applied to Plato&
ancestor ::: n. --> One from whom a person is descended, whether on the father&
anchor ::: n. --> A iron instrument which is attached to a ship by a cable (rope or chain), and which, being cast overboard, lays hold of the earth by a fluke or hook and thus retains the ship in a particular station.
Any instrument or contrivance serving a purpose like that of a ship&
angel ::: n. --> A messenger.
A spiritual, celestial being, superior to man in power and intelligence. In the Scriptures the angels appear as God&
anger ::: n. --> Trouble; vexation; also, physical pain or smart of a sore, etc.
A strong passion or emotion of displeasure or antagonism, excited by a real or supposed injury or insult to one&
anker ::: n. --> A liquid measure in various countries of Europe. The Dutch anker, formerly also used in England, contained about 10 of the old wine gallons, or 8/ imperial gallons.
annates ::: n. pl. --> The first year&
annat ::: n. --> A half years&
annunciation ::: n. --> The act of announcing; announcement; proclamation; as, the annunciation of peace.
The announcement of the incarnation, made by the angel Gabriel to the Virgin Mary.
The festival celebrated (March 25th) by the Church of England, of Rome, etc., in memory of the angel&
anomaly ::: n. --> Deviation from the common rule; an irregularity; anything anomalous.
The angular distance of a planet from its perihelion, as seen from the sun. This is the true anomaly. The eccentric anomaly is a corresponding angle at the center of the elliptic orbit of the planet. The mean anomaly is what the anomaly would be if the planet&
ansa ::: n. --> A name given to either of the projecting ends of Saturn&
antares ::: n. --> The principal star in Scorpio: -- called also the Scorpion&
ante- ::: --> A Latin preposition and prefix; akin to Gr. &
antediluvial ::: a. --> Before the flood, or Deluge, in Noah&
antediluvian ::: a. --> Of or relating to the period before the Deluge in Noah&
ante ::: n. --> Each player&
anthelion ::: n. --> A halo opposite the sun, consisting of a colored ring or rings around the shadow of the spectator&
anthomania ::: n. --> A extravagant fondness for flowers. html{color:
anthroposcopy ::: n. --> The art of discovering or judging of a man&
antichrist ::: n. --> A denier or opponent of Christ. Specif.: A great antagonist, person or power, expected to precede Christ&
anticor ::: n. --> A dangerous inflammatory swelling of a horse&
antimony ::: n. --> An elementary substance, resembling a metal in its appearance and physical properties, but in its chemical relations belonging to the class of nonmetallic substances. Atomic weight, 120. Symbol, Sb.
antinational ::: a. --> Antagonistic to one&
antique ::: a. --> Old; ancient; of genuine antiquity; as, an antique statue. In this sense it usually refers to the flourishing ages of Greece and Rome.
Old, as respects the present age, or a modern period of time; of old fashion; antiquated; as, an antique robe.
Made in imitation of antiquity; as, the antique style of Thomson&
antirenter ::: n. --> One opposed to the payment of rent; esp. one of those who in 1840-47 resisted the collection of rents claimed by the patroons from the settlers on certain manorial lands in the State of New York.
antisolar ::: a. --> Opposite to the sun; -- said of the point in the heavens 180¡ distant from the sun.
antistrophe ::: n. --> In Greek choruses and dances, the returning of the chorus, exactly answering to a previous strophe or movement from right to left. Hence: The lines of this part of the choral song.
The repetition of words in an inverse order; as, the master of the servant and the servant of the master.
The retort or turning of an adversary&
aphelion ::: n. --> That point of a planet&
aplustre ::: n. --> An ornamental appendage of wood at the ship&
apocrisiarius ::: n. --> A delegate or deputy; especially, the pope&
apology ::: n. --> Something said or written in defense or justification of what appears to others wrong, or of what may be liable to disapprobation; justification; as, Tertullian&
apophasis ::: n. --> A figure by which a speaker formally declines to take notice of a favorable point, but in such a manner as to produce the effect desired. [For example, see Mark Antony&
apostasy ::: n. --> An abandonment of what one has voluntarily professed; a total desertion of departure from one&
apostatize ::: v. i. --> To renounce totally a religious belief once professed; to forsake one&
apostrophe ::: n. --> A figure of speech by which the orator or writer suddenly breaks off from the previous method of his discourse, and addresses, in the second person, some person or thing, absent or present; as, Milton&
apostrophize ::: p. pr. & vb. n. --> To address by apostrophe.
To contract by omitting a letter or letters; also, to mark with an apostrophe (&
appear ::: v. i. --> To come or be in sight; to be in view; to become visible.
To come before the public; as, a great writer appeared at that time.
To stand in presence of some authority, tribunal, or superior person, to answer a charge, plead a cause, or the like; to present one&
apperception ::: n. --> The mind&
apposed ::: a. --> Placed in apposition; mutually fitting, as the mandibles of a bird&
apposer ::: n. --> An examiner; one whose business is to put questions. Formerly, in the English Court of Exchequer, an officer who audited the sheriffs&
apprehensive ::: a. --> Capable of apprehending, or quick to do so; apt; discerning.
Knowing; conscious; cognizant.
Relating to the faculty of apprehension.
Anticipative of something unfavorable&
apprentice ::: n. --> One who is bound by indentures or by legal agreement to serve a mechanic, or other person, for a certain time, with a view to learn the art, or trade, in which his master is bound to instruct him.
One not well versed in a subject; a tyro.
A barrister, considered a learner of law till of sixteen years&
appropriament ::: n. --> What is peculiarly one&
appropriate ::: a. --> Set apart for a particular use or person. Hence: Belonging peculiarly; peculiar; suitable; fit; proper. ::: v. t. --> To take to one&
appropriation ::: n. --> The act of setting apart or assigning to a particular use or person, or of taking to one&
approvement ::: n. --> Approbation.
a confession of guilt by a prisoner charged with treason or felony, together with an accusation of his accomplish and a giving evidence against them in order to obtain his own pardon. The term is no longer in use; it corresponded to what is now known as turning king&
apse ::: n. --> A projecting part of a building, esp. of a church, having in the plan a polygonal or semicircular termination, and, most often, projecting from the east end. In early churches the Eastern apse was occupied by seats for the bishop and clergy.
The bishop&
aquarian ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to an aquarium. ::: n. --> One of a sect of Christian in the primitive church who used water instead of wine in the Lord&
aquarius ::: n. --> The Water-bearer; the eleventh sign in the zodiac, which the sun enters about the 20th of January; -- so called from the rains which prevail at that season in Italy and the East.
A constellation south of Pegasus.
aquilated ::: a. --> Adorned with eagles&
arabinose ::: n. --> A sugar of the composition C5H10O5, obtained from cherry gum by boiling it with dilute sulphuric acid.
arachnoid ::: a. --> Resembling a spider&
araneose ::: a. --> Of the aspect of a spider&
arbitrary ::: a. --> Depending on will or discretion; not governed by any fixed rules; as, an arbitrary decision; an arbitrary punishment.
Exercised according to one&
archimedean ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to Archimedes, a celebrated Greek philosopher; constructed on the principle of Archimedes&
archontate ::: n. --> An archon&
arc ::: n. --> A portion of a curved line; as, the arc of a circle or of an ellipse.
A curvature in the shape of a circular arc or an arch; as, the colored arc (the rainbow); the arc of Hadley&
arcturus ::: a giant star in the constellation Boötes. It is the brightest star in the Northern Hemisphere and the fourth brightest star in the sky, with an apparent magnitude of 0.00; sometimes referring to the Great Bear itself.
ardor ::: n. --> Heat, in a literal sense; as, the ardor of the sun&
area ::: n. --> Any plane surface, as of the floor of a room or church, or of the ground within an inclosure; an open space in a building.
The inclosed space on which a building stands.
The sunken space or court, giving ingress and affording light to the basement of a building.
An extent of surface; a tract of the earth&
areola ::: n. --> An interstice or small space, as between the cracks of the surface in certain crustaceous lichens; or as between the fibers composing organs or vessels that interlace; or as between the nervures of an insect&
areopagus ::: n. --> The highest judicial court at Athens. Its sessions were held on Mars&
are ::: --> The present indicative plural of the substantive verb to be; but etymologically a different word from be, or was. Am, art, are, and is, all come from the root as. ::: n. --> The unit of superficial measure, being a square of which each side is ten meters in length; 100 square meters, or about 119.6 square
argil ::: n. --> Clay, or potter&
argoile ::: n. --> Potter&
argus ::: n. --> A fabulous being of antiquity, said to have had a hundred eyes, who has placed by Juno to guard Io. His eyes were transplanted to the peacock&
argus shell ::: --> A species of shell (Cypraea argus), beautifully variegated with spots resembling those in a peacock&
arise ::: v. i. --> To come up from a lower to a higher position; to come above the horizon; to come up from one&
aristotelic ::: a. --> Pertaining to Aristotle or to his philosophy. html{color:
arm-gret ::: a. --> Great as a man&
arminian ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to Arminius of his followers, or to their doctrines. See note under Arminian, n. ::: n. --> One who holds the tenets of Arminius, a Dutch divine (b. 1560, d. 1609).
armor ::: n. --> Defensive arms for the body; any clothing or covering worn to protect one&
arpen ::: n. --> Formerly, a measure of land in France, varying in different parts of the country. The arpent of Paris was 4,088 sq. yards, or nearly five sixths of an English acre. The woodland arpent was about 1 acre, 1 rood, 1 perch, English.
arrangement ::: n. --> The act of arranging or putting in an orderly condition; the state of being arranged or put in order; disposition in suitable form.
The manner or result of arranging; system of parts disposed in due order; regular and systematic classification; as, arrangement of one&
arrayer ::: n. --> One who arrays. In some early English statutes, applied to an officer who had care of the soldiers&
arrogant ::: a. --> Making, or having the disposition to make, exorbitant claims of rank or estimation; giving one&
arrogate ::: v. t. --> To assume, or claim as one&
artifice ::: 1530s,”workmanship,” from M.Fr. artifice”skill, cunning” (14c.), from L. artificium”making by art, craft,” from artifex(gen.artificis)”craftsman,artist,” from ars”art” (see art (n.)) + facere”do” (see factitious). Meaning”device, trick” (theusualmodernsense)isfrom1650s.
artotyrite ::: n. --> One of a sect in the primitive church, who celebrated the Lord&
ascendant ::: n. --> Ascent; height; elevation.
The horoscope, or that degree of the ecliptic which rises above the horizon at the moment of one&
aside ::: adv. --> On, or to, one side; out of a straight line, course, or direction; at a little distance from the rest; out of the way; apart.
Out of one&
asperse ::: v. t. --> To sprinkle, as water or dust, upon anybody or anything, or to besprinkle any one with a liquid or with dust.
To bespatter with foul reports or false and injurious charges; to tarnish in point of reputation or good name; to slander or calumniate; as, to asperse a poet or his writings; to asperse a man&
asphaltum ::: n. --> Mineral pitch, Jews&
asquint ::: adv. --> With the eye directed to one side; not in the straight line of vision; obliquely; awry, so as to see distortedly; as, to look asquint. html{color:
assent ::: v. t. --> To admit a thing as true; to express one&
assertion ::: n. --> The act of asserting, or that which is asserted; positive declaration or averment; affirmation; statement asserted; position advanced.
Maintenance; vindication; as, the assertion of one&
asset ::: n. --> Any article or separable part of one&
assignat ::: n. --> One of the notes, bills, or bonds, issued as currency by the revolutionary government of France (1790-1796), and based on the security of the lands of the church and of nobles which had been appropriated by the state.
assume ::: v. t. --> To take to or upon one&
assuming ::: p. pr. & vb. n. --> of Assume ::: a. --> Pretentious; taking much upon one&
assumption ::: n. --> The act of assuming, or taking to or upon one&
astel ::: n. --> An arch, or ceiling, of boards, placed over the men&
astro- ::: --> The combining form of the Greek word &
atmo ::: n. --> The standard atmospheric pressure used in certain physical measurements calculations; conventionally, that pressure under which the barometer stands at 760 millimeters, at a temperature of 0¡ Centigrade, at the level of the sea, and in the latitude of Paris.
attitude ::: n. --> The posture, action, or disposition of a figure or a statue.
The posture or position of a person or an animal, or the manner in which the parts of his body are disposed; position assumed or studied to serve a purpose; as, a threatening attitude; an attitude of entreaty.
Fig.: Position as indicating action, feeling, or mood; as, in times of trouble let a nation preserve a firm attitude; one&
augean ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to Augeus, king of Elis, whose stable contained 3000 oxen, and had not been cleaned for 30 years. Hercules cleansed it in a single day.
Hence: Exceedingly filthy or corrupt.
auger ::: n. --> A carpenter&
aune ::: n. --> A French cloth measure, of different parts of the country (at Paris, 0.95 of an English ell); -- now superseded by the meter.
aunt ::: n. --> The sister of one&
auricula ::: n. --> A species of Primula, or primrose, called also, from the shape of its leaves, bear&
auto- ::: --> A combining form, with the meaning of self, one&
autobiography ::: n. --> A biography written by the subject of it; memoirs of one&
autographical ::: a. --> Pertaining to an autograph, or one&
autograph ::: n. --> That which is written with one&
autography ::: n. --> The science of autographs; a person&
automorphic ::: a. --> Patterned after one&
autonomy ::: n. --> The power or right of self-government; self-government, or political independence, of a city or a state.
The sovereignty of reason in the sphere of morals; or man&
autophoby ::: n. --> Fear of one&
autophony ::: n. --> An auscultatory process, which consists in noting the tone of the observer&
autopsorin ::: n. --> That which is given under the doctrine of administering a patient&
autopsy ::: a. --> Personal observation or examination; seeing with one&
autoptical ::: a. --> Seen with one&
autoptically ::: adv. --> By means of ocular view, or one&
autotheism ::: n. --> The doctrine of God&
available ::: a. --> Having sufficient power, force, or efficacy, for the object; effectual; valid; as, an available plea.
Such as one may avail one&
avener ::: n. --> An officer of the king&
aventure ::: n. --> Accident; chance; adventure.
A mischance causing a person&
avicularia ::: n. pl. --> See prehensile processes on the cells of some Bryozoa, often having the shape of a bird&
avocado ::: n. --> The pulpy fruit of Persea gratissima, a tree of tropical America. It is about the size and shape of a large pear; -- called also avocado pear, alligator pear, midshipman&
avocation ::: n. --> A calling away; a diversion.
That which calls one away from one&
aware ::: a. --> Watchful; vigilant or on one&
awl ::: n. --> A pointed instrument for piercing small holes, as in leather or wood; used by shoemakers, saddlers, cabinetmakers, etc. The blade is differently shaped and pointed for different uses, as in the brad awl, saddler&
axe ::: n. --> A tool or instrument of steel, or of iron with a steel edge or blade, for felling trees, chopping and splitting wood, hewing timber, etc. It is wielded by a wooden helve or handle, so fixed in a socket or eye as to be in the same plane with the blade. The broadax, or carpenter&
axle ::: n. --> The pin or spindle on which a wheel revolves, or which revolves with a wheel.
A transverse bar or shaft connecting the opposite wheels of a car or carriage; an axletree.
An axis; as, the sun&
ayah ::: n. --> A native nurse for children; also, a lady&
azymous ::: a. --> Unleavened; unfermented. B () is the second letter of the English alphabet. (See Guide to Pronunciation, // 196, 220.) It is etymologically related to p, v, f, w and m , letters representing sounds having a close organic affinity to its own sound; as in Eng. bursar and purser; Eng. bear and Lat. ferre; Eng. silver and Ger. silber; Lat. cubitum and It. gomito; Eng. seven, Anglo-Saxon seofon, Ger. sieben, Lat. septem, Gr."epta`, Sanskrit saptan. The form of letter B is Roman, from Greek B (Beta), of Semitic
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babyhouse ::: a. --> A place for children&
bacharach ::: n. --> Alt. of Backarack html{color:
backwardation ::: n. --> The seller&
bag ::: n. --> A sack or pouch, used for holding anything; as, a bag of meal or of money.
A sac, or dependent gland, in animal bodies, containing some fluid or other substance; as, the bag of poison in the mouth of some serpents; the bag of a cow.
A sort of silken purse formerly tied about men&
bail bond ::: --> A bond or obligation given by a prisoner and his surety, to insure the prisoner&
bailiff ::: n. --> Originally, a person put in charge of something especially, a chief officer, magistrate, or keeper, as of a county, town, hundred, or castle; one to whom power/ of custody or care are intrusted.
A sheriff&
bailiwick ::: n. --> The precincts within which a bailiff has jurisdiction; the limits of a bailiff&
bait ::: v. i. --> Any substance, esp. food, used in catching fish, or other animals, by alluring them to a hook, snare, inclosure, or net.
Anything which allures; a lure; enticement; temptation.
A portion of food or drink, as a refreshment taken on a journey; also, a stop for rest and refreshment.
A light or hasty luncheon.
To stop to take a portion of food and drink for refreshment of one&
balaam ::: n. --> A paragraph describing something wonderful, used to fill out a newspaper column; -- an allusion to the miracle of Balaam&
balance ::: n. --> An apparatus for weighing.
Act of weighing mentally; comparison; estimate.
Equipoise between the weights in opposite scales.
The state of being in equipoise; equilibrium; even adjustment; steadiness.
An equality between the sums total of the two sides of an account; as, to bring one&
baldachin ::: n. --> A rich brocade; baudekin.
A structure in form of a canopy, sometimes supported by columns, and sometimes suspended from the roof or projecting from the wall; generally placed over an altar; as, the baldachin in St. Peter&
ballista ::: n. --> An ancient military engine, in the form of a crossbow, used for hurling large missiles. html{color:
balloon ::: n. --> A bag made of silk or other light material, and filled with hydrogen gas or heated air, so as to rise and float in the atmosphere; especially, one with a car attached for aerial navigation.
A ball or globe on the top of a pillar, church, etc., as at St. Paul&
banian ::: n. --> A Hindoo trader, merchant, cashier, or money changer.
A man&
banish ::: v. t. --> To condemn to exile, or compel to leave one&
bank book ::: --> A book kept by a depositor, in which an officer of a bank enters the debits and credits of the depositor&
ban ::: n. --> A public proclamation or edict; a public order or notice, mandatory or prohibitory; a summons by public proclamation.
A calling together of the king&
barde ::: n. --> A piece of defensive (or, sometimes, ornamental) armor for a horse&
bare ::: a. --> Without clothes or covering; stripped of the usual covering; naked; as, his body is bare; the trees are bare.
With head uncovered; bareheaded.
Without anything to cover up or conceal one&
barege ::: n. --> A gauzelike fabric for ladies&
barge ::: n. --> A pleasure boat; a vessel or boat of state, elegantly furnished and decorated.
A large, roomy boat for the conveyance of passengers or goods; as, a ship&
barkentine ::: n. --> A threemasted vessel, having the foremast square-rigged, and the others schooner-rigged. [Spelled also barquentine, barkantine, etc.] See Illust. in Append. html{color:
bark ::: v. t. --> To strip the bark from; to peel.
To abrade or rub off any outer covering from; as to bark one&
barnacle ::: n. --> Any cirriped crustacean adhering to rocks, floating timber, ships, etc., esp. (a) the sessile species (genus Balanus and allies), and (b) the stalked or goose barnacles (genus Lepas and allies). See Cirripedia, and Goose barnacle.
A bernicle goose.
An instrument for pinching a horse&
baroness ::: n. --> A baron&
barricade ::: n. --> A fortification, made in haste, of trees, earth, palisades, wagons, or anything that will obstruct the progress or attack of an enemy. It is usually an obstruction formed in streets to block an enemy&
bartlett ::: n. --> A Bartlett pear, a favorite kind of pear, which originated in England about 1770, and was called Williams&
barwood ::: n. --> A red wood of a leguminous tree (Baphia nitida), from Angola and the Gaboon in Africa. It is used as a dyewood, and also for ramrods, violin bows and turner&
based ::: imp. & p. p. --> of Base ::: a. --> Having a base, or having as a base; supported; as, broad-based. ::: n. html{color:
basque ::: a. --> Pertaining to Biscay, its people, or their language. ::: n. --> One of a race, of unknown origin, inhabiting a region on the Bay of Biscay in Spain and France.
The language spoken by the Basque people.
A part of a lady&
baston ::: n. --> A staff or cudgel.
See Baton.
An officer bearing a painted staff, who formerly was in attendance upon the king&
basylous ::: a. --> Pertaining to, or having the nature of, a basyle; electro-positive; basic; -- opposed to chlorous. html{color:
bathe ::: v. t. --> To wash by immersion, as in a bath; to subject to a bath.
To lave; to wet.
To moisten or suffuse with a liquid.
To apply water or some liquid medicament to; as, to bathe the eye with warm water or with sea water; to bathe one&
bathorse ::: n. --> A horse which carries an officer&
battering-ram ::: n. --> An engine used in ancient times to beat down the walls of besieged places.
A blacksmith&
battery ::: v. t. --> The act of battering or beating.
The unlawful beating of another. It includes every willful, angry and violent, or negligent touching of another&
battledoor ::: n. --> An instrument, with a handle and a flat part covered with parchment or crossed with catgut, used to strike a shuttlecock in play; also, the play of battledoor and shuttlecock.
A child&
batwing ::: a. --> Shaped like a bat&
bauble ::: n. --> A trifling piece of finery; a gewgaw; that which is gay and showy without real value; a cheap, showy plaything.
The fool&
bay-antler ::: n. --> The second tine of a stag&
bead ::: n. --> A prayer.
A little perforated ball, to be strung on a thread, and worn for ornament; or used in a rosary for counting prayers, as by Roman Catholics and Mohammedans, whence the phrases to tell beads, to at one&
bean trefoil ::: --> A leguminous shrub of southern Europe, with trifoliate leaves (Anagyris foetida). html{color:
bearing ::: p. pr. & vb. n. --> of Bear ::: n. --> The manner in which one bears or conducts one&
bearing rein ::: --> A short rein looped over the check hook or the hames to keep the horse&
beat ::: n. 1. A stroke or blow. 2. A regular sound or stroke. 3. The rhythmic contraction and expansion of the arteries with each beat of the heart. 4. A pulsating sound. 5. A forceful flapping of wings. beats, nerve-beat, hammer-beats, heart-beats, heart-beats", moment-beats, rhyme-beats. v. 6. To strike or pound with repeated blows. 7. To shape or break by repeated blows, as metal. 8. To sound in pulsations. 9. To throb rhythmically; pulsate, as the heart. 10. To flap, especially wings. 11. To strike with or as if with a series of violent blows, dash or pound repeatedly against, as waves, wind, etc. beats, beaten, beating. *adj. *sun-beat.
bedfellow ::: n. --> One who lies with another in the same bed; a person who shares one&
beggable ::: a. --> Capable of being begged. html{color:
beguard ::: n. --> One of an association of religious laymen living in imitation of the Beguines. They arose in the thirteenth century, were afterward subjected to much persecution, and were suppressed by Innocent X. in 1650. Called also Beguins.
behave ::: v. t. --> To manage or govern in point of behavior; to discipline; to handle; to restrain.
To carry; to conduct; to comport; to manage; to bear; -- used reflexively. ::: v. i. --> To act; to conduct; to bear or carry one&
behavior ::: n. --> Manner of behaving, whether good or bad; mode of conducting one&
belt ::: n. --> That which engirdles a person or thing; a band or girdle; as, a lady&
bench ::: n. --> A long seat, differing from a stool in its greater length.
A long table at which mechanics and other work; as, a carpenter&
bench warrant ::: --> A process issued by a presiding judge or by a court against a person guilty of some contempt, or indicted for some crime; -- so called in distinction from a justice&
benight ::: v. t. --> To involve in darkness; to shroud with the shades of night; to obscure.
To overtake with night or darkness, especially before the end of a day&
berretta ::: n. --> A square cap worn by ecclesiastics of the Roman Catholic Church. A cardinal&
berth ::: n. --> Convenient sea room.
A room in which a number of the officers or ship&
bestraught ::: a. --> Out of one&
betroth ::: v. t. --> To contract to any one for a marriage; to engage or promise in order to marriage; to affiance; -- used esp. of a woman.
To promise to take (as a future spouse); to plight one&
beurre ::: n. --> A beurre (or buttery) pear, one with the meat soft and melting; -- used with a distinguishing word; as, Beurre d&
bevile ::: n. --> A chief broken or opening like a carpenter&
bevilled ::: a. --> Notched with an angle like that inclosed by a carpenter&
beware ::: v. i. --> To be on one&
bewit ::: n. --> A double slip of leather by which bells are fastened to a hawk&
beyond ::: prep. --> On the further side of; in the same direction as, and further on or away than.
At a place or time not yet reached; before.
Past, out of the reach or sphere of; further than; greater than; as, the patient was beyond medical aid; beyond one&
bez-antler ::: n. --> The second branch of a stag&
bible ::: n. --> A book.
The Book by way of eminence, -- that is, the book which is made up of the writings accepted by Christians as of divine origin and authority, whether such writings be in the original language, or translated; the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments; -- sometimes in a restricted sense, the Old Testament; as, King James&
bicycle ::: n. --> A light vehicle having two wheels one behind the other. It has a saddle seat and is propelled by the rider&
bidale ::: n. --> An invitation of friends to drink ale at some poor man&
biggin ::: n. --> A child&
bight ::: v. --> A corner, bend, or angle; a hollow; as, the bight of a horse&
bigotry ::: n. --> The state of mind of a bigot; obstinate and unreasoning attachment of one&
bile ::: n. --> A yellow, or greenish, viscid fluid, usually alkaline in reaction, secreted by the liver. It passes into the intestines, where it aids in the digestive process. Its characteristic constituents are the bile salts, and coloring matters.
Bitterness of feeling; choler; anger; ill humor; as, to stir one&
bilge ::: n. --> The protuberant part of a cask, which is usually in the middle.
That part of a ship&
biliment ::: n. --> A woman&
billion ::: n. --> According to the French and American method of numeration, a thousand millions, or 1,000,000,000; according to the English method, a million millions, or 1,000,000,000,000. See Numeration.
billy ::: n. --> A club; esp., a policeman&
bindery ::: n. --> A place where books, or other articles, are bound; a bookbinder&
biography ::: n. --> The written history of a person&
birching ::: p. pr. & vb. n. --> of Birch html{color:
birthday ::: n. --> The day in which any person is born; day of origin or commencement.
The day of the month in which a person was born, in whatever succeeding year it may recur; the anniversary of one&
birthdom ::: n. --> The land of one&
bish ::: n. --> Same as Bikh. html{color:
bishop-stool ::: n. --> A bishop&
bismuth ::: n. --> One of the elements; a metal of a reddish white color, crystallizing in rhombohedrons. It is somewhat harder than lead, and rather brittle; masses show broad cleavage surfaces when broken across. It melts at 507¡ Fahr., being easily fused in the flame of a candle. It is found in a native state, and as a constituent of some minerals. Specific gravity 9.8. Atomic weight 207.5. Symbol Bi.
bissextile ::: n. --> Leap year; every fourth year, in which a day is added to the month of February on account of the excess of the tropical year (365 d. 5 h. 48 m. 46 s.) above 365 days. But one day added every four years is equivalent to six hours each year, which is 11 m. 14 s. more than the excess of the real year. Hence, it is necessary to suppress the bissextile day at the end of every century which is not divisible by 400, while it is retained at the end of those which are divisible by 400.
bitterroot ::: n. --> A plant (Lewisia rediviva) allied to the purslane, but with fleshy, farinaceous roots, growing in the mountains of Idaho, Montana, etc. It gives the name to the Bitter Root mountains and river. The Indians call both the plant and the river Spaet&
bitumen ::: n. --> Mineral pitch; a black, tarry substance, burning with a bright flame; Jew&
blackguard ::: n. --> The scullions and lower menials of a court, or of a nobleman&
black hole ::: --> A dungeon or dark cell in a prison; a military lock-up or guardroom; -- now commonly with allusion to the cell (the Black Hole) in a fort at Calcutta, into which 146 English prisoners were thrust by the nabob Suraja Dowla on the night of June 20, 17656, and in which 123 of the prisoners died before morning from lack of air.
black-letter ::: a. --> Written or printed in black letter; as, a black-letter manuscript or book.
Given to the study of books in black letter; that is, of old books; out of date.
Of or pertaining to the days in the calendar not marked with red letters as saints&
black monday ::: --> Easter Monday, so called from the severity of that day in 1360, which was so unusual that many of Edward III.&
black rod ::: --> the usher to the Chapter of the Garter, so called from the black rod which he carries. He is of the king&
bleed ::: v. i. --> To emit blood; to lose blood; to run with blood, by whatever means; as, the arm bleeds; the wound bled freely; to bleed at the nose.
To withdraw blood from the body; to let blood; as, Dr. A. bleeds in fevers.
To lose or shed one&
bless ::: v. t. --> To make or pronounce holy; to consecrate
To make happy, blithesome, or joyous; to confer prosperity or happiness upon; to grant divine favor to.
To express a wish or prayer for the happiness of; to invoke a blessing upon; -- applied to persons.
To invoke or confer beneficial attributes or qualities upon; to invoke or confer a blessing on, -- as on food.
To make the sign of the cross upon; to cross (one&
blight ::: v. t. --> To affect with blight; to blast; to prevent the growth and fertility of.
Hence: To destroy the happiness of; to ruin; to mar essentially; to frustrate; as, to blight one&
blind ::: adj. 1. Unable to see; lacking the sense of sight; sightless. Also fig. 2. Unwilling or unable to perceive or understand. 3. Lacking all consciousness or awareness. 4. Not having or based on reason or intelligence; absolute and unquestioning. 5. Not characterized or determined by reason or control. 6. Purposeless; fortuitous, random. 7. Undiscriminating; heedless; reckless. 8. Enveloped in darkness; dark, dim, obscure. 9. Dense enough to form a screen. 10. Covered or concealed from sight; hidden from immediate view. 11. Having no openings or passages for light; (a window or door) walled up. blindest, half-blind. v. 12. To deprive of sight permanently or temporarily. 13. To make sightless momentarily; dazzle. blinded.* n. 14. A blind person, esp. as pl., those who are blind. 15. Fig.* Any thing or action intended to conceal one"s real intention; a pretence, a pretext; subterfuge.
blindly ::: adv. --> Without sight, discernment, or understanding; without thought, investigation, knowledge, or purpose of one&
blinker ::: n. --> One who, or that which, blinks.
A blinder for horses; a flap of leather on a horse&
blob ::: n. --> Something blunt and round; a small drop or lump of something viscid or thick; a drop; a bubble; a blister.
A small fresh-water fish (Uranidea Richardsoni); the miller&
block ::: v. t. --> A piece of wood more or less bulky; a solid mass of wood, stone, etc., usually with one or more plane, or approximately plane, faces; as, a block on which a butcher chops his meat; a block by which to mount a horse; children&
blood money ::: --> Money paid to the next of kin of a person who has been killed by another.
Money obtained as the price, or at the cost, of another&
bloody hand ::: --> A hand stained with the blood of a deer, which, in the old forest laws of England, was sufficient evidence of a man&
blowpoint ::: n. --> A child&
bluegown ::: n. --> One of a class of paupers or pensioners, or licensed beggars, in Scotland, to whim annually on the king&
boarder ::: n. --> One who has food statedly at another&
board ::: n. --> A piece of timber sawed thin, and of considerable length and breadth as compared with the thickness, -- used for building, etc.
A table to put food upon.
Hence: What is served on a table as food; stated meals; provision; entertainment; -- usually as furnished for pay; as, to work for one&
boarfish ::: n. --> A Mediterranean fish (Capros aper), of the family Caproidae; -- so called from the resemblance of the extended lips to a hog&
boaster ::: n. --> One who boasts; a braggart.
A stone mason&
boast ::: v. i. --> To vaunt one&
bob ::: n. --> Anything that hangs so as to play loosely, or with a short abrupt motion, as at the end of a string; a pendant; as, the bob at the end of a kite&
bodice ::: n. --> A kind of under waist stiffened with whalebone, etc., worn esp. by women; a corset; stays.
A close-fitting outer waist or vest forming the upper part of a woman&
boilingly ::: adv. --> With boiling or ebullition. html{color:
boll ::: n. --> The pod or capsule of a plant, as of flax or cotton; a pericarp of a globular form.
A Scotch measure, formerly in use: for wheat and beans it contained four Winchester bushels; for oats, barley, and potatoes, six bushels. A boll of meal is 140 lbs. avoirdupois. Also, a measure for salt of two bushels. ::: v. i.
bonce ::: n. --> A boy&
bookbindery ::: n. --> A bookbinder&
book muslin ::: --> A kind of muslin used for the covers of books.
A kind of thin white muslin for ladies&
bookshop ::: n. --> A bookseller&
bookstore ::: n. --> A store where books are kept for sale; -- called in England a bookseller&
boothy ::: n. --> See Bothy.
A wooden hut or humble cot, esp. a rude hut or barrack for unmarried farm servants; a shepherd&
boottopping ::: n. --> The act or process of daubing a vessel&
boraginaceous ::: a. --> Of, pertaining to, or resembling, a family of plants (Boraginaceae) which includes the borage, heliotrope, beggar&
borax ::: n. --> A white or gray crystalline salt, with a slight alkaline taste, used as a flux, in soldering metals, making enamels, fixing colors on porcelain, and as a soap. It occurs native in certain mineral springs, and is made from the boric acid of hot springs in Tuscany. It was originally obtained from a lake in Thibet, and was sent to Europe under the name of tincal. Borax is a pyroborate or tetraborate of sodium, Na2B4O7.10H2O.
bordlode ::: n. --> The service formerly required of a tenant, to carry timber from the woods to the lord&
borneol ::: n. --> A rare variety of camphor, C10H17.OH, resembling ordinary camphor, from which it can be produced by reduction. It is said to occur in the camphor tree of Borneo and Sumatra (Dryobalanops camphora), but the natural borneol is rarely found in European or American commerce, being in great request by the Chinese. Called also Borneo camphor, Malay camphor, and camphol.
boron ::: n. --> A nonmetallic element occurring abundantly in borax. It is reduced with difficulty to the free state, when it can be obtained in several different forms; viz., as a substance of a deep olive color, in a semimetallic form, and in colorless quadratic crystals similar to the diamond in hardness and other properties. It occurs in nature also in boracite, datolite, tourmaline, and some other minerals. Atomic weight 10.9. Symbol B.
botany bay ::: --> A harbor on the east coast of Australia, and an English convict settlement there; -- so called from the number of new plants found on its shore at its discovery by Cook in 1770.
bottine ::: n. --> A small boot; a lady&
bottle ::: n. --> A hollow vessel, usually of glass or earthenware (but formerly of leather), with a narrow neck or mouth, for holding liquids.
The contents of a bottle; as much as a bottle contains; as, to drink a bottle of wine.
Fig.: Intoxicating liquor; as, to drown one&
bottom ::: n. --> The lowest part of anything; the foot; as, the bottom of a tree or well; the bottom of a hill, a lane, or a page.
The part of anything which is beneath the contents and supports them, as the part of a chair on which a person sits, the circular base or lower head of a cask or tub, or the plank floor of a ship&
bouch ::: n. --> A mouth.
An allowance of meat and drink for the tables of inferior officers or servants in a nobleman&
boudoir ::: n. --> A small room, esp. if pleasant, or elegantly furnished, to which a lady may retire to be alone, or to receive intimate friends; a lady&
bouillon ::: n. --> A nutritious liquid food made by boiling beef, or other meat, in water; a clear soup or broth.
An excrescence on a horse&
bourdon ::: n. --> A pilgrim&
boyism ::: n. --> Boyhood.
The nature of a boy; childishness. html{color:
boy ::: n. --> A male child, from birth to the age of puberty; a lad; hence, a son. ::: v. t. --> To act as a boy; -- in allusion to the former practice of boys acting women&
brag ::: v. i. --> To talk about one&
brail ::: n. --> A thong of soft leather to bind up a hawk&
brankursine ::: n. --> Bear&
bravura ::: n. --> A florid, brilliant style of music, written for effect, to show the range and flexibility of a singer&
breakfast ::: n. --> The first meal in the day, or that which is eaten at the first meal.
A meal after fasting, or food in general. ::: v. i. --> To break one&
break ::: v. 1. To destroy by or as if by shattering or crushing. 2. To force or make a way through (a barrier, etc.). 3. To vary or disrupt the uniformity or continuity of. 4. To overcome or put an end to. 5. To destroy or interrupt a regularity, uniformity, continuity, or arrangement of; interrupt. 6. To intrude upon; interrupt a conversation, etc. 7. To discontinue or sever an association, an agreement, or a relationship. **8. To overcome or wear down the spirit, strength, or resistance of. 9. (usually followed by in, into or out). 10. To filter or penetrate as sunlight into a room. 11. To come forth suddenly. 12. To utter suddenly; to express or start to express an emotion, mood, etc. 13. Said of waves, etc. when they dash against an obstacle, or topple over and become surf or broken water in the shallows. 14. To part the surface of water, as a ship or a jumping fish. breaks, broke, broken, breaking.* *n. 15.** An interruption or a disruption in continuity or regularity.
breastplate ::: n. --> A plate of metal covering the breast as defensive armor.
A piece against which the workman presses his breast in operating a breast drill, or other similar tool.
A strap that runs across a horse&
breviate ::: n. --> A short compend; a summary; a brief statement.
A lawyer&
brick ::: n. --> A block or clay tempered with water, sand, etc., molded into a regular form, usually rectangular, and sun-dried, or burnt in a kiln, or in a heap or stack called a clamp.
Bricks, collectively, as designating that kind of material; as, a load of brick; a thousand of brick.
Any oblong rectangular mass; as, a brick of maple sugar; a penny brick (of bread).
A good fellow; a merry person; as, you &
bridewell ::: n. --> A house of correction for the confinement of disorderly persons; -- so called from a hospital built in 1553 near St. Bride&
brief ::: a. --> Short in duration.
Concise; terse; succinct.
Rife; common; prevalent.
A short concise writing or letter; a statement in few words.
An epitome.
An abridgment or concise statement of a client&
brigge ::: n. --> A bridge. html{color:
brighten ::: a. --> To make bright or brighter; to make to shine; to increase the luster of; to give a brighter hue to.
To make illustrious, or more distinguished; to add luster or splendor to.
To improve or relieve by dispelling gloom or removing that which obscures and darkens; to shed light upon; to make cheerful; as, to brighten one&
broadcloth ::: n. --> A fine smooth-faced woolen cloth for men&
brog ::: n. --> A pointed instrument, as a joiner&
brother german ::: --> A brother by both the father&
brother-in-law ::: n. --> The brother of one&
bruise ::: v. t. --> To injure, as by a blow or collision, without laceration; to contuse; as, to bruise one&
bubby ::: n. --> A woman&
buchu ::: n. --> A South African shrub (Barosma) with small leaves that are dotted with oil glands; also, the leaves themselves, which are used in medicine for diseases of the urinary organs, etc. Several species furnish the leaves. html{color:
buckra ::: n. --> A white man; -- a term used by negroes of the African coast, West Indies, etc. ::: a. --> White; white man&
buddhism ::: n. --> The religion based upon the doctrine originally taught by the Hindoo sage Gautama Siddartha, surnamed Buddha, "the awakened or enlightened," in the sixth century b. c., and adopted as a religion by the greater part of the inhabitants of Central and Eastern Asia and the Indian Islands. Buddha&
build ::: v. t. --> To erect or construct, as an edifice or fabric of any kind; to form by uniting materials into a regular structure; to fabricate; to make; to raise.
To raise or place on a foundation; to form, establish, or produce by using appropriate means.
To increase and strengthen; to increase the power and stability of; to settle, or establish, and preserve; -- frequently with up; as, to build up one&
bulky ::: a. --> Of great bulk or dimensions; of great size; large; thick; massive; as, bulky volumes. html{color:
bullhead ::: n. --> A fresh-water fish of many species, of the genus Uranidea, esp. U. gobio of Europe, and U. Richardsoni of the United States; -- called also miller&
bull-necked ::: a. --> Having a short and thick neck like that of a bull. html{color:
bullwort ::: n. --> See Bishop&
bunchy ::: a. --> Swelling out in bunches.
Growing in bunches, or resembling a bunch; having tufts; as, the bird&
bunk ::: n. --> A wooden case or box, which serves for a seat in the daytime and for a bed at night.
One of a series of berths or bed places in tiers.
A piece of wood placed on a lumberman&
bunodonts ::: n. pl. --> A division of the herbivorous mammals including the hogs and hippopotami; -- so called because the teeth are tuberculated. html{color:
buntine ::: n. --> A thin woolen stuff, used chiefly for flags, colors, and ships&
burdon ::: n. --> A pilgrim&
bur marigold ::: --> See Beggar&
burn ::: v. t. --> To consume with fire; to reduce to ashes by the action of heat or fire; -- frequently intensified by up: as, to burn up wood.
To injure by fire or heat; to change destructively some property or properties of, by undue exposure to fire or heat; to scorch; to scald; to blister; to singe; to char; to sear; as, to burn steel in forging; to burn one&
bury ::: n. --> A borough; a manor; as, the Bury of St. Edmond&
bushelman ::: n. --> A tailor&
bush ::: n. --> A thicket, or place abounding in trees or shrubs; a wild forest.
A shrub; esp., a shrub with branches rising from or near the root; a thick shrub or a cluster of shrubs.
A shrub cut off, or a shrublike branch of a tree; as, bushes to support pea vines.
A shrub or branch, properly, a branch of ivy (as sacred to Bacchus), hung out at vintners&
busk ::: n. --> A thin, elastic strip of metal, whalebone, wood, or other material, worn in the front of a corset. ::: v. t. & i. --> To prepare; to make ready; to array; to dress.
To go; to direct one&
but ::: adv. & conj. --> Except with; unless with; without.
Except; besides; save.
Excepting or excluding the fact that; save that; were it not that; unless; -- elliptical, for but that.
Otherwise than that; that not; -- commonly, after a negative, with that.
Only; solely; merely.
On the contrary; on the other hand; only; yet; html{color:
butane ::: n. --> An inflammable gaseous hydrocarbon, C4H10, of the marsh gas, or paraffin, series.
butlerage ::: n. --> A duty of two shillings on every tun of wine imported into England by merchant strangers; -- so called because paid to the king&
butler ::: n. --> An officer in a king&
butt hinge ::: --> See 1st Butt, 10.
cabas ::: n. --> A flat basket or frail for figs, etc.; hence, a lady&
caducean ::: a. --> Of or belonging to Mercury&
caduceus ::: n. --> The official staff or wand of Hermes or Mercury, the messenger of the gods. It was originally said to be a herald&
calamus ::: n. --> The indian cane, a plant of the Palm family. It furnishes the common rattan. See Rattan, and Dragon&
calash ::: n. --> A light carriage with low wheels, having a top or hood that can be raised or lowered, seats for inside, a separate seat for the driver, and often a movable front, so that it can be used as either an open or a close carriage.
In Canada, a two-wheeled, one-seated vehicle, with a calash top, and the driver&
calceiform ::: a. --> Shaped like a slipper, as one petal of the lady&
calcium ::: n. --> An elementary substance; a metal which combined with oxygen forms lime. It is of a pale yellow color, tenacious, and malleable. It is a member of the alkaline earth group of elements. Atomic weight 40. Symbol Ca.
calculate ::: v. i. --> To ascertain or determine by mathematical processes, usually by the ordinary rules of arithmetic; to reckon up; to estimate; to compute.
To ascertain or predict by mathematical or astrological computations the time, circumstances, or other conditions of; to forecast or compute the character or consequences of; as, to calculate or cast one&
calendar ::: n. --> An orderly arrangement of the division of time, adapted to the purposes of civil life, as years, months, weeks, and days; also, a register of the year with its divisions; an almanac.
A tabular statement of the dates of feasts, offices, saints&
calorie ::: n. --> The unit of heat according to the French standard; the amount of heat required to raise the temperature of one kilogram (sometimes, one gram) of water one degree centigrade, or from 0¡ to 1¡. Compare the English standard unit, Foot pound.
caltrap ::: n. --> A genus of herbaceous plants (Tribulus) of the order Zygophylleae, having a hard several-celled fruit, armed with stout spines, and resembling the military instrument of the same name. The species grow in warm countries, and are often very annoying to cattle.
An instrument with four iron points, so disposed that, any three of them being on the ground, the other projects upward. They are scattered on the ground where an enemy&
calver ::: v. i. --> To cut in slices and pickle, as salmon.
To crimp; as, calvered salmon.
To bear, or be susceptible of, being calvered; as, grayling&
camelshair ::: a. --> Of camel&
camerlingo ::: n. --> The papal chamberlain; the cardinal who presides over the pope&
camisard ::: n. --> One of the French Protestant insurgents who rebelled against Louis XIV, after the revocation of the edict of Nates; -- so called from the peasant&
camlet ::: n. --> A woven fabric originally made of camel&
camonflet ::: n. --> A small mine, sometimes formed in the wall or side of an enemy&
campanulaceous ::: a. --> Of pertaining to, or resembling, the family of plants (Camponulaceae) of which Campanula is the type, and which includes the Canterbury bell, the harebell, and the Venus&
camphene ::: n. --> One of a series of substances C10H16, resembling camphor, regarded as modified terpenes.
camphor ::: n. --> A tough, white, aromatic resin, or gum, obtained from different species of the Laurus family, esp. from Cinnamomum camphara (the Laurus camphara of Linnaeus.). Camphor, C10H16O, is volatile and fragrant, and is used in medicine as a diaphoretic, a stimulant, or sedative.
A gum resembling ordinary camphor, obtained from a tree (Dryobalanops camphora) growing in Sumatra and Borneo; -- called also Malay camphor, camphor of Borneo, or borneol. See Borneol.
camp ::: n. --> The ground or spot on which tents, huts, etc., are erected for shelter, as for an army or for lumbermen, etc.
A collection of tents, huts, etc., for shelter, commonly arranged in an orderly manner.
A single hut or shelter; as, a hunter&
camwood ::: n. --> See Barwood. html{color:
cancer ::: n. --> A genus of decapod Crustacea, including some of the most common shore crabs of Europe and North America, as the rock crab, Jonah crab, etc. See Crab.
The fourth of the twelve signs of the zodiac. The first point is the northern limit of the sun&
canker ::: n. --> A corroding or sloughing ulcer; esp. a spreading gangrenous ulcer or collection of ulcers in or about the mouth; -- called also water canker, canker of the mouth, and noma.
Anything which corrodes, corrupts, or destroy.
A disease incident to trees, causing the bark to rot and fall off.
An obstinate and often incurable disease of a horse&
canon bit ::: --> That part of a bit which is put in a horse&
cantarro ::: n. --> A weight used in southern Europe and East for heavy articles. It varies in different localities; thus, at Rome it is nearly 75 pounds, in Sardinia nearly 94 pounds, in Cairo it is 95 pounds, in Syria about 503 pounds.
A liquid measure in Spain, ranging from two and a half to four gallons.
canteen ::: n. --> A vessel used by soldiers for carrying water, liquor, or other drink.
The sutler&
canton crape ::: --> A soft, white or colored silk fabric, of a gauzy texture and wavy appearance, used for ladies&
capuchin ::: n. --> A Franciscan monk of the austere branch established in 1526 by Matteo di Baschi, distinguished by wearing the long pointed cowl or capoch of St. Francis.
A garment for women, consisting of a cloak and hood, resembling, or supposed to resemble, that of capuchin monks.
A long-tailed South American monkey (Cabus capucinus), having the forehead naked and wrinkled, with the hair on the crown reflexed and resembling a monk&
caravel ::: n. --> A name given to several kinds of vessels.
The caravel of the 16th century was a small vessel with broad bows, high, narrow poop, four masts, and lateen sails. Columbus commanded three caravels on his great voyage.
A Portuguese vessel of 100 or 150 tons burden.
A small fishing boat used on the French coast.
A Turkish man-of-war.
carbone ::: v. t. --> To broil. [Obs.] "We had a calf&
centuries ::: periods of 100 years.
centurion ::: the commander of a century (100 men) in the Roman army.
dark ::: adj. 1. Lacking or having very little light. 2. Concealed or secret; mysterious. 3. Difficult to understand; obscure. 4. Characterized by gloom; dismal. 5. Fig. Sinister; evil; absent moral or spiritual values. 6. (used of color) Having a dark hue; almost black. 7. Showing a brooding ill humor. 8. Having a complexion that is not fair; swarthy. darker, darkest, dark-browed, dark-robed.* n. 9. Absence of light; dark state or condition; darkness, esp. that of night. 10. A dark place: a place of darkness. 11. The condition of being hidden from view, obscure, or unknown; obscurity. *in the dark: in concealment or secrecy.
deep ::: n. 1. A vast extent, as of space or time; an abyss. 2. Fig. Difficult to penetrate; incomprehensible to one of ordinary understanding or knowledge; as an unfathomable thought, idea, esp. poetic. Deep, deep"s, deeps. adj. 3. Extending far downward below a surface. 4. Having great spatial extension or penetration downward or inward from an outer surface or backward or laterally or outward from a center; sometimes used in combination. 5. Coming from or penetrating to a great depth. 6. Situated far down, in, or back. 7. Lying below the surface; not superficial; profound. 8. Of great intensity; as extreme deep happiness, deep trouble. 9. Absorbing; engrossing. 10. Grave or serious. 11. Profoundly or intensely. 12. Mysterious; obscure; difficult to penetrate or understand. 13. Low in pitch or tone. 14. Profoundly cunning, crafty or artful. 15. The central and most intense or profound part; "in the deep of night”; "in the deep of winter”. deeper, deepest, deep-browed, deep-caved, deep-concealed, deep-etched, deep-fraught, deep-guarded, deep-hid, deep-honied, deep-pooled, deep-thoughted. *adv. *16. to a great depth psychologically or profoundly.
draw ::: 1. To cause to move in a given direction or to a given position, as by leading. 2. To bring towards oneself or itself, as by inherent force or influence; attract. 3. To cause to come by attracting; attract. 4. To cause to move in a particular direction by or as by a pulling force; pull; drag. 5. To get, take or obtain as from a source; to derive. 6. To bring, take, or pull out, as from a receptacle or source. 7. To draw a (or the) line (fig.) to determine or define the limit between two things or groups; in modern colloquial use (esp. with at), to lay down a definite limit of action beyond which one refuses to go. 8. To make, sketch (a picture or representation of someone or something) in lines or words; to design, trace out, delineate; depict; also, to mould, model. 9. To mark or lay out; trace. 10. To compose or write out in legal format. 11. To write out (a bill of exchange or promissory note). 12. To disembowel. 13. To move or pull so as to cover or uncover something. 14. To suck or take in (air, for example); inhale. 15. To extend, lengthen, prolong, protract. 16. To cause to move after or toward one by applying continuous force; drag. draws, drew, drawn, drawing, wide-drawn.
drive ::: v. 1. To impel; constrain; urge; compel. 2. To manoeuvre, guide or steer the progress of. 3. To impel (matter) by physical force; to cause (something) to move along by direct application of physical force; to propel, carry along. 4. To send, expel, or otherwise cause to move away or out by force or compulsion. 5. To strive vigorously and with determination toward a goal or objective. 6. To cause and guide the movement of (a vehicle, an animal, etc.). n. 7. A strong organized effort to accomplish a purpose, with energy, push or aggressiveness. 8. Impulse; impulsive force. adj. 9. Urged onward, impelled. 10. Pertaining to an inner urge that stimulates activity or inhibition. drives, drove, drov"st, driving, driven.
FA1.5EH00D. An extreme result of Avidyd. It is created by an Asuric power which inicrv'cnes in this creation and is not only separated from the Truth and therefore limited in know- ledge and open to error, but in revolt against the Truth or in the habit of seizing the Truth only to pervert it. This Power, the dark Asuric Shakti or ROLwl Mdyd puts forward its o\vn perverted consciousness as a true knowledge and its wilful dis- tortions or reversals of the Truth as the verily of things. It is the powers and personalities of this perverted and perverting consciousness that we call hostile beings, hostile forces. When- ever these perversions created by them out of the stuff of
heavy ::: 1. Having relatively great weight. lit. and fig. 2. Weighed down; burdened. 3. Marked by or exhibiting weariness. 4. Without vivacity or interest; ponderous; dull. 5. Not easily borne; oppressive; burdensome; harsh. 6. Hard to cope with; trying; difficult. 7. Weighed down with sorrow or grief; sorrowful, sad, grieved, despondent. 8. Deep, profound, intense. 9. Of great import or seriousness; grave. 10. Sober, serious, sombre or tragic. 11. With great force, intensity, turbulence, etc. 12. Having considerable thickness or substance. 13. Lacking vitality; deficient in vivacity or grace. 14. Emotionally weighed down; despondent. heavier.
"He the Eternal"s delegate soul in man.” Savitri 10. 3.
“He the Eternal’s delegate soul in man.” Savitri 10. 3.
"I have started writing about doubt, but even in doing so I am afflicted by the ‘doubt" whether any amount of writing or of anything else can ever persuade the eternal doubt in man which is the penalty of his native ignorance. In the first place, to write adequately would mean anything from 60 to 600 pages, but not even 6000 convincing pages would convince doubt. For doubt exists for its own sake; its very function is to doubt always and, even when convinced, to go on doubting still; it is only to persuade its entertainer to give it board and lodging that it pretends to be an honest truth-seeker. This is a lesson I have learnt from the experience both of my own mind and of the minds of others; the only way to get rid of doubt is to take discrimination as one"s detector of truth and falsehood and under its guard to open the door freely and courageously to experience.” Letters on Yoga
I have started writing about doubt, but even in doing so I am afflicted by the ‘doubt’ whether any amount of writing or of anything else can ever persuade the eternal doubt in man which is the penalty of his native ignorance. In the first place, to write adequately would mean anything from 60 to 600 pages, but not even 6000 convincing pages would convince doubt. For doubt exists for its own sake; its very function is to doubt always and, even when convinced, to go on doubting still; it is only to persuade its entertainer to give it board and lodging that it pretends to be an honest truth-seeker. This is a lesson I have learnt from the experience both of my own mind and of the minds of others; the only way to get rid of doubt is to take discrimination as one’s detector of truth and falsehood and under its guard to open the door freely and courageously to experience.” Letters on Yoga
Location: E Library—Works Of The Mother—English—Cwmce—Questions And Answers Volume 03—Supermind And Overmind …
Mother"s Agenda, Volume 10, 1969.
MuLCUND 1W0USTRIE5
MWA 303
n. 1. The lower interior part of a ship or airplane where cargo is stored. 2. The act or a means of grasping. v. 3. To have or keep in the hand; keep fast; grasp. 4. To bear, sustain, or support, as with the hands or arms, or by any other means. 5. To contain or be capable of containing. 6. To keep from departing or getting away. 7. To withstand stress, pressure, or opposition; to maintain occupation of by force or coercion. 8. To have in its power, possess, affect, occupy. 9. To engage in; preside over; carry on. 10. To have or keep in the mind; think or believe. 11. To regard or consider. 12. To keep or maintain a grasp on something. 13. To maintain one"s position against opposition; continue in resistance. 14. To agree or side (usually followed by with). holds, holding. ::: hold back. 15. a. To retain possession of; keep back. b. To refrain from revealing; withhold. c. To refrain from participating or engaging in some activity.
Oh, a tremendous power—tremendous. The first time I heard it … The first time I heard it … There was a certain Bernard who had spent a year in India, in the Himalayas, and he was visited by yogis whom he didn’t know (he lived in a hut in the Himalayas, all alone). One yogi came to see him; he didn’t say anything, he just sat by his side and then left. And that yogi simply told him,”Om …” Then he came back to France, recounted his experiences in India, and he said that. Me, I knew absolutely nothing of India at the time, and when he uttered the word OM … (Mother brings her arms down), it came: a Force like this, my whole, entire body, everything vibrated in an extraordinary way! It was like a revelation—everything, but everything started vibrating. Then I said,”At last, here’s the true sound!” Yet I knew nothing, absolutely nothing, neither what it meant nor anything. Mother’s Agenda, Volume 10, 1969.
pass ::: v. 1. To move on or ahead; proceed. 2. To move by. 3. To go or get through (something), lit. and fig. **4. To go across or over (a stream, threshold, etc.); cross. 5. To cross, traverse, in reference to times, stages, states, conditions, processes, actions, experiences, etc. 6. To be transferred from one to another; circulate. 7. To come to or toward, then go beyond. 8. To come to an end. 9. To cease to exist. 10. To convey, transfer, or transmit; deliver (often followed by on). 11. To be accepted as or believed to be. 12. To sanction or approve. passes, passed, passing. n. 13. A way, such as a narrow gap between mountains, that affords passage around, over, or through a barrier. passes. ::: pass by. To let go without notice, action, remark, etc.; leave unconsidered; disregard; overlook.
press ::: n. 1. A crowd, throng, or multitude. 2. A crowding, thronging, or pressing together; a collective force. 3. Pressure or demands of affairs; urgency, haste, hurry. v. 4. To exert weight, force or pressure. 5. To advance or carry on vigorously despite obstacles in one"s way. 6. To impress (a thing) upon the mind, etc., emphasize, inculcate. 7. To beset or harass; afflict. 8. To cause to move in some direction or into some position by pressure; to push, drive, thrust. 9. To compress or squeeze. 10. To squeeze out or express, as juice. 11. To urge or entreat strongly or insistently. 12. To hold closely as in an embrace; clasp. presses, pressed, pressing.
Price ::: Rs. 10/-
purpled ::: Amal: “To become richly manifest, beautifully intense, colourfully deep.” (Bk. II, Canto 10, Line 403)
Rajayoga 209
sapphics ::: a metre used by Sappho (the famous Greek poetess of Lesbos [c 600 b.c.]).
shadow ::: n. 1. A dark figure or image cast on the ground or some surface by a body intercepting light. 2. Shade or comparative darkness, as in an area. 3. Darkness that is caused by the interception of light. 4. A phantom; a ghost. 5. An obscure indication; a symbol, type; a prefiguration, foreshadowing. 6. A hint or faint, indistinct image or idea; intimation. 7. A mere semblance. 8. A mirrored image or reflection. 9. Shelter; protection. 10. A dominant or pervasive threat, influence, or atmosphere, esp. one causing gloom, fear, doubt, or the like. Shadow, shadow"s, shadows. v. 11. To represent faintly, prophetically; to indicate obscurely or in slight outline; to symbolize, typify, prefigure. (Often followed by forth.) shadowed. (Sri Aurobindo also employs the word as an adj.) shadowlike, shadow-hung, shadow-self, shadow-soul, shadow-Sphinx.
shadow ::: n. 1. A dark figure or image cast on the ground or some surface by a body intercepting light. 2. Shade or comparative darkness, as in an area. 3. Darkness that is caused by the interception of light. 4. A phantom; a ghost. 5. An obscure indication; a symbol, type; a prefiguration, foreshadowing. 6. A hint or faint, indistinct image or idea; intimation. 7. A mere semblance. 8. A mirrored image or reflection. 9. Shelter; protection. 10. A dominant or pervasive threat, influence, or atmosphere, esp. one causing gloom, fear, doubt, or the like. Shadow, shadow’s, shadows. v. 11. To represent faintly, prophetically; to indicate obscurely or in slight outline; to symbolize, typify, prefigure. (Often followed by forth.) shadowed. (Sri Aurobindo also employs the word as an adj.) shadowlike, shadow-hung, shadow-self, shadow-soul, shadow-Sphinx.
sign ::: n. 1. An act or gesture used to convey an idea, a desire, information, or a command. 2. Any object, action, event, pattern, etc., that conveys a meaning. 3. A mark used to mean something; a symbol that sets something apart from others of its kind. 4. Something that indicates or acts as a token of a fact, condition, etc., that is not immediately or outwardly observable. 5. A signal. 6. A conventional figure or device that stands for a word, phrase, or operation; a symbol, as in mathematics or in musical notation. 7. A displayed structure such as a banner bearing lettering or symbols. 8. An act or significant event that is experienced as indication of divine intervention. 9. A portent of things to come. Sign, sign"s, signs, signless, sign-burdened, flame-signs. v. 10. To affix one"s signature to. 11. To indicate by or as if by a sign; betoken. signs, signed, signing.
steel ::: 1. A generally hard, strong, durable, malleable alloy of iron and carbon, usually containing between 0.2 and 1.5 percent carbon, often with other constituents such as manganese, chromium, nickel, molybdenum, copper, tungsten, cobalt, or silicon, depending on the desired alloy properties, and widely used as a structural material. 2. Something, such as a sword, or a cutting instrument such as an axe that is made of steel. steel-bound.
stratosphere ::: 1. The region of the Earth"s atmosphere extending from the tropopause to about 50 km (31 mi) above the Earth"s surface. The stratosphere is characterized by the presence of ozone gas (in the ozone layer) and by temperatures which rise slightly with altitude, due to the absorption of ultraviolet radiation. 2. An extremely high or the highest point or degree on a ranked scale.
The eternal bridegroom of the eternal bride.” Savitri, 10. 4. Satyavan’s.
The eternal bridegroom of the eternal bride.” Savitri, 10. 4.
The Mother : "An Avatar is an emanation of the Supreme Lord who assumes a human body on earth.” Works of the Mother, "On Thoughts and Aphorisms” Vol.10
The Mother : “An Avatar is an emanation of the Supreme Lord who assumes a human body on earth.” Works of the Mother,”On Thoughts and Aphorisms” Vol.10.
The Mother: " A total self-giving to the Divine is the true purpose of existence.” On Thoughts and Aphorisms, MCW Vol. 10.*
The Mother: “ A total self-giving to the Divine is the true purpose of existence.” On Thoughts and Aphorisms, MCW Vol. 10.
thirst ::: Madhav: “… all the power, all the knowledge that the world can give us are products of time, products of the movements of time. Truly they cannot satisfy the sacred thirst of the spirit. Mark the words ‘sacred thirst’ (III. 1. 305.). Mother uses the word ‘thirst’ so often; it is an intense aspiration that cannot be satisfied, cannot be fulfilled by the gifts of time; it can be fulfilled only by the gifts of what is beyond time, of what is eternal. The hunger of the soul in us can be satisfied only by a response from the Eternal.” The Book of the Divine Mother
thousand ::: 1. Something represented by, representing, or consisting of 1000 units. 2. Often used to denote a large amount. thousands, thousand-hooded, thousand-pillared, thousand-voiced.
trace ::: n. 1. A surviving mark, sign, or evidence of the former existence, influence, or action of some agent or event; vestige. 2. Evidence or an indication of the former presence or existence of something non-material; a vestige. 3. A barely discernable indication or evidence of some quality, quality, characteristic, expression, etc. v. 4. To make one"s way over, through, or along (something). Also fig. 5. To follow a course, trail, etc.; make one"s way. 6. To follow, make out, or determine the course or line of, especially by going backward from the latest evidence, nearest existence, etc. 7. To locate or discover by searching or researching evidence; follow the history of. 8. To draw an outline of something. Also fig. 9. To decorate with tracery. 10. To copy (a design, map, etc.) by drawing over the lines visible through a superimposed sheet of transparent paper or other material. 11. To draw or delineate a plan or diagram of. traced, tracing.
turn ::: v. **1. To cause to move around an axis or center; cause to rotate or revolve. 2. To direct or set one"s course toward, away from, or in a particular direction. 3. To change direction, as at a bend or curve. 4. To direct the face or gaze toward or away from someone or something. 5. To channel one"s attention, interest, or thought toward or away from something. 6. To direct one"s thought, attention, interest, desire, effort, etc. toward or away from someone or something. 7. To change the position (esp. the body) from side to side or back and forth. 8. To change or cause to change one"s attitude so as to become hostile or to retaliate. 9. To direct or bring to bear in the way of opposition; to proceed to use against. 10. To cause to go in a specific direction; direct. 11. To change or convert or be changed or converted to change or convert or be changed or converted; transform. 12. To apply to some use or purpose; to make use of, employ. 13. To twist, bend, or distort in shape. turns, turned, turning, fate-turned.* *n. 14. The act of turning or the condition of being turned; rotation or revolution. 15. An act or instance of changing or reversing the course or direction, or a place or point at which such a change occurs. 16. Course; direction. 17. Requirement, need, exigency; purpose, use, convenience. 18. A change in affairs, conditions, or circumstances; vicissitude; revolution; esp. a change for better or worse, or the like, at a crisis; hence, sometimes, the time at which such a change takes place. Often fig. 19. A propensity or adeptness. 20. The place, point, or time or occasion at which a deviation or change occurs. turns.
way ::: 1. A road, path, or highway affording passage from one place to another. Also fig. 2. Any line of passage or progression, esp. in a particular direction. 3. A direction or vicinity. 4. A course of life, action, or experience. 5. A prescribed course of life or conduct; also in pl. 6. A method, plan, or means for attaining a goal. 7. A method, plan, or means for attaining a goal. 8. Space for passing or advancing. 9. Characteristic or habitual manner. 10. Distance. ways, earth-ways, half-way, world-ways, Angel of the Way, evolving Way, heavenly Way, middle Way, shining upward Way, terrestrial Way, the Way.
yosaif0}(i
KEYS (10k)
1 Tao te Ching
1 Suhane
1 Pindar
1 Larry Wall
1 Koran
1 Anon. 1600's
NEW FULL DB (2.4M)
115 Anonymous
12 John Walter Bratton
12 50 Cent
8 Alexandre Soumet
6 Woody Allen
5 E 40
4 Wayne Gretzky
4 Timothy Ferriss
4 The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints
4 John Lloyd
3 William Shakespeare
3 Walter Isaacson
3 Thomas A Edison
3 Theodore Sturgeon
3 Peter Thiel
3 Neil Young
3 Neil Gaiman
3 Madonna Ciccone
3 Jeffrey Archer
3 Hillary Clinton
1:The Alphabet of Physics no less than of Metaphysics, of Physiology no less than of Psychology is an Alphabet of Relations, in which N is N only because M is M and 0, 0. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Collected Letters 688, #KEYS
2:0:He whose self has become all existences, for he has the knowledge, how shall he be deluded, whence shall he have grief, he who sees everywhere oneness? Isha Upanishad.1 ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Divine Soul, #KEYS
3:So dazzling is even a glimpse of this supreme existence and so absorbing its attraction that, once seen, we feel readily justified in neglecting all else for its pursuit. ~ Sri Aurobindo, TSOY, 0.02 - The Three Steps of Nature, #KEYS
4:0 Order - All developmental theories consider the infant to be "undifferentiated," the essence of which is the absence of any self-other boundary (interpersonally) or any subject-object boundary (intrapsychically), hence, stage 0 rather than stage 1. The infant is believed to consider all of the phenomena it experiences as extensions of itself. The infant is "all self" or "all subject" and "no object or other." Whether one speaks of infantile narcissism," "orality," being under the sway completely of "the pleasure principle" with no countervailing "reality principle," or being "all assimilative" with no countervailing "accommodation," all descriptions amount to the same picture of an objectless, incorporative embeddedness. Such an underlying psychologic gives rise not only to a specific kind of cognition (prerepresentational) but to a specific kind of emotion in which the emotional world lacks any distinction between inner and outer sources of pleasure and discomfort. To describe a state of complete undifferentiation, psychologists have had to rely on metaphors: Our language itself depends on the transcendence of this prerepresentational stage. The objects, symbols, signs, and referents of language organize the experienced world and presuppose the very categories that are not yet articulated at stage 0. Thus, Freud has described this period as the "oceanic stage," the self undifferentiated from the swelling sea. Jung suggested "uroboros," the snake that swallows its tail. ~ Robert Kegan, #KEYS
5:More often, he listened to the voice of Eros. Sometimes he watched the video feeds too, but usually, he just listened. Over the hours and days, he began to hear, if not patterns, at least common structures. Some of the voices spooling out of the dying station were consistent-broadcasters and entertainers who were overrepresented in the audio files archives, he guessed. There seemed to be some specific tendencies in, for want of a better term, the music of it too. Hours of random, fluting static and snatched bits of phrases would give way, and Eros would latch on to some word or phrase, fixating on it with greater and greater intensity until it broke apart and the randomness poured back in.
"... are, are, are, ARE, ARE, ARE... "
Aren't, Miller thought, and the ship suddenly shoved itself up, leaving Miller's stomach about half a foot from where it had been. A series of loud clanks followed, and then the brief wail of a Klaxon. "Dieu! Dieu!" someone shouted. "Bombs son vamen roja! Going to fry it! Fry us toda!"
There was the usual polite chuckle that the same joke had occasioned over the course of the trip, and the boy who'd made it-a pimply Belter no more than fifteen years old-grinned with pleasure at his own wit. If he didn't stop that shit, someone was going to beat him with a crowbar before they got back to Tycho. But Miller figured that someone wasn't him.
A massive jolt forward pushed him hard into the couch, and then gravity was back, the familiar 0.3 g. Maybe a little more. Except that with the airlocks pointing toward ship's down, the pilot had to grapple the spinning skin of Eros' belly first. The spin gravity made what had been the ceiling the new floor; the lowest rank of couches was now the top; and while they rigged the fusion bombs to the docks, they were all going to have to climb up onto a cold, dark rock that was trying to fling them off into the vacuum.
Such were the joys of sabotage. ~ James S A Corey, Leviathan Wakes,#KEYS
6:Daemons
A daemon is a process that runs in the background, not connecting to any controlling terminal. Daemons are normally started at boot time, are run as root or some
other special user (such as apache or postfix), and handle system-level tasks. As a
convention, the name of a daemon often ends in d (as in crond and sshd), but this is
not required, or even universal.
The name derives from Maxwell's demon, an 1867 thought experiment by the physicist James Maxwell. Daemons are also supernatural beings in Greek mythology,
existing somewhere between humans and the gods and gifted with powers and divine
knowledge. Unlike the demons of Judeo-Christian lore, the Greek daemon need not
be evil. Indeed, the daemons of mythology tended to be aides to the gods, performing
tasks that the denizens of Mount Olympus found themselves unwilling to do-much
as Unix daemons perform tasks that foreground users would rather avoid.
A daemon has two general requirements: it must run as a child of init, and it must
not be connected to a terminal.
In general, a program performs the following steps to become a daemon:
1. Call fork( ). This creates a new process, which will become the daemon.
2. In the parent, call exit( ). This ensures that the original parent (the daemon's
grandparent) is satisfied that its child terminated, that the daemon's parent is no
longer running, and that the daemon is not a process group leader. This last
point is a requirement for the successful completion of the next step.
3. Call setsid( ), giving the daemon a new process group and session, both of
which have it as leader. This also ensures that the process has no associated controlling terminal (as the process just created a new session, and will not assign
one).
4. Change the working directory to the root directory via chdir( ). This is done
because the inherited working directory can be anywhere on the filesystem. Daemons tend to run for the duration of the system's uptime, and you don't want to
keep some random directory open, and thus prevent an administrator from
unmounting the filesystem containing that directory.
5. Close all file descriptors. You do not want to inherit open file descriptors, and,
unaware, hold them open.
6. Open file descriptors 0, 1, and 2 (standard in, standard out, and standard error)
and redirect them to /dev/null.
Following these rules, here is a program that daemonizes itself:
~ OReilly Linux System Programming,#KEYS
*** WISDOM TROVE ***
1:Any sufficiently crisp question can be answered by a single binary digit-0 or 1, yes or no. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 2:Leadership is no longer about position - but passion. It's no longer about image but impact. This is Leadership 2.0. ~ robin-sharma, @wisdomtrove 3:Teach me, 0 God, not to torture myself, not to make a martyr out of myself through stifling reflection, but rather teach me to breathe deeply in faith. ~ soren-kierkegaard, @wisdomtrove 4:The logic behind patriotism is a mystery. At least a man who believes that his own family or clan is superior to all others is familiar with more than 0.000003% of the people involved. ~ criss-jami, @wisdomtrove 5:Do you know how a lover of God feels? His attitude is: "0 God, Thou art the Master, and I am Thy servant. Thou art the Mother, and I am Thy child." Or again: "Thou art my Father and Mother. Thou art the Whole, and I am a part." He doesn't like to say, "I am Brahman." ~ sri-ramakrishna, @wisdomtrove 6:God will not hold us responsible to understand the mysteries of election, predestination, and the divine sovereignty. The best and safest way to deal with these truths is to raise our eyes to God and in deepest reverence say, "0 Lord, Thou knowest." Those things belong to the deep and mysterious Profound of God's omniscience. Prying into them may make theologians, but it will never make saints. ~ aiden-wilson-tozer, @wisdomtrove 7:Even after attaining samadhi, some retain the "servant ego," or the "devotee ego." The bhakta keeps this "I-consciousness." He says, "0 God, Thou art the Master and I am Thy servant; Thou art the Lord and I am Thy devotee," He feels that way even after the realization of God. His "I" -is not completely effaced. Again, by constantly practicing this kind of consciousness," one ultimately attains God... ~ sri-ramakrishna, @wisdomtrove 8:I behold Thee, 0 Lord my God, in a kind of mental trance, ... Thus, while I am borne to loftiest heights, I behold Thee as Infinity... And when I behold Thee as absolute Infinity, to whom is befitting neither the name of creating Creator nor of creatable Creator-then indeed I begin to behold Thee unveiled, and to enter into the garden of delights! ... [In that vision] nothing is seen other than Thyself, [for Thou] art Thyself the object of Thyself (for Thou seest, and art That which is seen, and art the sight as well) . ~ nicholas-of-cusa, @wisdomtrove 9:What we want is another sample of life, which is not on our tree of life at all. All life that we've studied so far on Earth belongs to the same tree. We share genes with mushrooms and oak trees and fish and bacteria that live in volcanic vents and so on that it's all the same life descended from a common origin. What we want is a second tree of life. We want alien life, alien not necessarily in the sense of having come from space, but alien in the sense of belonging to a different tree altogether. That is what we're looking for, "life 2.0." ~ paul-davies, @wisdomtrove 10:One cannot see God without purity of heart. Through attachment to "woman and gold" the mind has become stained -covered with dirt, as it were. A magnet cannot attract a needle if the needle is covered with mud. Wash away the mud and the magnet will draw it. Likewise, the dirt of the mind can be washed away with the tears of our eyes. This stain is removed if one sheds tears of repentence and says, "0 God, I shall never again do such a thing." Thereupon God, who is like the, magnet, draws to Himself the mind, which is like the needle. Then the devotee goes into samadhi and obtains the vision of God. ~ sri-ramakrishna, @wisdomtrove *** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***
1:1. 0 is a number. ~ Giuseppe Peano, #NFDB
2:ISBN 978-0-300-11633-5 ~ Richard Sennett, #NFDB
3:See? So is 0.428571. ~ Madeleine L Engle, #NFDB
4:7, 1, 9, 3, 2, 4, 0. For NC. ~ Tony Abbott, #NFDB
5:Crazycakes’ Crib Day 0 “I’m ~ Kresley Cole, #NFDB
6:The number was: "2 B R 0 2 B. ~ Kurt Vonnegut, #NFDB
7:That home run ties it up, 1-0. ~ Jerry Coleman, #NFDB
8:THE MILLENNIUM FULCRUM EDITION 3.0 ~ Lewis Carroll, #NFDB
9:ISBN 13: 978-0-7432-0615-0 (ebook) ~ Mary Higgins Clark, #NFDB
10:ISBN_13: 978-0-7432-0615-0 (ebook) ~ Mary Higgins Clark, #NFDB
11:I’m not like other men, Ash. I’m Man 2.0. ~ Sarina Bowen, #NFDB
12:Pinterest is like window shopping 3.0. ~ Gary Vaynerchuk, #NFDB
13:There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1. ~ John Green, #NFDB
14:Es muy difícil pasar de 0 a 1 sin un equipo. ~ Peter Thiel, #NFDB
15:If at first you don't succeed; call it version 1.0. ~ Various, #NFDB
16:Anything from 1-0 to 2-0 would be a nice result ~ Bobby Robson, #NFDB
17:every time we create something new, we go from 0 to 1. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
18:And with just 4 minutes gone, the score is already 0-0. ~ Ian Darke, #NFDB
19:showtime! 6-0-0 the clock said—in my face, first thing ~ Gillian Flynn, #NFDB
20:Thernos 1.0 is an external point-of-care BlackBerry. ~ Elizabeth Holmes, #NFDB
21:9 &
9L
I j8 % 5 8 : 3 0
k
I
I ; ( ~ Anonymous,#NFDB
22:I'd much rather eat pasta and drink wine than be a size 0. ~ Sophia Loren, #NFDB
23:There was never any danger of Business 2.0 ever going under. ~ James Daly, #NFDB
24:The updated scoreboard: Maccagnan 1,000,000,000,000, Idzik 0. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
25:But iteration without a bold plan won’t take you from 0 to 1. ~ Peter Thiel, #NFDB
26:Eric Show will be 0 for 10 if that pop fly ever comes down. ~ Jerry Coleman, #NFDB
27:Mobile will probably disrupt much of what we know of web 2.0. ~ Keith Teare, #NFDB
28:Das sind 0,003 Tote pro einer Milliarde Personenkilometer ~ Sebastian Fitzek, #NFDB
29:La palabra para vertical, el progreso de 0 a 1, es tecnología. ~ Peter Thiel, #NFDB
30:it was still the pre-eminent social networking site for the 0-3 age group ~ Greg Egan, #NFDB
31:We teach offense 5-0/5-5 (whole method) and defense by part (1-1/3-3). ~ Dick Bennett, #NFDB
32:First International: Scotland 0 England 0, Partick, 30 November 1872 ~ Jonathan Wilson, #NFDB
33:Beauty is not between a size 0 and a size 8. It's not a number at all. ~ Ellen DeGeneres, #NFDB
34:The collective energy of everyone is what really made Business 2.0 exciting. ~ James Daly, #NFDB
35:0 LORD, you will establish peace for us, since you have done everything for us. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
36:Of the total surface area of Earth, Britain occupies just 0.0174069 per cent. ~ Bill Bryson, #NFDB
37:Business 2.0 was hugely profitable last year, and will be profitable this year. ~ James Daly, #NFDB
38:a large neural network with 10 layers can do anything a human can in 0.1 seconds. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
39:In AI 5.0, the CompassionateMind module works one level above the DeepMind module. ~ Amit Ray, #NFDB
40:Life isn't, and has never been, a 2-0 home victory after a fish and chip lunch. ~ Nick Hornby, #NFDB
41:... how much time you should be spending on hiring? The answer is 0 or 25 percent. ~ Sam Altman, #NFDB
42:It can be measured with an hs-CRP test. You want to be between 0.00 and 1.0 mg/L. ~ Kelly Brogan, #NFDB
43:Life 2.0”: life whose hardware is evolved, but whose software is largely designed. ~ Max Tegmark, #NFDB
44:I believe 0% is luck. I think you create your own luck, so I don't believe in luck. ~ Joey Logano, #NFDB
45:If you're 0-0 down, there's no-one better to get you back on terms than Ian Wright. ~ Robbie Earle, #NFDB
46:The eiderdown of this 2-0 lead is a lot more comfortable than the blanket of 1-0. ~ George Hamilton, #NFDB
47:The poster child of Web 2.0 is Flickr.com. Personalization is a key piece of Web 2.0. ~ Jared Spool, #NFDB
48:Life 1.0”: life where both the hardware and software are evolved rather than designed. ~ Max Tegmark, #NFDB
49:Without these self-service Operations platforms, the cloud is just Expensive Hosting 2.0. ~ Gene Kim, #NFDB
50:only 0.27 percent of all estates were wealthy enough to be affected by estate taxes. The ~ Jane Mayer, #NFDB
51:PLAYBOY OF THE WESTERN WORLD AND RIDERS TO THE SEA, J. M. Synge. 80pp. 0-486-27562-0 THE ~ Mark Twain, #NFDB
52:The best thing for them to do (Ireland) is to stay at 0-0 until they score the goal. ~ Martin O Neill, #NFDB
53:The zero in the telephone number he pronounced "naught." The number was: "2 B R 0 2 B. ~ Kurt Vonnegut, #NFDB
54:I think everyone is a little egocentric, but when I help someone I lose 0.01% of my ego. ~ Adriana Lima, #NFDB
55:Altın rezervinin olmadığı bölgelerde ise ağaçlarda 0,1 topraklarda ise 6 ppb altın bulunuyor ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
56:Any sufficiently crisp question can be answered by a single binary digit-0 or 1, yes or no. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
57:This ability of Life 2.0 to design its software enables it to be much smarter than Life 1.0 ~ Max Tegmark, #NFDB
58:1/r^2 has a nasty singularity at r=0, but it did not bother Newton-the Moon is far enough. ~ Edward Witten, #NFDB
59:and if, 0 my love, my heart is breaking, please
neglect my cries and I will spare you. ~ John Berryman,#NFDB
60:the 0.01 percent represents just 14,588 families each with incomes over $11,477,000.*3 ~ Erik Brynjolfsson, #NFDB
61:and damn well no 5-0 with his Smokey the Bear looking sidekick, will ever tell me differently. ~ J J McAvoy, #NFDB
62:God Almighty, I might’ve just committed a cardinal sin just by thinking it, but he was like Cam 2.0. ~ J Lynn, #NFDB
63:Let's be healthy big people. Everybody can't be a size 0 or 45, but let's be healthy. ~ Mo Nique Imes Jackson, #NFDB
64:Web 1.0 was making the Internet for people, Web 2.0 is making the Internet better for companies. ~ Jeff Bezos, #NFDB
65:Love sama dengan 0. Ditumpuk sebanyak apapun hanya akan menghasilkan kekalahan yang menyedihkan ~ Gosho Aoyama, #NFDB
66:Se desacelera economía de EU En el primer trimestre se expandió 0.2%; al cierre del 2014 creció 2.2%. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
67:The double 0 numerals signify an agent who has killed and who is privileged to kill on active service. ~ Ian Fleming, #NFDB
68:CSI, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Criminal Minds, Blue Bloods, Castle, Bones, and Hawaii Five-0 ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
69:Marriage isn't a 50-50 proposition very often. It's more like 100-0 one moment and 0-100 the next. ~ Billie Jean King, #NFDB
70:I think there should be an Occupy Gallifrey. Because 0.000001% of the people have 99.99999% of the Time. ~ Neil Gaiman, #NFDB
71:Thou shalt not think that thou be a leader, merely because thee be having more than 0 followers. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana, #NFDB
72:between 1973 and 2011, the median hourly wage barely changed, growing by just 0.1 percent per year. ~ Erik Brynjolfsson, #NFDB
73:Dave Scherer: “Those Are Not Transactions (Cassandra 2.0),” blog.foundationdb.com, September 6, 2013. ~ Martin Kleppmann, #NFDB
74:the population of the world grew at an average annual rate of barely 0.8 percent between 1700 and 2012. ~ Thomas Piketty, #NFDB
75:There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1...there is a a bigger infinite set of numbers between 1 and 2... ~ John Green, #NFDB
76:In order to be a top-tier candidate, I need 7.5 million dollars, and I currently have 0.0 million dollars. ~ Stephen Colbert, #NFDB
77:( 100 / 0 ) " You have to be willing to give 100 percent with zero expectation of receiving anything in return ~ Darren Hardy, #NFDB
78:I've never heard of a size 0 or a negative human. That's hard. A lot of girls aren't naturally built that way. ~ Serinda Swan, #NFDB
79:Well, I don't like to make outlandish statements. Not all the time. But Wimbledon would have beaten them 10-0. ~ Eamon Dunphy, #NFDB
80:100/0 -
You have to be willing to give 100 percent with
zero expectation of receiving anything in return ~ Darren Hardy,#NFDB
81:Female astronaut at 40 Double PhD at 30 Gold medallist at 20 Child prodigy at 10 Killed at 0 #gold by shikhar nilabh ~ Various, #NFDB
82:Increment(y) if y = 0 then return(1) else if (y mod 2) = 1 then return(2 · Increment( y/2
)) else return(y + 1) ~ Anonymous,#NFDB
83:In my heart of hearts, I thought, if we get a 1-0 win and the team doesn't perform well, that would feel good. ~ Landon Donovan, #NFDB
84:In the United States, 95 per cent of income gains since the recession began have gone to the top 0.01 per cent. ~ Russell Brand, #NFDB
85:As Damon Edwards observed, “Without these self-service Operations platforms, the cloud is just Expensive Hosting 2.0. ~ Gene Kim, #NFDB
86:Across the thirty-five studies, the correlation between extraversion and sales performance was a minuscule 0.07.) ~ Daniel H Pink, #NFDB
87:The last time Pena faced the Padres, the Dodgers scratched for a run to tie the game and then went on to win 4-0. ~ Jerry Coleman, #NFDB
88:We had already beaten them 4-0 and 7-0 earlier this season, so we knew we were in for a really tough game today. ~ Barry Ferguson, #NFDB
89:c:\work\myproject> lein test Testing myproject.test.core Ran 1 tests containing 2 assertions. 0 failures, 0 errors. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
90:When lack of structure fails, it fails all at once. What works totally fine from 0-20 employees, is disastrous at 30. ~ Sam Altman, #NFDB
91:Leadership is no longer about position - but passion. It's no longer about image but impact. This is Leadership 2.0. ~ Robin Sharma, #NFDB
92:the history of the income tax, which began as a tax only on the 0.1 percent and was never designed to target the poor. ~ Jane Mayer, #NFDB
93:Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration. ~ Stan Kelly Bootle, #NFDB
94:the top 0.01 percent)—saw their share of national income double from 3 percent to 6 percent between 1995 and 2007. ~ Erik Brynjolfsson, #NFDB
95:As members of the same human species, you and I share all but 0.01% (1/100th of 1%) of identical genetic sequences. ~ Jill Bolte Taylor, #NFDB
96:Get a version 1.0 out there as soon as you can. Until you have some users to measure, you're optimizing based on guesses. ~ Paul Graham, #NFDB
97:The late 90s were crazy science-fictional if you were inside the superheated steam bubble of the dot-com 1.0 industry. ~ Charles Stross, #NFDB
98:the average demographic growth rate between 0 and 1700 was less than 0.2 percent and almost certainly less than 0.1 percent. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
99:In AI 5.0, the interaction between human and machine will be like evolutionary interactions between flowering plants and bees. ~ Amit Ray, #NFDB
100:MAXIMUM RIDE #2: SCHOOL’S OUT FOREVER Hardcover: 978-0-316-15559-5 Mass Market: 978-0-446-61889-2 Paperback: 978-0-316-06796-6 ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
101:Never trust a man who thinks his religion gives him all the answers. ~ Charles Stross, Halting State ISBN 978-0-441-01607-5 (2007), p. 275, #NFDB
102:All this requires life to undergo a final upgrade, to Life 3.0, which can design not only its software but also its hardware. ~ Max Tegmark, #NFDB
103:SOLAR ECLIPSE in AQUARIUS on February 15th ~ Great American Eclipse 2.0?? ~ #EvolvingDoor #Astrology Newsletter - mailchi.mp/7aebc2149dec/s…, #NFDB
104:Ten Keys To Success: Number 0; there is no easy or guaranteed recipe. Number 11: some else's path to it will not be yours. ~ Rasheed Ogunlaru, #NFDB
105:Ten Keys To Success: Number 0; there is no guaranteed or easy recipe. Number 11: some else's path to it will not be yours. ~ Rasheed Ogunlaru, #NFDB
106:How did I get here? I was just minding my own business and someone lobbed a grenade into my life 0 in the form of Jack Eversea. ~ Natasha Boyd, #NFDB
107:Taylor et al. (2011) found the 3D-WS correlated with both positive self- deception (r = 0.20) and impression management (r = 0.24). ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
108:the top 0.01 percent now get a bigger share of the top 1 percent of income than the top 1 percent get of the whole economy. ~ Erik Brynjolfsson, #NFDB
109:First is Epsilon, which equals 0.007, which is the relative amount of hydrogen that converts to helium via fusion in the big bang. ~ Michio Kaku, #NFDB
110:generations of love and hope, strife and passion. 978-0-7515-4070-3 * published outside the UK under the title PASSION’s PROMISE ~ Danielle Steel, #NFDB
111:I think we all have a slightly gay gene inside us, don't we? It might be 0.00001 per cent as mine is, or one per cent as yours is. ~ Steve Coogan, #NFDB
112:When people talk about Web 2.0, they mean that when the Internet, the World Wide Web, first became popular, it was one way only. ~ Edward Snowden, #NFDB
113:Jonathan Ellis: “Facebook’s Cassandra Paper, Annotated and Compared to Apache Cassandra 2.0,” datastax.com, September 12, 2013. ~ Martin Kleppmann, #NFDB
114:For me, if I get up and don't meditate and don't eat something before having caffeine, I go from 0 to 10 on the stress scale. ~ Gabrielle Bernstein, #NFDB
115:In their last four Blackburn have lost 3-0, 3-1, 5-3 and 3-2. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to work out that's 12 goals conceded ~ Alan Brazil, #NFDB
116:Messi is an irreplaceable player, today if he was here we would have won 5-0 but he was not and we had to play another in his place. ~ Pep Guardiola, #NFDB
117:If you have any trouble sounding condescending, find a Unix user to show you how it’s done. Dilbert newsletter 3.0, 1994 —Scott Adams ~ Eric S Raymond, #NFDB
118:If we could convert 0.03 percent of the sunlight that falls on the earth into energy, we could meet all of our projected needs for 2030. ~ Ray Kurzweil, #NFDB
119:Many stories are invented about me - too many stories; almost everyone uses me, and I'd say about 0.01 percent of the gossip is true. ~ Mario Balotelli, #NFDB
120:6-0-0. It felt different. I rarely woke at such a rounded time. I was a man of jagged risings: 8:43, 11:51, 9:26. My life was alarmless. ~ Gillian Flynn, #NFDB
121:Number of square miles of seabed in international waters that were under contract for mining operations in 2000 : 0 That are today : 463,323 ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
122:Seahawks beat Cardinals, 58-0. If Patriots beat Texans, 58-0, it will be first time in NFL history there were two 58-0 games in same week. ~ Norman Chad, #NFDB
123:0 summer friendship, whose flat-tering leaves shadowed us in our prosperity, With the least gust, drop off in the autumn of adversity. ~ Philip Massinger, #NFDB
124:Los capitalistas de riesgo deben encontrar el puñado de compañías que pasen con éxito de 0 a 1 y luego respaldarlas con todos sus recursos. ~ Peter Thiel, #NFDB
125:opportunity for new entrants is to fully embrace the potential of Web 2.0. Companies that succeed will create applications that learn from ~ Tim O Reilly, #NFDB
126:You know, I'm not real tall. I'm 6'0, 6'½, but I think people think I'm shorter than I am because I'm not the most muscular cat in the world. ~ Mark McGrath, #NFDB
127:Did we put our kids in 0.5-mile-per-gallon (mpg) tanks and 17 feet per gallon aircraft carriers because we failed to put them in 32-mpg cars? ~ Hunter Lovins, #NFDB
128:0 the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!" (Rom. 11:33). ~ Eugene H Peterson, #NFDB
129:All you have to remember is that every ordinary fraction can be converted into an infinite periodic decimal fraction. See? So is 0.428571. ~ Madeleine L Engle, #NFDB
130:less than 1% of new businesses started each year in the U.S. receive venture funding, and total VC investment accounts for less than 0.2% of GDP. ~ Peter Thiel, #NFDB
131:Most little girls in England grow up wanting to marry
a prince. Bex grew up wanting to kick James Bond's butt and assume his double-0 ranking. ~ Ally Carter,#NFDB
132:Waking up in full daylight, he dials 0 and asks if this is Saturday. A reproachful second goes by before the operator says, “This is Friday, sir. ~ David Gates, #NFDB
133:If Wasp were writing field notes on herself, they’d read: plans attempted: 1000000 plans succeeded: 0 never learns. better off destroyed. ~ Nicole Kornher Stace, #NFDB
134:He was such a great lover. He was so male, so thoroughly a man that she felt all the rewards of being his woman." (showing 0-0 of 0) (0.04 seconds) ~ Sienna Mynx, #NFDB
135:In our initial brainstorming, we formulated our sense of Web 2.0 by example: Web 1.0 Web 2.0 DoubleClick --> Google AdSense Ofoto --> Flickr ~ Tim O Reilly, #NFDB
136:#$%' H5N1 MW7B46/D!"#$%': 1997 +0 ^(sWU4QVADCD"#$%': 2003 +Df0(3 45Dnn0 ¡0¢Kf.£DP0¤Dvwx?12(3s tU4QVij9klmnD!/KXg.!"#$%'0vw4567M6 ¥¦§:LfUtuV AD8"%9:AWU ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
137:Cutting PBS support (0.012% of budget) to help balance the Federal budget is like deleting text files to make room on your 500Gig hard drive ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson, #NFDB
138:You don't want to be down 2-0 in a series. It's always important to try and get one on the opponent's home court. It makes your job at home easier. ~ Doug Collins, #NFDB
139:Almost all thinking people agree that you should not have probability 1 (or 0) for any event, other than one demonstrable by logic, like 2 x 2 = 4. ~ Dennis Lindley, #NFDB
140:If 100 percent success, 0 casualties are your goal, you’re going to conduct very few operations. You will never take any risks, realistic or otherwise. ~ Chris Kyle, #NFDB
141:I still believe that the mission of Business 2.0 is very strong, very fundamental, and we're really at the beginning of where they're going to take us. ~ James Daly, #NFDB
142:~ Packer, James I. (1973). "1 - The study of God" (in en). Knowing God (first ed.). Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press. pp. 21, 29. ISBN 978-0-8308-1651-4., #NFDB
143:a person with an ACE Score of 4 or more is, statistically, 1,220 percent more likely to attempt suicide than someone with an ACE Score of 0. ~ Donna Jackson Nakazawa, #NFDB
144:Childbirth is nothing. Death is mighty. The 0 to our 1. There is nothing in the world like it. But there is nothing in it that is not like the world. ~ Marion Coutts, #NFDB
145:inflammation in the body) is a very healthy 0.01, and all of my other indexes (for heart disease, diabetes, and other conditions) are at ideal levels. ~ Ray Kurzweil, #NFDB
146:The part of uranium that's fissile - when you hit it with a neutron, it splits in two - is about 0.7%. The reactors we have today are burning that 0.7%. ~ Bill Gates, #NFDB
147:Researchers here in New York created a robot that actually passed a self-awareness test. So if you're keeping score, that's robots: 1, Donald Trump, 0. ~ Jimmy Fallon, #NFDB
148:En cambio, poseer únicamente el 0,01 por ciento de Google es increíblemente valioso (más de 35 millones de dólares en el momento de escribir este libro). ~ Peter Thiel, #NFDB
149:The pain is not limited to one generation. It’s widely felt. In the United States, hourly wages have grown by a paltry 0.2 percent since 1979. Things ~ Bhaskar Sunkara, #NFDB
150:Time. The great human enemy. Maybe the greatest. It’s beaten everyone so far. The scoreboard doesn’t lie: Time: an immense, incalculable number Us: 0 ~ David Gatewood, #NFDB
151:We all pulled together at the right time, unfortunately, we were down 3-0 to the Yankees when we decided to do it, but we did it. And we shocked the world. ~ Johnny Damon, #NFDB
152:Teach me, 0 God, not to torture myself, not to make a martyr out of myself through stifling reflection, but rather teach me to breathe deeply in faith. ~ Soren Kierkegaard, #NFDB
153:ads and popups in favor of minimally intrusive, context-sensitive, consumer-friendly text advertising. The Web 2.0 lesson: leverage customer-self service and ~ Tim O Reilly, #NFDB
154:Because the dietary supplement industry is essentially unregulated, only 170 (0.3 percent) of the 54,000 products on the market have documented safety tests. ~ Paul A Offit, #NFDB
155:If our 14 billion year cosmic history were scaled to 1 year, then 100,000 years of human history would be 4 minutes, and a 100 year life would be 0.2 seconds. ~ Max Tegmark, #NFDB
156:Looking around at the diversity within our human race, it is obvious that 0.01% accounts for a significant difference in how we look, think, and behave. ~ Jill Bolte Taylor, #NFDB
157:We built our welfare society on the assumption that we would have 3 percent economic growth permanently.” This year the economy is expected to grow 0.9 percent. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
158:1861 年改革后,僧侣同贵族一样失去了等级特征,但 是贵族由于具有庄园经济的独立性,不但没有受到冲击,反而因 为“割地”而获利。而神职人员的特权则大大削弱,本来就狭窄 的向上的通道也被阻塞,所以“失落感”格外突出。在民粹主义 者中有 22%是僧侣的后代,而且他们还都是极有代表性的人物, 可僧侣仅占当时人口的 0·9%。 ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
159:All that can really be said is that at some indeterminate point in the very distant past, for reasons unknown, there came the moment known to science as t = 0. ~ Bill Bryson, #NFDB
160:Doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But every time we create something new, we go from 0 to 1. ~ Peter Thiel, #NFDB
161:HTML 4.01 has three document types: Strict, Transitional, and Frameset. Both HTML5 and XHTML 1.1 have one document type, but XHTML 1.0, like HTML 4.01, has three ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
162:The only number that would ever be enough is 0. Zero pounds, zero life, size zero, double-zero, zero point. Zero in tennis is love. I finally get it. ~ Laurie Halse Anderson, #NFDB
163:You could build the best version of an app that lets people order toilet paper from their iPhone. But iteration without a bold plan won’t take you from 0 to 1. ~ Peter Thiel, #NFDB
164:by Rebecca 0 minutes ago
" Tink's titties!" Jenks from any of Kim Harrison's books on The Hollows. (aka Cincinnati,OH)
reply | edit | delete | flag * ~ Kim Harrison,#NFDB
165:I tried marriage. I'm 0 for 3 with the marriage thing. So, being a ballplayer - I believe in numbers. I'm not going 0 for 4. I'm not wearing a golden sombrero. ~ Charlie Sheen, #NFDB
166:Tautology and contradiction are, however, not senseless; they are part of the symbolism, in the same way that “0” is part of the symbolism of Arithmetic. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein, #NFDB
167:I remember my second game for England - we lost 2-0 to Norway, I was subbed and didn't do myself justice and I thought that was the end of my England career. ~ Teddy Sheringham, #NFDB
168:the controversy about Life 3.0 centers around not one but two separate questions: when and what? When (if ever) will it happen, and what will it mean for humanity? ~ Max Tegmark, #NFDB
169:We will be confident when we stand before the Lord, even if our hearts condemn us. For God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything. —1 JOHN 3:19-20 0 NLT ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
170:Web 2.0 ideas have a chirpy, cheerful rhetoric to them, but I think they consistently express a profound pessimism about humans, human nature and the human future. ~ Jaron Lanier, #NFDB
171:The Cards had one pitcher who won fourteen straight games in a period of twenty-four days. Then when he lost his fifteenth game 1-0, his manager fined him fifty bucks. ~ Dizzy Dean, #NFDB
172:The annual budget of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) is around $30 billion, for example, of which less than 0.2% goes towards testing mind–body therapies. ~ Jo Marchant, #NFDB
173:By shooting the darkest areas three zones lighter, you turned a black, lifeless max black zone 0 into a zone 3.
I think, in life, most of us did this all the time. ~ A S King,#NFDB
174:example of such an application, although it hasn’t yet gained wide traction. Nor will the Web 2.0 revolution be limited to PC applications. Salesforce.com demonstrates ~ Tim O Reilly, #NFDB
175:Motivation 2.0 is similar. At its heart are two elegant and simple ideas: Rewarding an activity will get you more of it. Punishing an activity will get you less of it. ~ Daniel H Pink, #NFDB
176:The annual budget of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) is around $30 billion, for example, of which less than 0.2% goes towards testing mind–body therapies.23 ~ Jo Marchant, #NFDB
177:L p sin x dx = -cos x 0 d p = -[cos p - cos 0] = -[-1 - 1] = 2 0 L2p sin x dx = -cos x cos 2p - cos p] = -[1 - s -1d] = p d 2p = -[p -2 The second integral gives a negative ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
178:Your ideal body weight as an ectomorph at 6' 0" will be 214.378 lbs. There. Happy? And if you lose or gain a pound, I will have you killed. It is important to be ideal. ~ Mark Rippetoe, #NFDB
179:If you hold there is a 100 percent probability that God exists, or a 0 percent probability, then under Bayes’s theorem, no amount of evidence could persuade you otherwise. ~ Nate Silver, #NFDB
180:Look at the figure for salt per 100g • More than 1.5g salt is high (0.6g sodium) • 0.3g -1.5g salt is medium (0.1-0.6g sodium) • Less than 0.3g salt is low (0.1g sodium) (NHS) ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
181:Ten thousand years ago, humans plus their pets and livestock accounted for about 0.1% of the terrestrial vertebrate biomass inhabiting the earth; we now account for 98%. ~ Daniel J Levitin, #NFDB
182:what we believe to be the core competencies of Web 2.0 companies: Services, not packaged software, with cost-effective scalability Control over unique, hard-to-recreate data ~ Tim O Reilly, #NFDB
183:Watch out for that one, Grace 2.0 whispered. That smile will have you tucking your heart into your panties and handing the whole shebang over before he even buys you a drink. ~ Lauren Layne, #NFDB
184:When he decided that Woz would be “Employee #1,” Steve went to him and whined; it didn’t take long till Scotty relented and gave Steve a new, customized tag: “Employee #0. ~ Brent Schlender, #NFDB
185:When Sergei Brin and Larry Page founded Google in 1998, just 0.2 percent of the Chinese population was connected to the internet, compared with 30 percent in the United States. ~ Kai Fu Lee, #NFDB
186:+%06*&(3061 "-()"/*.(30610'4)*11*/(53"/410358-- $.,."..05)(6-'#7 53"/4"5-"/5*$53"/410354)*11*/( 5"54
&.*3"5&4/"5*0/"-4)*11*/(4&37*$&4 &/44
"#/03."-- ~ Anonymous,#NFDB
187:Imagine what our planet would look like with an increase in temperature of two degrees or four degrees, given that at 0.8 degrees we already have serious problems in the world. ~ Evo Morales, #NFDB
188:If you play it safe, middle of the road with all the right notes, you might win. If you are unique and have too much personality, you might easily score a '0' in competition. ~ Charlie Albright, #NFDB
189:I remember the $0.05 hamburger and a $0.40-per-hour minimum wage, so I've seen a tremendous amount of inflation in my lifetime. Did it ruin the investment climate? I think not. ~ Charlie Munger, #NFDB
190:The aim of compassionate superintelligence AI 5.0 is to build deep connections - the connections which can feel the pain of the prisoners and the joy in the dances of the butterflies. ~ Amit Ray, #NFDB
191:The percentage of people qualifying for federal disability benefits because they are unable to work rose from 0.7 percent of the size of the labor force in 1960 to 5.3% in 2010. ~ Charles Murray, #NFDB
192:10. Solving some polynomial equations 1. Factorise x 3 − x 2 − 65x − 63 given that (x + 7) is a factor.2. Show that x = −1 is a root of x 3 + 11x 2 + 31x + 21 = 0 and locate the other ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
193:Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform. ~ Tim O Reilly, #NFDB
194:Also, if one of the indexes is down for the day on volume larger than the prior day’s volume, it should decline more than 0.2% for this to be counted as a distribution day. After ~ William J O Neil, #NFDB
195:Committee, n.: A group of people that, when given the task of deciding whether to start array indices from either 0 or 1, compromises to declare that they are to start from 0.5. ~ Stan Kelly Bootle, #NFDB
196:I would love to do something like 'Tosh.0,' where I host Internet clips. I did host 'Talk Soup,' which is similar. I love doing that, making fun of video clips on the Internet. ~ Cassandra Peterson, #NFDB
197:Morgan Stanley’s fees will apply whether you sell your Amazon shares online or through a Morgan Stanley broker. • Under 500 shares: $14.95 per transaction • 500+ shares: $0.03 per share ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
198:The logic behind patriotism is a mystery. At least a man who believes that his own family or clan is superior to all others is familiar with more than 0.000003% of the people involved. ~ Criss Jami, #NFDB
199:Memories weigh something. They drag you down. ~ Elizabeth Bear, Covenant in Ed Finn & Kathryn Cramer (eds.) Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future (2014), ISBN 978-0-06-220469-1, p. 421, #NFDB
200:It's not possible today to pick up a phone running Android 1.0 and understand what using Android 1.0 was actually like—all that's left is a faint, fossilized impression of the experience. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
201:If you're really concerned about deficits, you cannot take seriously a budget that would give $30 billion a year worth of tax cuts to not just the top 1 percent but the top 0.1 percent. ~ Barack Obama, #NFDB
202:When you see yourself quoted in print and you're sorry you said it, it suddenly becomes a misquotation. ~ Laurence J. Peter , Peter's Quotations: Ideas for Our Time (1977), ISBN 0-688-03217-6, p. 418., #NFDB
203:Truth is beauti- ful, no matter what that truth is. Even if it’s scary or bad. It is -1— beauty simply because it’s true. And truth is bright. Truth 0— makes you more you. I want to be me.’ ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
204:Benefit fraud – costing an annual £1.2 billion, or 0.7 per cent of social security spending – is treated as a despicable crime, while tax avoidance – worth an estimated £25 billion a year – ~ Owen Jones, #NFDB
205:by Tim O'Brien Cover design by Elizabeth B. Parisi & Phil Falco e-ISBN: 978-0-545-22993-7 All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of ~ Suzanne Collins, #NFDB
206:I think baseball has such a way of humbling you. You can go 20-for-20, and before you know it, you're going to go through an 0-for-30. It has that way of knocking you back down to earth. ~ Chipper Jones, #NFDB
207:A lot of the records you buy, there's nothing you can hold in your hand, it's all 1′s and 0′s, this digital cloud floating in the ether, but with analog albums, you can hold it in your hand. ~ Dave Grohl, #NFDB
208:Obsolescence and death, the reign of the archaic, the abandoned, and the corny: Really, if you saw Windows 3.0 on the sidewalk outside the building, would you bend over and pick it up?!? ~ Bruce Sterling, #NFDB
209:Prime Minister Jan Dhan Yojana is a reflection of how rich India's poor are at heart. Without any obligation to put any money in the 0 balance accounts, they didn't open an empty account. ~ Narendra Modi, #NFDB
210:There's this large trend - I think the next trend in the Web, sort of Web 2.0 - which is to have users really express, offer, and market their own content, their own persona, their identity. ~ John Doerr, #NFDB
211:I'm the only Red in our family! You know my father, my brother, my brother-in-law, my 14-year-old niece and two of my uncles are all City season ticket holders. So I'm gonna say 5-0 to United! ~ Ian Brown, #NFDB
212:The first step was for field staff to get an absentee or early voting ballot to those them deemed pro-Trump because they scored a 90 or above on a call of 0 to 100 in the national database. ~ Bob Woodward, #NFDB
213:Absolutely nothing useful is realized when one person who holds that there is a 0 percent probability of something argues against another person who holds that the probability is 100 percent. ~ Nate Silver, #NFDB
214:for 99 percent of Americans, incomes increased by a mere 0.2 percent. Meanwhile, the incomes of the top 1 percent jumped by 11.6 percent. It was definitely a recovery—for the 1 percent. ~ Chrystia Freeland, #NFDB
215:If it does not upset, it is not philosophy. ~ Walter Kaufmann, The Faith of a Heretic (1963), cited from the trade paperback edition published by Princeton University Press ISBN 978-0-691-16548-6, (p. 405), #NFDB
216:Our task today is to find singular ways to create the new things that will make the future not just different, but better—to go from 0 to 1. The essential first step is to think for yourself. ~ Peter Thiel, #NFDB
217:the rate of population growth observed from 1700 to 2012—0.8 percent per year—were to continue for the next three centuries, the world’s population would be on the order of 70 billion in 2300. ~ Thomas Piketty, #NFDB
218:The Vanguard Total International Stock exchange-traded fund—to cite one low-cost example—owns more than 5,000 non-U.S. stocks, has a dividend yield of 3.2% and charges an annual fee of 0.14%. Another ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
219:Plus/minus
Positive/negative
1/0
I can/ I can't
I will/ I won't
You are/You aren't
I said/I thought
I said "I will"/I thought "I can't"
I thought "I can"/I said "You won't ~ David Levithan,#NFDB
220:As an assistant coach at Picayune High School, he helped a team that had gone 0–10 the year before…to go 0–10 again. “With all my expertise in coaching,” he wrote, “we came close to winning a game. ~ Jeff Pearlman, #NFDB
221:McNulty, J, Sgt: and if that works McNulty, J, Sgt: u must name ur first kid james in my honor Mason, E, LT 2nd: > > McNulty, J, Sgt: if it’s a daughter u name it jamette Mason, E, LT 2nd: 0 o ~ Amie Kaufman, #NFDB
222:I’d do it all again for another moment with him. I’d do it all again with him. I’d leap blindly into the air if only there were even a 0.01 percent chance that he’d still be there, waiting to catch me. ~ Katy Evans, #NFDB
223:Did you know that the chances of being in a plane crash are less than 0.00001 per cent? That means that you’re more likely to be killed by a donkey or to naturally conceive identical quadruplets.” Bunty ~ Holly Smale, #NFDB
224:In the latter case it is often government that organizes the conquest, and religion that justifies it. ~ Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997) "From Egalitarianism to Kleptocracy", p. 266 ISBN 978-0-393-31755-8, #NFDB
225:when it came time for that once-in-a-lifetime shot of the bride and groom sealing the deal with a lengthy smooch, the groomsmen all lifted scorecards rating the kiss. Everything from a 9.5 to a 10.0. ~ Janice Thompson, #NFDB
226:Angus Maddison has estimated from the very fragmentary evidence that exists, that, at the beginning of our Common Era (CE 0) the per capita income of the world was about $515 a year in today’s prices. ~ Partha Dasgupta, #NFDB
227:At one point, Chinese programmers were barred from updating a popular software system called Node.js because the version number, 0.6.4, corresponded with June 4, the date of the Tiananmen Square crackdown. ~ Evan Osnos, #NFDB
228:Jason rammed his pants down to his ankles. I couldn’t believe it. We were down 1-0 less than 10 seconds into the game. In the same time, my partner was down to his red long johns and his hockey socks. ~ Sigmund Brouwer, #NFDB
229:For the overall economy, the official GDP numbers miss the value of new goods and services added to the tune of about 0.4 percent of additional growth each year, according to economist Robert Gordon.* ~ Erik Brynjolfsson, #NFDB
230:Life is too short and hard and strange not to blame God for what He done made of the world. ~ Jay Lake, The Temptation of Eustace Prudence McAllen in Martin H. Greenberg (ed.) Westward Weird ISBN 978-0-7564-0718-6 p. 199, #NFDB
231:Optimal levels of homocysteine are between 7 and 10 micromoles per liter of blood; normal levels of methylmalonic acid are between 0.08 and 0.56 mmol/L (in my experience, this is a less sensitive measure). ~ Kelly Brogan, #NFDB
232:We have an enormous support within the Dutch public. One million people voted for my party.If we would've been extreme, we would've got 0.01 per cent of the vote. We got more than 10 per cent of the vote. ~ Geert Wilders, #NFDB
233:0:He whose self has become all existences, for he has the knowledge, how shall he be deluded, whence shall he have grief, he who sees everywhere oneness? Isha Upanishad.1 ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Divine Soul, #NFDB
234:The gap between the wealthy and everyone else is largest in the United States. In 2010, the richest 1 percent of the population had 34 percent of the accumulated wealth; the top 0.1 percent had some 15 percent. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
235:About 200,000 academic journals are published in English each year. The average number of readers per article is five. The average numbers of readers of any given published scientific paper is said to be 0.6. ~ John Lloyd, #NFDB
236:The war is underway. It's class warfare. It's Off With Their Heads 2.0. It's going to be a battle between the haves and the have-nots. Only a very few have everything, and way too many have much too little. ~ Gerald Celente, #NFDB
237:In July 1997, three months before the Kyoto Protocol was finalized, U.S. senators Robert Byrd and Charles Hagel introduced a resolution blocking its adoption.168 Byrd-Hagel passed the Senate by a vote of 97–0. ~ Naomi Oreskes, #NFDB
238:0:09
/
0:09
“If I have learned one thing in my life, it is this — just go with it. If you relax, it doesn’t hurt as much,” Madonna ( she said as childhood pictures of Rocco were shown in the background.) ~ Madonna,#NFDB
239:The introduction of the cipher 0 or the group concept was general nonsense too, and mathematics was more or less stagnating for thousands of years because nobody was around to take such childish steps. ~ Alexander Grothendieck, #NFDB
240:“There’s more to life than mathematics,” Joan said. “But not much more.” ~ Greg Egan, Glory (2007) in Gardner Dozois & Jonathan Strahan (eds.) The New Space Opera (mass market paperback edition, ISBN 978-0-06-135041-2), p. 126, #NFDB
241:My mom was there to answer the unanswerable, to make sense of the fault in our life - and we got through that somehow; we came out on the other side. Now I'm 0 for 2 and I don't get any more pitches to swing at. ~ Daisy Whitney, #NFDB
242:CO2 level up 0.5 percent,” it rasped, giving him a meaningful look. “You do know you could find yourself charged with being a dominant species while under the influence of impulse-driven consumerism, don’t you? ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
243:My grade point average went from a 2.2 to a 4.0 over the summer. I wanted to get straight A's. I decided to get straight A's. I didn't want people to think I was dumb. And when you get straight A's once, its easier. ~ Bill Gates, #NFDB
244:I’m going to swim 0.93 miles, ride a bike 24.8 miles, then run a final 6.2 miles. And what’s all that supposed to prove? How is this any different from pouring water in an old pan with a tiny hole in the bottom? ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
245:The low points are the central and developmental grooves; the high points are the cusp tips and triangular ridges. Correct depth (0.8 mm for the central groove and nonfunctional cusps, 1.3 mm for the functional cusps* ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
246:uZPQK)WUGÀ? RSDT"#$%'U:}0»ç7!"#$%'0245VWKL7 HIJKXd.H5N1 CDüÂDPQ0J3sW56UGV YZ[3\0»ç72]:? ij9klmn^:AWU^0^àZCD!"#$%& #'K12(345U 4QV4À4.-+:!"#$%'Kij9klmnD!/0(34QM6 ¥¹º:Zd.UQij9klmnDK H5N1 C8"%90vw4QM6¥¹ ºLfUtuVij9klmn ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
247:Gravitons are the avatars of general covariance.
Photons are the avatars of gauge symmetry 1.0.
Weakons are the avatars of gauge symmetry 2.0.
Color gluons are the avatars of gauge symmetry 3.0. ~ Frank Wilczek,#NFDB
248:Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned. ~ Anonymous; quoted in Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (2006) by Daniel C. Dennett, p. 17,ISBN 0-670-03472-X, #NFDB
249:(The genomes of two individual humans differ by an average of about 3 million positions, which is approximately 0.1 percent of the total. Most of these are single base changes or changes in tandem repeat lengths.) ~ George M Church, #NFDB
250:Well, the first thing to say is that we've worked hard to maintain compatibility, so that any program written with an earlier version of Mathematica can run without change in 3.0, and any notebook can be converted. ~ Stephen Wolfram, #NFDB
251:May His great Name be blessed forever and ever. ~ The Kaddish Prayer: A new translation with a commentary anthologized from Talmudic, Midrashic and Rabbinic sources. New York: Mesorah Publications, Ltd., 2001, ISBN 0-89906-160-5, p.7, #NFDB
252:The truth is, if you are a woman saving 10% of your income for retirement, and you put it in the bank account, your chances of retiring well - living on 90% of your pre-retirement income for your full life - is 0%. ~ Sallie Krawcheck, #NFDB
253:günümüzü simgeleyen ‘0’ noktasından gelecek yılların bulgularına doğru kafamızı çevirdiğimizde yaklaşık 50,000 yıl boyunca güneşlenme miktarında Milankovitch döngülerine bağlı hiçbir düşüşün meydana gelmeyeceğini görüyoruz. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
254:Driving with a mobile phone makes you hit the brakes 0.5 seconds slower. If you are travelling at 112km per hour, in 0.5seconds you travel 15.5 meters... a lot can happen over that distance. If you are distracted in your ~ Kevin Horsley, #NFDB
255:The probability of ten consecutive heads is 0.1 percent; thus, when you have millions of coin tossers, or investors, in the end there will be thousands of very successful practitioners of coin tossing, or stock picking. ~ Alan Greenspan, #NFDB
256:The sched setscheduler() system call changes both the scheduling policy and the priority of the process whose process ID is specified in pid. If pid is specified as 0, the attributes of the calling process are changed. ~ Michael Kerrisk, #NFDB
257:The sched_setscheduler() system call changes both the scheduling policy and the priority of the process whose process ID is specified in pid. If pid is specified as 0, the attributes of the calling process are changed. ~ Michael Kerrisk, #NFDB
258:People would publish their websites; other people would read them. But there was no real back and forth other than through e-mail. Web 2.0 was what they called the collaborative web - Facebook, Twitter, the social media. ~ Edward Snowden, #NFDB
259:traditional businesses are profit maximizers, which square perfectly with Motivation 2.0. These new entities are purpose maximizers—which are unsuited to this older operating system because they flout its very principles. ~ Daniel H Pink, #NFDB
260:You could have 100% of the equity if you fully fund your own venture, but if it fails you’ll have 100% of nothing. Owning just 0.01% of Google, by contrast, is incredibly valuable (more than $35 million as of this writing). ~ Peter Thiel, #NFDB
261:Of course, it’s easier to copy a model than to make something new. Doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But every time we create something new, we go from 0 to 1. ~ Peter Thiel, #NFDB
262:A change of more than 0.4 per cent in the constants governing the strength of the strong nuclear force or more than 4 per cent in the fine structure constant would destroy almost all carbon or almost all oxygen in every star. ~ John D Barrow, #NFDB
263:Because a quantum computer deals with 1’s and 0’s that are in a quantum superposition, they are called quantum bits, or qubits (pronounced “cubits”). The advantage of qubits becomes even clearer when we consider more particles. ~ Simon Singh, #NFDB
264:Much can be left unstated. But if nothing is discredited, it is not philosophy. ~ Walter Kaufmann, The Faith of a Heretic (1963), cited from the trade paperback edition published by Princeton University Press ISBN 978-0-691-16548-6, (p. 405), #NFDB
265:If you’re vegetarian, your best options are eggs, low-fat cottage cheese (Organic Valley is my favorite brand), low-fat European style (Greek) yogurt (0% Fage is my favorite), tempeh, tofu, quinoa, almonds, rice, and beans. ~ Michael Matthews, #NFDB
266:New Rule: Instead of killing 99.9 percent of germs, Lysol has to just go ahead and kill them all. Why spare the remaining 0.1 percent? So they can return to their villages and tell the other germs, "Dude, do not mess with Lysol"? ~ Bill Maher, #NFDB
267:I have successfully avoided enjoying opera all my life.
-quoted in Entertainment Weeky, http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20548... ~ Stephen Sondheim,#NFDB
268:It’s easier to copy a model than to make something new: doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. Every new creation goes from 0 to 1. This book is about how to get there. ~ Peter Thiel, #NFDB
269:Solar power is one of the most hopeful technologies but still produces about 0.01 percent of U.S. electricity. The U.S. allocates just $159 million for solar research per year - about what we spend in Iraq every nine hours. ~ Nicholas D Kristof, #NFDB
270:243.0 megacycles, known as Guard channel, which all airplanes with UHF kept tuned in for emergency use. The USAF called that frequency Navy Common. The Navy jocks said it was Air Force Common. The Marines could not have cared less. ~ Mark Berent, #NFDB
271:More often than not, a piece of mathematics worked out years before—and believed to be totally without practical value—finds a role in the “real” world. ~ Ivars Peterson (1998). The Mathematical Tourist. Barnes & Noble. p. 9. ISBN 0-7607-2361-3., #NFDB
272:Annual drug deaths: tobacco: 395,000, alcohol: 125,000, 'legal' drugs: 38,000, illegal drug overdoses: 5,200, marijuana: 0. Considering government subsidies of tobacco, just what is our government protecting us from in the drug war? ~ Ralph Nader, #NFDB
273:I bought Windows 2.0, Windows 3.0, Windows 3.1415926, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows RSVP, The Best of Windows, Windows Strikes Back, Windows Does Dallas, and Windows Let's All Buy Bill Gates a House the Size of Vermont. ~ Dave Barry, #NFDB
274:Organized religion flourishes. And so do thoughtlessness, dishonesty, and hypocrisy. ~ Walter Kaufmann, The Faith of a Heretic (1963), cited from the trade paperback edition published by Princeton University Press ISBN 978-0-691-16548-6, (p. 277), #NFDB
275:To get the full effect, you want at least a few ketones in your blood most of the time. You can get keto strips to measure your urine, and they should be at least a very light pink. The minimum blood level you want every day is 0.5. ~ Dave Asprey, #NFDB
276:DADOS FINANCEIROS Para análise da viabilidade econômico-financeira da empresa beneficiadora da casca de côco verde foi considerado o fluxo de caixa ao longo de 10 anos (ano 0 a 9), o detalhe do fluxo de caixa segue abaixo na tabela 01. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
277:I worked at this place called Water World; it was a waterslide park. My brother and my dad framed my first paycheck from this place - which was for $0.00 dollars - because I didn't even make enough to cover the cost of my uniform! ~ Summer Sanders, #NFDB
278:Charles had an inbreeding coefficient of 0.254, making him slightly more inbred than a child of two siblings (0.250). He suffered from extensive physical and emotional disabilities, and was a strange (and largely ineffective) king. ~ Randall Munroe, #NFDB
279:Compassionate Artificial Superintelligence or "AI 5.0", empowers humanity and machine with super-intelligence, super-creativity and super-compassion, which will help humanity and machine to reach new levels of evolution of consciousness. ~ Amit Ray, #NFDB
280:I mean the word proof not in the sense of the lawyers, who set two half proofs equal to a whole one, but in the sense of a mathematician, where half proof = 0, and it is demanded for proof that every doubt becomes impossible. ~ Carl Friedrich Gauss, #NFDB
281:According to Pfeffer and Fong’s study, it doesn’t matter if you graduate at the top of your class with a perfect 4.0 or at the bottom with a barely passing grade—getting an MBA has zero correlation with long-term career success. None. ~ Josh Kaufman, #NFDB
282:All this requires life to undergo a final upgrade, to Life 3.0, which can design not only its software but also its hardware. In other words, Life 3.0 is the master of its own destiny, finally fully free from its evolutionary shackles. ~ Max Tegmark, #NFDB
283:Since consumer tech is a $964 billion market globally, Google owns less than 0.24% of it—a far cry from relevance, let alone monopoly. Framing itself as just another tech company allows Google to escape all sorts of unwanted attention. ~ Peter Thiel, #NFDB
284:Lobbyists know that a 0 percent tax rate on capital income is not, in fact, the lowest possible rate. There can be negative tax rates. There can be subsidies. There can be allowances for depreciation. Lobbyists are adaptive creatures. ~ Joel Achenbach, #NFDB
285:There is a famous formula, perhaps the most compact and famous of all formulas - developed by Euler from a discovery of de Moivre: e^(i pi) + 1 = 0... It appeals equally to the mystic, the scientist, the philosopher, the mathematician. ~ Edward Kasner, #NFDB
286:He’d always felt he had a right to exist as a wizard in the same way that you couldn’t do proper maths without the number 0, which wasn’t a number at all but, if it went away, would leave a lot of larger numbers looking bloody stupid. ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
287:If every country committed to spending 0.05 per cent of GDP on researching non-carbon-emitting energy technologies, that would cost $25 billion a year, and it would do a lot more than massive carbon cuts to fight warming and save lives. ~ Bjorn Lomborg, #NFDB
288:Hoy en día los soldados se camuflan, se disfrazan, se esconden. Sin embargo, los guerreros antiguos iban con sus ropas mas coloridas y mas vistosas a los campos de batalla. 0 Querían que el enemigo los viese. Estaban orgullosos de la lucha 0 ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
289:In the 200,000 years of the species Homo sapiens, patriarchy accounts for less than 5% of our evolutionary history. If we consider the 2.5 million years of the Homo genus, our direct ancestors, patriarchy is less than 0.5% of our history. ~ Robert Jensen, #NFDB
290:I grew up below the poverty line; I didn't have as much as other people did. I think it made me stronger as a person, it built my character. Now I have a 4.0 grade point average and I want to go to college, and just become a better person. ~ Justin Bieber, #NFDB
291:What is to be remembered, I suppose I remember; everything else dissolves and vanishes: breath on an icy mirror. ~ Daniel Quinn, The Frog King, or Iron Henry, in Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling (eds.) Black Thorn, White Rose (1994), ISBN 0-380-77129-2, p. 97, #NFDB
292:El funcionario recordó que el recorte de 124,300 millones de pesos para el 2015 —que se anunció en enero— representa 0.7% del Producto Interno Bruto (PIB), e indicó que el ajuste previsto para el siguiente año, también, representará 0.7% del PIB. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
293:In 2005, nonprofits employed 12.9 million people, approximately 9.7% of the U.S. economy, and they employed more people than the construction (7.3 million), finance and insurance (5.8 million), and real estate (2.0 million) sectors. ~ Darian Rodriguez Heyman, #NFDB
294:The five phases of Artificial Intelligence (AI 5.0) are Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI), Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), Artificial Consciousness, Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) and Compassionate Artificial Superintelligence (CAS). ~ Amit Ray, #NFDB
295:All the known particles in the universe can be divided into two groups: particles of spin ½, which make up the matter in the universe, and particles of spin 0, 1, and 2, which, as we shall see, give rise to forces between the matter particles. ~ Stephen Hawking, #NFDB
296:My main concern is when it's 2-0, I've got to keep it at 2-0. It gives us a little more of a chance. To give up four more runs, that isn't going to get it done. I don't care who you're facing or who you're playing, it's not going to get it done. ~ Roger Clemens, #NFDB
297:Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned. ~ Anonymous; quoted in Dennett, Daniel C. (2006). Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (1st ed.). Viking Penguin. pp. p. 17. ISBN 0-670-03472-X.., #NFDB
298:Memory is kinder than reality, it always has been. We make our memories; we knit them together out of disparate events; we define ourselves by what we make. ~ Michelle West, Dime Store Rings, in Denise Little (ed.) The Magic Shop (2004), ISBN 0-7564-0173-9, p. 119, #NFDB
299:£1 invested in 2007 in a savings account giving 4% compound interest would have risen in value to £1× (1 + 0.04)1000= 108 million billion pounds by the year 3007. However, this will probably still be what you would have to pay for your Sunday newspaper. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
300:The small alien walked past the car. “CO2 level up 0.5 percent,” it rasped, giving him a meaningful look. “You do know you could find yourself charged with being a dominant species while under the influence of impulse-driven consumerism, don’t you? ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
301:I'll miss all my teammates. I'll miss Elvis (Andrus) and (Adrian) Beltre, Mitch (Moreland), Matt Harrison and [manager Ron] Washington. To be honest with you, I hope they go 0-162. I got friends, and I love my friends, but I hope they lose their ass. ~ Ian Kinsler, #NFDB
302:There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1. There's .1 and .12 and .112 and infinite collection of others. Of course, there is a bigger infinite set of numbers between 0 and 2, or between 0 and a million. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities. ~ John Green, #NFDB
303:The Senate voted 97-0 for an anti-spam bill to stop those annoying things you get on your computer. The senators made it very clear that when you start misleading the American people and start taking their money over false promises, that's our turf, buddy! ~ Jay Leno, #NFDB
304:The small alien walked past the car. ‘CO2 level up 0.5 per cent,’ it rasped, giving him a meaningful look. ‘You do know you could find yourself charged with being a dominant species while under the influence of impulse-driven consumerism, don’t you? ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
305:determined that the information content of typical written English was 1.0 to 1.2 bits per letter. This means that a good compression algorithm should be able to compress ASCII English text—which is 8 bits per letter—to about ⅛th of its original size. ~ Randall Munroe, #NFDB
306:In 2016 a total of 40 million commercial passenger flights landed safely at their destinations. Only ten ended in fatal accidents. Of course, those were the ones the journalists wrote about: 0.000025 percent of the total. Safe flights are not newsworthy ~ Hans Rosling, #NFDB
307:My best has to be for Barcelona against Villarreal in 2006 - that is the one I am asked most about, and it is the one I am most proud of. Xavi chipped the ball to me, I chested it down, twisted and hit an overhead kick. It was the final goal in a 4-0 win. ~ Ronaldinho, #NFDB
308:There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1. There's .1 and .12 and .112 and an infinite collection of others. Of course, there is a bigger infinite set of numbers between 0 and 2, or between 0 and a million. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities. ~ John Green, #NFDB
309:...Think of it as 'Right Livelihood 2.0'... In addition to not causing harm to yourself or another, this is livelihood that is an expression of your Core Intention, work that you can fall in love with and that no longer feels like “work”: work that matters. ~ Maia Duerr, #NFDB
310:If I am 100% prepared for the fight, my opponent has no chance to win the fight. I am saying what I mean: He has a 0% chance to win the fight. There is going to be no luck involved; there is going to be nothing else to stop me from winning the fight. ~ Wladimir Klitschko, #NFDB
311:I knew a dude whose entire check was going to his car. He didn't care. This is back when the Mustang 5.0 came out in, like, '82. Between paying the note and insurance, I think he had like $40 left. A lot of people knew people because of their car, and not them. ~ Ice Cube, #NFDB
312:The small alien walked past the car. ‘CO2 level up 0.5 per cent,’ it rasped, giving him a meaningful look. ‘You do know you could find yourself charged with being a dominant species while under the influence of impulse-driven consumerism, don’t you?’ The ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
313:Why do you have to develop? If economic growth rises from 5% to 10%, is happiness going to double? What's wrong with a growth rate of 0%? Isn't this a rather stable kind of economics? Could there be anything better than living simply and taking it easy? ~ Masanobu Fukuoka, #NFDB
314:The Auditors had tried to understand religion, because so much that made no sense whatsoever was done in its name. But it could also excuse practically any kind of eccentricity. Genocide, for example. ~ Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time (2001), ISBN 0-06-103132-1, pp. 221-222, #NFDB
315:It was my proudest moment as a manager when England drew 0-0 with Italy in Rome to qualify for the World Cup finals. Fifteen years later, the stakes are equally high for both countries as they go head-to-head for a semi-final place at the European Championship. ~ Glenn Hoddle, #NFDB
316:If you look at the attached plot you will see that the land also shows the 1940s blip (as I'm sure you know). So, if we could reduce the ocean blip by, say, 0.15 degC, then this would be significant for the global mean—but we'd still have to explain the land blip. ~ Tom Wigley, #NFDB
317:A minuscule 4 percent of funds produce market-beating after-tax results with a scant 0.6 percent (annual) margin of gain. The 96 percent of funds that fail to meet or beat the Vanguard 500 Index Fund lose by a wealth-destroying margin of 4.8 percent per annum. ~ David F Swensen, #NFDB
318:Books, I was starting to discover, could be great points of reference, even if they weren’t true. Some of them had a way of telling things how they were, whether they were completely true or not. ~ Alice Ozma, The Reading Promise ISBN 978-0-441-01179-7 (2011), Chapter 5 (p. 42), #NFDB
319:Corvina must have been so different then ... really literally a different person. At what point do you make that call? At what point should you just give someone a new name? Sorry, no, you don't get to be Corvina anymore. Now you're Corvina 2.0 - a dubious upgrade. ~ Robin Sloan, #NFDB
320:Shaunak gradually let down his guard and allowed that the Theranos 1.0, as Elizabeth had christened the blood-testing system, didn’t always work. It was kind of a crapshoot, actually, he said. Sometimes you could coax a result from it and sometimes you couldn’t. ~ John Carreyrou, #NFDB
321:Your plugin's extension to contribute a menu item to the org.eclipse.ui.actionSet extension point would look like: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> ~ Various, #NFDB
322:Convert any common fraction to a decimal fraction by dividing the lower number (denominator) into the upper number (numerator). For example, ¾ = 3 + 4 = 0.75. The result is also known as a proportion. Multiply it by 100 to convert it into a percentage. Recognition ~ The Economist, #NFDB
323:The new Web is a very different thing. It's a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it's really a revolution. ~ Lev Grossman, #NFDB
324:If the fine structure constant, that governs the strength of electromagnetic forces, were changed by more than 4 per cent or the strong force by more than 0.4 of one per cent then the production of carbon or oxygen would be reduced by factors of between 30 and 1000. ~ John D Barrow, #NFDB
325:Doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But every time we create something new, we go from 0 to 1. The act of creation is singular, as is the moment of creation, and the result is something fresh and strange. ~ Peter Thiel, #NFDB
326:In any event, any person from 2.0 down on the Tone Scale should not have, in any thinking society, any civil rights of any kind, because by abusing those rights he brings into being arduous and strenuous laws which are oppressive to those who need no such restraints. ~ L Ron Hubbard, #NFDB
327:Deerfield, Massachusetts
February 29, 1704
Temperature 0 degrees
They crossed field after field, the Indians constantly demanding more speed. Mercy did not know why the Indians were in such a hurry. They had killed anybody who could chase them. ~ Caroline B Cooney,#NFDB
328:I'm 0 for 3 with marriage - the scoreboard doesn't lie, never has. So what we all have is a marriage of the heart. To sully or contaminate or radically disrespect this union with a shameful contract is something that I will leave to the amateurs and the Bible grippers. ~ Charlie Sheen, #NFDB
329:düzeyine sahip vergi müfettişlerinin, lisansüstü eğitim düzeyine sahip vergi müfettişlerine göre daha olumsuz bir bakış açısına sahip oldukları görülmektedir.Ancak, anlamlılık düzeyine bakıldığında, tüm etik ilkeler açısından anlamlılık düzeyinin 0,05’in çok üzerinde olduğu ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
330:It is simply not worth paying anybody more than 1 percent to manage your money. Above $1 million, you should be paying no more than 0.75 percent, and above $5 million, no more than 0.5 percent. . . . Your adviser should use index/passive stock funds wherever possible. If ~ John C Bogle, #NFDB
331:There are no gods! Just voices in your head. They tell you to do what you already want to do. ~ John Kessel, Events Preceding the Helvetican Renaissance (2009) in Gardner Dozois & Jonathan Strahan (eds.) The New Space Opera 2 (mass market paperback edition, ISBN 978-0-06-156236-5), p. 86, #NFDB
332:The Tesla Model S is a remarkably luxurious car, though. It’s pretty stiffly sprung, like a sports car, and it has a selectable operating mode that is literally called “Ludicrous.” The car outperforms any comparable internal-combustion vehicle, doing 0–60 in about 3.2 seconds. ~ Bill Nye, #NFDB
333:if, for each t, we write u(t) for the function from to that takes x to u(x, t), then it describes how the function u(t) “evolves” over time. The Cauchy problem for an evolution equation is the problem of determining this evolution from knowledge of its initial value u(0). ~ Timothy Gowers, #NFDB
334:A good day's filming at last... John Horton's rabbit effects are superb. A really vicious white rabbit, which bites Sir Bor's head off. Much of the ground lost over the week is made up. We listen to the Cup Final in between fighting the rabbit -- Liverpool beat Newcastle 3-0. ~ Michael Palin, #NFDB
335:At Starbucks 0 as in any business, in any life - there are so many hectic moments during the day when we are simply trying to do the job, trying to put out the fires, trying to solve any number of small problems, that we often lose sight of what it is we're really here to do. ~ Howard Schultz, #NFDB
336:study of a religious forty-day fast found that baseline growth hormone levels increased from 0.73 ng/mL to peak at 9.86 ng/mL. That is a 1250 percent increase in growth hormone, all done without drugs. And a 1992 study showed a fivefold increase in growth hormone in response to a ~ Jason Fung, #NFDB
337:All the elements other than hydrogen and helium make up just 0.04 percent of the universe. Seen from this perspective, the periodic system appears to be rather insignificant. But the fact remains that we live on the earth… where the relative abundance of elements is quite different. ~ Sam Kean, #NFDB
338:The most obvious failure of organized religions is surely that almost all of them have made a mockery of what their founders taught. ~ Walter Kaufmann, The Faith of a Heretic (1963), cited from the trade paperback edition published by Princeton University Press ISBN 978-0-691-16548-6, (p. 267), #NFDB
339:Nowadays he is best remembered for the Fibonacci sequence of numbers (0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 . . .), in which each successive number is the sum of the previous two, and the ratio between a number and its immediate antecedent tends towards a ‘golden mean’ (around 1.618). It ~ Niall Ferguson, #NFDB
340:Driving with a mobile phone makes you hit the brakes 0.5 seconds slower. If you are travelling at 112km per hour, in 0.5seconds you travel 15.5 meters... a lot can happen over that distance. If you are distracted in your car, you have a 9 times higher chance of having an accident. ~ Kevin Horsley, #NFDB
341:Web Analytics 2.0 is: the analysis of qualitative and quantitative data from your website and the competition, to drive a continual improvement of the online experience that your customers, and potential customers have, which translates into your desired outcomes (online and offline). ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
342:I`m going to say the New England Patriots fans [biggest winner of the year 2015]. I mean - bring it on. Bring it on. You know why? You know why? Because we won the Super Bowl, because we got Brady reinstated because we started 10 and 0. Bring on the heat because you can`t beat us. ~ Steve Kornacki, #NFDB
343:The most popular intermediate-term bond fund, among those advisers monitored by the Hulbert Financial Digest who have beaten the S&P 500 over the past 15 years, is the Vanguard Intermediate-Term Investment-Grade Fund, which charges annual fees of 0.20%, or $20 per $10,000 invested. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
344:Therefore Godel's theorem had an electrifying effect upon logicians, mathematicians, and philosophers interested in the foundations of mathematics, for it showed that no fixed system, no matter how complicated could represent the complexity of the whole numbers: 0,1,2,3,..... ~ Douglas R Hofstadter, #NFDB
345:Richard Bach, the author of Illusions and Jonathan Livingston Seagull, who said, “You are never given a wish without the power to make it come true.” The positive energy formula was inspired by the formula E + R = 0, which Jack Canfield, author of The Success Principles, shared with me. ~ Jon Gordon, #NFDB
346:Deerfield, Massachusetts
February 29, 1704
Temperature 0 degrees
Eben’s moccasins were lined with thick black fur. His boots were abandoned at the edge of the trail. Eben thought of Deerfield men getting this far in pursuit and finding a hundred pairs of shoes. ~ Caroline B Cooney,#NFDB
347:be done if we are to make the shift from a belief-based Buddhism (version 1.0) to a praxis-based Buddhism (version 2.0). We have to train ourselves to the point where on hearing or reading a text from the canon our initial response is no longer “Is that true?” but “Does this work? ~ Stephen Batchelor, #NFDB
348:Nowadays, of course, we are taught that the flat-Earth theory is wrong; that it is all wrong, absolutely. But it isn't. The curvature of the Earth is nearly 0 per mile, so that although the flat-Earth theory is wrong, it happens to be nearly right. That's why the theory lasted so long. ~ Isaac Asimov, #NFDB
349:(1) 0 is a number. (2) The successor of any number is a number. (3) No two numbers have the same successor. (page 6) (4) 0 is not the successor of any number. (5) Any property which belongs to 0, and also to the successor of every number which has the property, belongs to all numbers. ~ Bertrand Russell, #NFDB
350:At that exact moment, 6-0-0, the sun climbed over the skyline of oaks, revealing its full summer angry-god self. Its reflection flared across the river toward our house, a long, blaring finger aimed at me through our frail bedroom curtains. Accusing: You have been seen. You will be seen. ~ Gillian Flynn, #NFDB
351:There is a familiar formula—perhaps the most compact and famous of all formulas—developed by Euler from a discovery of De Moivre: eiπ + 1 = 0. ...It appeals equally to the mystic, the scientist, the philosopher, the mathematician. ~ Edward Kasner, James R. Newman, Mathematics and the Imagination (1940)., #NFDB
352:Not only did PI set the temporal and spatial proportions of the GPG's height, but it even helped in defining the measure of the ancient Egyptian Royal Cubits for that the difference between the two circumferences here equals to 280(1-1/PI)=100/0.5232 with an apparent error of 0.1% only. ~ Ibrahim Ibrahim, #NFDB
353:In 2007, a hallmark addiction study ranked twenty common recreational drugs on a scale of 0 to 3, with higher scores indicating a greater risk of dependence. Tobacco clocked in as the third most addictive drug overall. It had a score of 2.21, beaten only by cocaine (2.39) and heroin (3.00).8 ~ Dave Asprey, #NFDB
354:less than 1% of new businesses started each year in the U.S. receive venture funding, and total VC investment accounts for less than 0.2% of GDP. But the results of those investments disproportionately propel the entire economy. Venture-backed companies create 11% of all private sector jobs. ~ Peter Thiel, #NFDB
355:Não sou formada em matemática, mas sei de uma coisa: existe uma quantidade infinita de números entre 0 e 1. Tem o 0,1 e o 0,12 e o 0,112 e uma infinidade de outros. Obviamente, existe um conjunto ainda maior entre o 0 e o 2, ou entre o 0 e o 1 milhão. Alguns infinitos são maiores que outros... ~ John Green, #NFDB
356:The imaginary expression √(-a) and the negative expression -b, have this resemblance, that either of them occurring as the solution of a problem indicates some inconsistency or absurdity. As far as real meaning is concerned, both are imaginary, since 0 - a is as inconceivable as √(-a). ~ Augustus De Morgan, #NFDB
357:The worst thing about this particular end (of my youth) and the beginning (of middle age) is that for the first time in my life, I realize I don't know where I'm going. My wants are simple: a job that I like and a guy whom I love. And on the eve of my thirteth, I must face that I am 0 for 2. ~ Emily Giffin, #NFDB
358:You can express your generosity in ways that are virtually limitless. This was what I wanted to convey in 'Giving 2.0' - that whether you have $10 or $10 million to give, if you identify the right opportunities and make the most of your resources, your impact can be tremendous. ~ Laura Arrillaga Andreessen, #NFDB
359:If you go to a diner in the middle of America, people are having these conversations, but our politicians are too scared to bring it up because they're worried about offending the 0.002 percent of the country that may somehow be subject to what the conversation may be. And it's ridiculous. ~ Donald Trump Jr, #NFDB
360:Deerfield, Massachusetts
February 29, 1704
Temperature 0 degrees
In a dark and twisted grove of spruce, a place Eben would have avoided in summer at high noon, the Indians stopped for the night. If he had ever seen a place where an evil spirit would dwell, this was it. ~ Caroline B Cooney,#NFDB
361:Think of it: of the infinity of real numbers, those that are most important to mathematics—0, 1, √2, e and π—are located within less than four units on the number line. A remarkable coincidence? A mere detail in the Creator's grand design? I let the reader decide. ~ Eli Maor, e: The Story of a Number (1994)., #NFDB
362:Aunque un 35 por ciento de las mejores amistades preescolares se desarrollan entre niños y niñas (como Naomi y Eric), a la edad de siete años ese porcentaje cae hasta prácticamente un 0 por ciento. Desde entonces y hasta la pubertad los sexos tienen muy poco o nada que ver el uno con el otro. ~ John M Gottman, #NFDB
363:Second by second, the Queng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth's moon. But if you looked at it still more closely ... the starting instant was actually about fifteen million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind's first computer operating systems. ~ Vernor Vinge, #NFDB
364:This is a real life spy thriller, happening in real time. It is my hope that The Plot to Hack America will inform the American electorate of how Russia executed a full scale political and cyber war on America, starting with Watergate 2.0, to elect Donald Trump President of the United States. ~ Malcolm W Nance, #NFDB
365:JOE’S MEAN GREEN (GREEN JUICE) Makes 2 servings Nutrition per serving: 251 kCal; 1049 kJ; 6 g protein; 54 g carbohydrates; 1 g fat; 0 g saturated fat; 2 g fiber; 30 g sugar; 128 mg salt Ingredients: 16 kale leaves 2 cucumbers 8 celery sticks 4 apples 1 lemon 2-inch (5 cm) piece of fresh root ginger ~ Joe Cross, #NFDB
366:Oceans today represent only about 0.02 percent of Earth’s total mass, while the atmosphere is no more than one part per million of its bulk. Nevertheless, oceans and atmosphere have exerted, and continue to exert, disproportionately large influences in making Earth the unique world that it is. ~ Robert M Hazen, #NFDB
367:the soundtrack. This was the era of disco, and it's used to good effect here. You want hip? You want to be with it? You want the right chariot for your night out on the town? You want the Datsun 280ZX Black Gold. 0:08--After a slow unveil, we see the 10th Anniversary Datsun 280ZX in its full glory. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
368:Under what’s known as a “business as usual” emissions scenario, surface ocean pH will fall to 8.0 by the middle of this century, and it will drop to 7.8 by the century’s end. At that point, the oceans will be 150 percent more acidic than they were at the start of the industrial revolution.* ~ Elizabeth Kolbert, #NFDB
369:I don't think young black men, or anybody, should get a criminal record for low-level use. You know, I don't think that we should spend our law enforcement time jailing or imprisoning marijuana users. But to solve that problem, you don't need to go to the other extreme of creating Big Tobacco 2.0. ~ Kevin Sabet, #NFDB
370:I get 0.5 seconds to react to a ball, sometimes even less than that. I can't be thinking of what XYZ has said about me. I need to surrender myself to my natural instincts. My subconscious mind knows exactly what to do. It is trained to react. At home, my family doesn't discuss media coverage. ~ Sachin Tendulkar, #NFDB
371:89 per cent of input used for power generation today is indigenous, from coal (55 per cent), diesel and gas (11 per cent), hydroelectricity (21 per cent), nuclear power (2 per cent) and renewable (11 per cent). Solar energy segment contributes just 0.5 per cent of our energy production today. ~ A P J Abdul Kalam, #NFDB
372:Man got mad because he tripped over his wife's exercise ball and spilled scalding coffee on his lap. Man grabbed a golf club and tried to pop the exercise ball by beating it to death. Man was knocked out cold when the golf club bounced off the ball and hit him in the head. Exercise ball: 2. Man: 0. ~ Kerry Hamm, #NFDB
373:Newborns (0–3 months): 14–17 hours Infants (4–11 months): 12–15 hours Toddlers (1–2 years): 11–14 hours Preschoolers (3–5): 10–13 hours School-age children (6–13): 9–11 hours Teenagers (14–17): 8–10 hours Young adults (18–25): 7–9 hours Adults (26–64): 7–9 hours Older adults (65+): 7–8 hours ~ Arianna Huffington, #NFDB
374:The number doesn't matter. If I got down to 070.00, I'd want to be 065.00. If I weight 010.00, I wouldn't be happy until I got down to 005.00. The only number that would ever be enough is 0. Zero pounds, zero life, size zero, double-zero, zero point. Zero in tennis is love. I finally get it. ~ Laurie Halse Anderson, #NFDB
375:Two days. Forty-eight hours without flow plunged people into a state eerily similar to a serious psychiatric disorder. The experiment suggests that flow, the deep sense of engagement that Motivation 3.0 calls for, isn’t a nicety. It’s a necessity. We need it to survive. It is the oxygen of the soul. ~ Daniel H Pink, #NFDB
376:A pesar de que significó mantenerse por tres trimestres al hilo arriba de 2.0%, todavía está lejos de las variaciones mostradas entre el 2010 y el 2012 (entre 3.2 y 6.7%); el comportamiento de la actividad económica del país no alcanza un incremento de 3.0% desde el último tercio del 2012 (3.6 por ciento). ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
377:Harlequin Holiday Collection: Four Classic Seasonal Novellas: And a Dead Guy in a Pear Tree\Seduced by the Season\Evidence of Desire\Season of Wonder, by Leslie Kelly, is free in the Kindle store for a limited time. It usually costs $0.99. It has an average rating of 4.0 out of 5 stars. The book is getting ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
378:Our planet Earth has a diameter of 0.04 light-seconds. Neptune’s orbit spans 8 light-hours. The stars of the Milky Way galaxy delineate a broad, flat disk about 100,000 light-years across. And the Virgo supercluster of galaxies, to which the Milky Way belongs, extends some 60 million light-years. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson, #NFDB
379:An 0.1 percent tax on capital would be more in the nature of a compulsory reporting law than a true tax. Everyone would be required to report ownership of capital assets to the world’s financial authorities in order to be recognized as the legal owner, with all the advantages and disadvantages thereof. ~ Thomas Piketty, #NFDB
380:2. “Tuck Me In: Relaxing Yourself to Sleep” by Martha Ringer Martha Ringer, a productivity consultant, created this soothing eight-minute meditation to recapture the feeling of comfort and safety we felt as children being tucked in to bed. Available for $0.99 on Amazon.com, Google Play, and iTunes. ~ Arianna Huffington, #NFDB
381:I remember when we were in the World Cup in Australia and I had to win the singles against Tony Payne, best of seven legs, to win it. I was 2-0 down but ended up beating him I suffer much less than many of my colleagues. I am perfectly able to go to Australia and film within three hours of arrival. ~ David Attenborough, #NFDB
382:In Globalization 1.0, which began around 1492, the world went from size large to size medium. In Globalization 2.0, the era that introduced us to multinational companies, it went from size medium to size small. And then around 2000 came Globalization 3.0, in which the world went from being small to tiny. ~ Thomas Friedman, #NFDB
383:The president and his subordinates have also taken the position that the federal government has a veto over a church’s choice of its ministers and employees. The Supreme Court rejected this offensive claim in a 9–0 ruling that even included the two justices appointed to the high court by the president.26 ~ Andrew McCarthy, #NFDB
384:According to the history books, the decisive battle that ended the Ankh-Morpork Civil War was fought between two handfuls of bone-weary men in a swamp early one misty morning and, although one side claimed victory, ended with a practical score of Humans 0, ravens 1,000, which is the case with most battles ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
385:The actual history of interracial rape - according to FBI statistics - is that, since the 70's, approximately 15,000 to 36,000 white women have been raped by black men every year, while, on average, zero black women are raped by black men." (The Department of Justice uses "0" to denote fewer than ten victims. ~ Ann Coulter, #NFDB
386:The Foreign Office is a very important arm of the British state and I think Britain has a fantastic diplomatic service. We are the only country in the world spending 2% of our national income on defence and 0.7% of our national income on aid. We are the only country in the world doing both of those things. ~ George Osborne, #NFDB
387:According to the history books, the decisive battle that ended the Ankh-Morpork Civil War was fought between two handfuls of bone-weary men in a swamp early one misty morning and, although one side claimed victory, ended with a practical score of Humans 0, ravens 1,000, which is the case with most battles. ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
388:Ultimately, application vendors are driven by volume, and volume is favored by the open approach Google is taking. There are so many manufacturers working so hard to distribute Android phones globally that whether you like [Android 4.0] or not, you will want to develop for that platform, and perhaps even first. ~ Eric Schmidt, #NFDB
389:My phone rings, they call me up and say, 'Chael, your testosterone level is too high.' I say, 'Well, how high was it?' They say, '0.7.' I said, 'What's normal?' They say, '0.6.'; I said, 'One-tenth? You're telling me I'm one-tenth higher than the average man? Re-test that - you must have caught me on a low day.' ~ Chael Sonnen, #NFDB
390:But the 1970s kicked off a three-decade-long “tax-cutting spree” during which the wealthiest 1 percent succeeded in getting their average effective federal tax rate slashed by a third, and the very, very richest, the 0.01 percent of the population, did even better, getting its effective federal tax rate cut in half. ~ Jane Mayer, #NFDB
391:I do often read others’ reviews to see if I agree or disagree. Most commonly what happens is that a reviewer will point out something bad about a book I enjoyed that I didn’t notice, and it’ll make me think “Huh, I guess that WAS dumb.” So in general, reading reviews makes me dislike things more. HOORAY FOR WEB 2.0 ~ David Malki, #NFDB
392:I tell my kids in the Academy at Newcastle to watch Henry. He plays with such a swagger, not an arrogance, and that is a great quality. He always looks so comfortable. You talk about cars going from 0 to 60 in a matter of seconds, and he is like that. He just explodes. I could sit there for hours and watch him. ~ Peter Beardsley, #NFDB
393:No matter what age we are, regress to a certain youthfulness with people we've known our whole lives, especially our parents. And since I've written the brothers as young people a lot - most notably Archer & Armstrong #0 and the upcoming Book of Death: Legends of the Geomancer #4 , it comes very naturally to me. ~ Fred Van Lente, #NFDB
394:There's always changes in the way they do that in the cinematic universe. I think, with the S.H.I.E.L.D. 2.0, you're seeing some of the first ripples of those different points of view on what S.H.I.E.L.D. should be when it's rebuilt. I'm very, very curious to know which side Coulson will end up on in that struggle. ~ Clark Gregg, #NFDB
395:What defines Web 2.0 is the fact that the material on it is generated by the users (consumers) rather than the producers of the system. Thus, those who operate on Web 2.0 can be called prosumers because they simultaneously produce what they consume such as the interaction on Facebook and the entries on Wikipedia. ~ George Ritzer, #NFDB
396:So instead of the Super Bowl, we've got the Stupor Bowl. Two once-proud teams, now 0-4 and stumbling through the season like zombies. And if you think the Cowboys are bad (and they are), the Redskins are so bad that every few plays you have to put a mirror under thieir noses to make sure they're still breathing. ~ Tony Kornheiser, #NFDB
397:What makes the decisive difference is not whether religion is persecuted or not, but whether religion is a pious name for conformity or a fighting name for non-conformity. ~ Walter Kaufmann, The Faith of a Heretic (1963), cited from the trade paperback edition published by Princeton University Press ISBN 978-0-691-16548-6, (p. 253), #NFDB
398:Owning the U.S. “market” means the whole shooting match—the Wilshire 5000. The granddaddy of all “total-market” funds is the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund. With rock-bottom expenses of 0.20%, it is a superb choice. Since its inception in 1992, it has done an excellent job of tracking the Wilshire 5000, ~ William J Bernstein, #NFDB
399:Also, organic cows, like Rosie the organic chicken, are never fed corn that contains residues of atrazine, the herbicide commonly sprayed on American cornfields. The tiniest amount of this chemical (0.1 part per billion) has been shown to change the sex of frogs. There’s been no study to show what it does to children. ~ Michael Pollan, #NFDB
400:Brazil fell into recession in the first half of the year, according to official data which showed the economy shrinking by 0.6% in the second quarter and 0.2% in the first. The main reason was another big drop in investment. The government had said that it expects GDP to grow by 1.8% this year, but that now seems unlikely. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
401:5 1/2 centuries after its 1.0 release, the book is a surprisingly robust piece of information technology. Sure, its memory is relatively tiny--one novel adds up to less than a megabyte. But it doesn't need charging, and it never crashes. Its interface is rapidly and intuitively navigable. The scroll never stood a chance. ~ Lev Grossman, #NFDB
402:University of Hawaii Press, 1983; The Happiest Man: The Life of Louis Borgenicht (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1942). Used by permission of Lindy Friedman Sobel and Alice Friedman Holzman. The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher. ISBN 978-0-316-04034-1 E3 ~ Malcolm Gladwell, #NFDB
403:“Know that you're a writer?” When Ethelfreda nodded, Mrs. Gotti said, “You have that pale, physically unfit, financially desperate, and emotionally downtrodden look about you. It’s unmistakable. Only writers ever look like that.” ~ Laura Resnick, The Magic Keyboard, in Denise Little (ed.) The Magic Shop (2004), ISBN 0-7564-0173-9, p. 87, #NFDB
404:In France, the percentage of children exposed to three or more maternal partners is 0.5 percent—about one in two hundred. The second highest share is 2.6 percent, in Sweden, or about one in forty. In the United States, the figure is a shocking 8.2 percent—about one in twelve—and the figure is even higher in the working class. ~ J D Vance, #NFDB
405:The average American household's income declined for a second year in a row, the data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show, down 0.9 percent to $64,432. The wealthiest fifth of Americans were an exception: Their incomes increased by 0.9 percent. Among the poorest fifth, incomes fell 3.5 percent. Taking taxes into account, ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
406:When I first raised the issue of the so-called Islamic State at the Munich Security Conference in February, speaking about its economy, its flexibility and pathology, people thought I was trying to scare them. But now we have experienced just that. If al-Qaida was version 2.0 of terror, then the Islamic State is version 5.0. ~ Ashraf Ghani, #NFDB
407:When Divine Love had its effect,
It made rest and comfort disagreeable.
When he experienced the ecstasy of love,
He removed the crown from his head.
He exchanged the Royal Throne for a life of poverty.
Well done, 0 True Lover, well done!
Ask about the ecstasy of love from him,
Whose heart has been injured by love. ~ Rumi,#NFDB
408:leanness is a methodology, not a goal. Making small changes to things that already exist might lead you to a local maximum, but it won’t help you find the global maximum. You could build the best version of an app that lets people order toilet paper from their iPhone. But iteration without a bold plan won’t take you from 0 to 1. ~ Peter Thiel, #NFDB
409:Endeavor's partnership with Bain took off at just the right moment. We were embarking on our '3.0' organizational strategy, and thanks to the compelling analysis, entrepreneurial zeal and tireless commitment of our Bain team, we've emerged with a world-class plan. We look forward to continuing our high-impact work with Bain! ~ Linda Rottenberg, #NFDB
410:Should have made you a bet, because, hey, guess what, got a loaded gun in my underwear so it tuns out I was right. Not that I can complain. Had some good years. My life, in a nutshell: 0-8 yrs. happy, no reason; 9-19 happy, wrong reasons; 20-33 unhappy for all the right reasons, 34 to present moment, unhappy, looking for a reason. ~ Charles Yu, #NFDB
411:Weightless (in air), alcohol units 8 (but in-flight so canceled out by altitude), cigarettes 0 (desperate: no-smoking seat), calories 1 million (entirely made up of things would never have dreamt of putting in self's mouth were they not on in-flight tray), farts from traveling companion 38 (so far), variations in fart aroma 0. ~ Helen Fielding, #NFDB
412:Are you ready to cut off your head and place your foot on it? If so, come; Love awaits you! Love is not grown in a garden, nor sold in the marketplace; whether you are a king or a servant, the price is your head, and nothing less. Yes, the cost of the elixir of love is your head! Do you hesitate? 0 miser, It is cheap at that price! ~ Al-Ghazali, #NFDB
413:Education is all about business, not people. Not teachers, and not children. Testing companies rake in billions every year administering the mandatory testing program... ~ Kathleen Ann Goonan, Girl in Wave : Wave in Girl, in Ed Finn & Kathryn Cramer (eds.) Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future (2014), ISBN 978-0-06-220469-1, p. 49, #NFDB
414:In 1997, 42 percent of the population of both India and China were living in extreme poverty. By 2017, in India, that share had dropped to 12 percent: there were 270 million fewer people living in extreme poverty than there had been just 20 years earlier. In China, that share dropped to a stunning 0.7 percent over the same period ~ Hans Rosling, #NFDB
415:The power law means that differences between companies will dwarf the differences in roles inside companies. You could have 100% of the equity if you fully fund your own venture, but if it fails you’ll have 100% of nothing. Owning just 0.01% of Google, by contrast, is incredibly valuable (more than $35 million as of this writing). ~ Peter Thiel, #NFDB
416:Karbonmonoksitin bir insanı etkilemesi için ortamda maalesef çok büyük miktarlarda bulunması da gerekmiyor.Soluduğunuz hava temizse hacimce %21 oksijen içerir.Eğer bu hava %0,1 oranında karbonmonoksit içeriyorsa bir saat içinde kanımızdaki hemoglobin moleküllerinin %50’sine oksijen yerine karbonmonoksit bağlanır. Bu ise ölüm demektir ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
417:Nuclear, ecological, chemical, economic — our arsenal of Death by Stupidity is impressive for a species as smart as Homo sapiens ["Strange New World," http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/boo...]. ~ Jeanette Winterson, #NFDB
418:in 1963 because he liked the sound of the sentence “Three quarks for Muster Mark” in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. As for “Muster Mark, ”three quarks are needed to form a proton or a neutron. The electric charges of quarks are fractional (+/-1/3 or +−2/3) because their sum must equal the charge of a proton (+1) or a neutron (0). ~ Matthieu Ricard, #NFDB
419:True Films On TrueFilms.com, Kevin has reviewed the best documentaries he’s seen over decades. The counterpart book series, True Films 3.0, contains the 200 documentaries he feels you should see before you die, and it is available as a PDF on kk.org. Three docs we both love are The King of Kong, Man on Wire, and A State of Mind. ~ Timothy Ferriss, #NFDB
420:Are some flowers more beautiful than others? The garden is beautiful. Do I prefer brother over brother? Comparisons are part of this political world. Where there is one, there is no conflict. Where there is two or more, there is conflict. Two is the devil. Conflict begin with the devil. We count 0 to 1, then back to 0. It is a circle. ~ Peter Tosh, #NFDB
421:Of course, it’s easier to copy a model than to make something new. Doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But every time we create something new, we go from 0 to 1. The act of creation is singular, as is the moment of creation, and the result is something fresh and strange. ~ Peter Thiel, #NFDB
422:I just read that one scene for Emily in New Moon, and it was pretty simple and straightforward. They liked that I did it really natural. They were like, "That was great!," even with what little I had. Sometimes just having those little scenes are a lot tougher than if you have five pages because you have to go from 0 to 100 in a snap. ~ Tinsel Korey, #NFDB
423:Why do airline pilots always call passengers "folks"? I don't usually take umbrage at generic terminology--I'm one of those forward-thinkers who believes that "man" encompasses the whole darned race -- but at whatever 0'clock in the mornning. I thought it would be nice to be called sometihng that suggested unwashed masses a little less. ~ C E Murphy, #NFDB
424:Hey, where were you while the game was happening?” George asked. “I thought you were never coming back and I’d have to be pals with Jon Cartwright. Then I thought about being pals with Jon, was overwhelmed with despair, and decided to find one of the frogs I know are living in here, give it little frog glasses and call it Simon 2.0. ~ Cassandra Clare, #NFDB
425:During 2001-2005, Mexico's growth performance has been miserable, with an annual growth rate of per capita income at 0.3% (or a paltry 1.7% increase in total over five years). By contrast, during the 'bad old days' of ISI (1955-82), Mexico's per capita income had grown much faster during the NAFTA period-at an average of 3.1% per year. ~ Ha Joon Chang, #NFDB
426:By putting the means of production into the hands of the masses but withholding from those same masses any ownership over the product of their work, Web 2.0 provides an incredibly efficient mechanism to harvest the economic value of the free labor provided by the very, very many and concentrate it into the hands of the very, very few. ~ Nicholas G Carr, #NFDB
427:Horizontal or extensive progress means copying things that work—going from 1 to n. Horizontal progress is easy to imagine because we already know what it looks like. Vertical or intensive progress means doing new things—going from 0 to 1. Vertical progress is harder to imagine because it requires doing something nobody else has ever done. ~ Peter Thiel, #NFDB
428:Deaths from legal abortion declined fivefold between 1973 and 1985 (from 3.3 deaths to 0.4 deaths per 100,000 procedures),” reported the American Medical Association’s Council on Scientific Affairs, reflecting increased physician education and skills, improvements in medical technology, and, notably, the earlier termination of pregnancy. ~ Katha Pollitt, #NFDB
429:In this code, Number.isInteger() returns true for both 25 and 25.0 even though the latter looks like a float. Simply adding a decimal point to a number doesn’t automatically make it a float in JavaScript. Since 25.0 is really just 25, it is stored as an integer. The number 25.1, however, is stored as a float because there is a fraction value. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
430:While the DFT is limited to computing points in the frequency domain over the full unit circle, the FRFT evaluates a set of equispaced points on the frequency domain over a fraction of this range, determined by , as shown in Fig.2ab. The FRFT can be centered about ! = 0 by pre-multiplying the input vector by a phase ramp, which we denote as C ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
431:Apple’s graphical user interface. Just as Jobs was being eased out of Apple in 1985, John Sculley had struck a surrender deal: Microsoft could license the Apple GUI for Windows 1.0, and in return it would make Excel exclusive to the Mac for up to two years. In 1988, after Microsoft came out with Windows 2.0, Apple sued. Sculley contended ~ Walter Isaacson, #NFDB
432:Our task today is to find singular ways to create the new things that will make the future not just different, but better—to go from 0 to 1. The essential first step is to think for yourself. Only by seeing our world anew, as fresh and strange as it was to the ancients who saw it first, can we both re-create it and preserve it for the future. ~ Peter Thiel, #NFDB
433:There has been a useful and wholesome swing away from Churchianity and from orthodox religion during the past century, and this will present a unique opportunity for the restoration of true religion and the presentation of a simple return to the ways of spiritual living. ~ Alice Bailey, The Reappearance of the Christ, Chapter Two (1947) ISBN 978-0-85330-114-1., #NFDB
434:Indeed, the very premise of extrinsic incentives is that we’ll always respond rationally to them. But even most economists don’t believe that anymore. Sometimes these motivators work. Often they don’t. And many times, they inflict collateral damage. In short, the new way economists think about what we do is hard to reconcile with Motivation 2.0. ~ Daniel H Pink, #NFDB
435:Although the NYPD frequently attempts to justify stop-and-frisk operations in poor communities of color on the grounds that such tactics are necessary to get guns off the streets, less than 1 percent of stops (0.15 percent) resulted in guns being found, and guns were seized less often in stops of African Americans and Latinos than of whites. ~ Michelle Alexander, #NFDB
436:There is also a magic in reading. Books have taken me to places I never thought I would visit, introduced me to people I never thought I would meet, and transported me to times past and futures imagined I never though I would experience. ~ Joe Lieberman in Roxanne J. Coady and Joy Johannessen (eds.) The Book That Changed My Life (2006), ISBN 1-592-40210-0, p. 104, #NFDB
437:of those buzzword-addicted startups are definitely not Web 2.0, while some of the applications we identified as Web 2.0, like Napster and BitTorrent, are not even properly web applications!) We began trying to tease out the principles that are demonstrated in one way or another by the success stories of web 1.0 and by the most interesting of the new ~ Tim O Reilly, #NFDB
438:At precisely nine in the morning, working with focus and stealth, our entire membership succeeded in simultaneously beheading no one... not a single one of us blew himself/herself up in a crowded public place... in addition, zero (0) planes were flown into buildings.
All this was accomplished so surreptitiosly, it attracted little public notice. ~ George Saunders,#NFDB
439:We can prove that the Great Pyramid's base area (with a metric side of 440*0.5236) expresses a solar year through dividing it by the number of days per year, i.e. 365. As a result it delivers to us an area with a square side of 12 rendering such a square as a unit of measurement relevant to our model as John Michell anticipates throughout his work. ~ Ibrahim Ibrahim, #NFDB
440:Have mercy upon me, 0 God, According to Your lovingkindness; According to the multitude of Your tender mercies, Blot out my transgressions. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, And cleanse me from my sin.
For I acknowledge my transgressions, And my sin is always before me. Against You, You only, have I sinned, And done this evil in Your sight-
That ~ R C Sproul,#NFDB
441:We're headed for what is called Type 1 Civilization, planetary civilization. Type 2 would be stellar civilization, like Star Trek. Type 3 Civilization would be galactic, like Star Wars. We are Type 0. We get our energy from dead plants, oil and coal. But the question is: Will we make it? Will we make the transition from Type 0 to Type 1? It's not clear. ~ Michio Kaku, #NFDB
442:A third of the UK is owned by 1,200 aristocrats and their families. Thirty-six thousand people, or 0.6 per cent of the population, own half of the rural land in England. Despite the widely held belief that Britain is ‘full’ and that it is in danger of being ‘concreted over’, only 6 per cent of the UK’s land use is classed as urban, with 94 per cent rural. ~ John Higgs, #NFDB
443:calculations show that a change of as little as 0.5 percent in the strength of the strong nuclear force, or 4 percent in the electric force, would destroy either nearly all carbon or all oxygen in every star, and hence the possibility of life as we know it. Change those rules of our universe just a bit, and the conditions for our existence disappear! ~ Stephen Hawking, #NFDB
444:Demonstrate ROI. In this approach, you gather and analyze data to prove that a usability change you’ve made resulted in cost savings or additional revenue (“Changing the label on this button increased sales by 0.25%”). There’s an excellent book about it: Cost-justifying Usability: An Update for the Internet Age, edited by Randolph Bias and Deborah Mayhew. ~ Steve Krug, #NFDB
445:For every child of an illegal immigrant who's a valedictorian, there's another 100 out there who weigh 130 pounds and they've got calves the size of cantaloupes because they're hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert (http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/12/steve-king-still-stands-by-cantaloupe-comments/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0). ~ Michael C Burgess, #NFDB
446:In Cantor's mind there were an infinite number of infinities-the transfinite numbers-each nested in the other. Aleph 0 is smaller than Aleph 1, which is smaller than Aleph 2, which is smaller than Aleph 3, and so forth. At the top of the chain sits the ultimate infinity that engulfs all other infinities: God, the infinity that defies all comprehension. ~ Charles Seife, #NFDB
447:By seizing the formerly little-known Height 102.0 - the Mamayev Hill - the Red Army fought its way to the fascists' den - Berlin. We are proud to say that our victory in Stalingrad radically changed the whole situation in the Second World War. And this victory meant that our Motherland had withstood one of the most difficult tests in its history. ~ Aleksandr Vasilevsky, #NFDB
448:in the grave / Dana Stabenow.—1st ed. p. cm. ISBN 978-0-312-55913-7 (hardcover) ISBN 978-1-4299-5038-1 (e-book) 1. Shugak, Kate (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Women private investigators—Alaska—Fiction. 3. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. 4. Alaska—Fiction. I. Title. PS3569.T1249R47 2012 813'.54—dc23 2011037662 ~ Dana Stabenow, #NFDB
449:I started treating my career as if it was a guarantee,if things get difficult and things don't work out, I'm not gonna think I have a Plan B, which is grad school, or Plan C, which is an office job. I'm just gonna have a Plan A, a Plan A 2.0, a Plan A 3.0, and that's what I'm going to do. Because entertainment and YouTube are always going to be my Plan A. ~ Lilly Singh, #NFDB
450:Instead of the go-to ingredients previously used in animal protein substitutes — soy, wheat gluten, vegetable starches — Food 2.0 companies are using computer algorithms to analyze hundreds of thousands of plant species to find out what compounds can be stripped out and recombined to create what they say are more delicious and sustainable sources of protein. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
451:I wonder that a great voice doesn't come out of heaven thundering: '0 ye of little faith!' When will people understand that a new age has really dawned? When will they stop sealing up the terrible crack into heaven which Ouspensky has made, with precautions and good behavior? We must allow divine madness to take possession of us now, before hell freezes! ~ Rodney Collin, #NFDB
452:Released at the height of the “Web 2.0” era, Klavika has become a prototypical sans serif of the information age. This is reinforced by the fact that it is the basis for the Facebook logo, but it’s been widely used in many other markets as well, including the automobile, sports, and publication industries. The foundation of the typeface is the pill shape. ~ Stephen Coles, #NFDB
453:Our revolution is like Wikipedia, okay? Everyone is contributing content, [but] you don't know the names of the people contributing the content. This is exactly what happened. Revolution 2.0 in Egypt was exactly the same. Everyone is contributing small pieces, bits and pieces. We drew this whole picture of a revolution. And no one is the hero in that picture. ~ Wael Ghonim, #NFDB
454:Hear David Swensen, widely respected chief investment officer of the Yale University Endowment Fund. “A minuscule 4 percent of funds produce market-beating after-tax results with a scant 0.6 percent (annual) margin of gain. The 96 percent of funds that fail to meet or beat the Vanguard 500 Index Fund lose by a wealth-destroying margin of 4.8 percent per annum. ~ John C Bogle, #NFDB
455:I can’t talk about our love story, so I will talk about math. I am not a mathematician, but I know this: There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1. There’s .1 and .12 and .112 and an infinite collection of others. Of course, there is a bigger infinite set of numbers between 0 and 2, or between 0 and a million. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities. A ~ John Green, #NFDB
456:On January 1, 2004, Denmark introduced legislation to restrict trans fats to no more than 2 percent of the total fat in any food. Consumption of trans fats fell from 4.5 grams a day per person in 1975 to 2.2 grams in 1993 to 1.5 grams in 1995 to almost 0 grams by 2005. By 2010, the incidence of heart disease and related deaths in Denmark had dropped 60 percent. ~ Paul A Offit, #NFDB
457:If we treat another person as essentially bad, we dehumanize him or her. If we take the view that every human being has some good in them, even if it is only 0.1 percent of their makeup, then by focusing on their good part, we humanize them. By acknowledging and attending to and rewarding their good part, we allow it to grow, like a small flower in a desert. ~ Simon Baron Cohen, #NFDB
458:the simple algebraic equation ω+k3 = 0. This is called the dispersion relation of (1): with the help of the Fourier transform it is not hard to show that every solution is a superposition of solutions of the form ei(kx-ωt), and the dispersion relation tells us how the “wave number” k is related to the “angular frequency” ω in each of these elementary solutions. ~ Timothy Gowers, #NFDB
459:A party for Me?" thought Pooh to himself. " How grand!" And he began to wonder if all the other ani- mals would know that it was a special Pooh Party, and if Christopher Robin had told them about The Floating Bear and The Brain 0/ Pooh and all the wonderful ships he had invented and sailed on, and he began to think how awful it would be if everybody had forgotten 149 ~ A A Milne, #NFDB
460:El índice de recaída nacional para la terapia matrimonial tradicional es de un 30 a un 50 por ciento. Nuestro índice es de un 20 por ciento. Averiguamos que al comienzo de nuestros talleres el 27 por ciento de las parejas corría un alto riesgo de divorcio. A los tres meses, la proporción había bajado a un 7 por ciento, y a los nueve meses era de un 0 por ciento. ~ John M Gottman, #NFDB
461:Let's face it, we're skunk drunk and it's because of money. It's almost like we all need to enter Betty Ford Clinic 2.0 together. This time, it's not stock market money but private equity, M&A, VCs and to some degree the reckless abandonment of logic by some advertisers who are perpetuating what is sure to end badly when the economy turns. Hubris is back my friends. ~ Steve Rubel, #NFDB
462:Obama has played fast and loose with ethical rules, from promoting crony capitalists to attending near-constant fundraisers among the pay-to-play 0.0001 percent. Again, why should we be surprised, given that he was the first presidential candidate who refused in a general election to accept federal campaign financing, with its accompanying rules curbing mega-fundraising? ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
463:The Royal Cubit is a daily measure which is projected into the solar month (i.e. a decanic month consists of 3 weeks with 10 days each) through angularly treating the day as an arcdegree (30=180/pi*0.5236) so that the reciprocity of the RC delivers a magnification measure which equals to the ratio of the size of the Earth to that of the Sun (109.28=180/[pi*0.5236]). ~ Ibrahim Ibrahim, #NFDB
464:A lot of people think PMI is the genome project 2.0. No. This is about all the influences on disease - genetics is in there, but the environment is in there as well, health choices, behaviors, all the factors that are important, otherwise we're not doing what we promised we would do - which is in a holistic way look at how people stay healthy or how do they fall ill. ~ Francis Collins, #NFDB
465:Driving with a mobile phone makes you hit the brakes 0.5 seconds slower. If you are travelling at 112km per hour, in 0.5seconds you travel 15.5 meters... a lot can happen over that distance. If you are distracted in your car, you have a 9 times higher chance of having an accident. When your phone rings, you don’t have to pick it up... that’s why voice mail was invented! ~ Kevin Horsley, #NFDB
466:To many, mathematics is a collection of theorems. For me, mathematics is a collection of examples; a theorem is a statement about a collection of examples and the purpose of proving theorems is to classify and explain the examples... ~ John B. Conway, Subnormal Operators (1981) Research Notes in Math., 51, Pitman Advanced Publishing Program, Boston-London-Melbourne, ISBN 0-8218-2184-9., #NFDB
467:How could there be people on Earth? It was impossible. No one had survived the Cataclysm. That was incontrovertible, as deeply ingrained in Wells’s mind as the fact that water froze at 0 degrees Celsius, or that planets revolved around the sun. And yet, he’d seen them with his own eyes. People who certainly hadn’t come down on the dropship from the Colony. Earthborns. “He’s ~ Kass Morgan, #NFDB
468:What are domino foods? Foods that could be acceptable if humans had strict portion control, but that are disallowed because practically none of us do. Common domino foods include: Chickpeas Peanut butter Salted cashews Alcohol Domino triggers aren’t limited to food. For some people, if they play 15 minutes of World of Warcraft, they’ll play 15 hours. It’s 0 or 15 hours. ~ Timothy Ferriss, #NFDB
469:Shimba Technologies, developed a mobile medical directory and “knowledge app,” MedAfrica, to address the health challenges in its home country, where there are only 7,000 registered doctors in a country of 40 million people. The World Bank puts the doctor per 1,000 person ratio of Kenya at 0.2; in the United States, that number is more than ten times larger—2.4 as of 2010. To ~ Alec J Ross, #NFDB
470:Just then, the music stopped. The band needed a break from Mike’s requests. As they were exiting the stage, a sudden uproar--an explosion--erupted from the first floor of the country club.
ASU had shocked the world by beating Nebraska. The final score: 19--0.
September twenty-first was about to go down in history as the most memorable date of Marlboro Man’s life. ~ Ree Drummond,#NFDB
471:Our top command wanted us to achieve 100 percent success, and to do it with 0 casualties. That may sound admirable—who doesn’t want to succeed, and who wants anyone to get hurt? But in war those are incompatible and unrealistic. If 100 percent success, 0 casualties are your goal, you’re going to conduct very few operations. You will never take any risks, realistic or otherwise. ~ Chris Kyle, #NFDB
472:There is an undeniable correlation between functional illiteracy, poverty, and crime—in fact, eleven states predict their future need for prison cells based on the reading levels of their fourth graders. Books can change lives, yes, and so can the lack of them. ~ Roxanne J. Coady in Roxanne J. Coady and Joy Johannessen (eds.) The Book That Changed My Life (2006), ISBN 1-592-40210-0, p. xvi., #NFDB
473:I definitely think the girls look too skinny now. I'm friends with models Helena Christensen and Linda Evangelista, and I remember Linda telling me that when she was a model in the nineties, a sample size was a 6 or an 8. Now a sample dress size is a 0 or a 2. That's pretty alarming. There's a lot of pressure on the models. It's not healthy. I can't even imagine what that's like. ~ Liv Tyler, #NFDB
474:I'm an idiot, basically. I don't think that I'm a dumb guy, but I also realise that I have access to about 0.1 percent of the information that I need to have a truly informed opinion about half the stuff I talk about. I'm like that loud guy in the bar, who kind of makes sense for about ten minutes, and then you realise he flunked everything at high school so you just laugh at him. ~ Bill Burr, #NFDB
475:The Collins grave plot is 4 ft in width and 8 ft in depth and the ‘Celtic Cross’ intended to be erected thereon will be 11′ 6″ in height and the sculptor has specified for a minimum base of 4′ 6″ x 3′ 0″ x 1′ 3″ high. While the plot in its present layout is fully that width the committee will not allow the foundation of the monument to exceed 4′ without Government authority.32 ~ Tim Pat Coogan, #NFDB
476:Whether by using the Royal Cubits of 0.5236 meters or 0.5232 meters, the error is less than 0.9%. If the geometry of the Great Pyramid is that which counts in determining the proper conversion constant (rather than some unnecessary 'precision'), then the golden ratio suffices as a measure for the intended accuracy which demonstrates itself in the dimensions of this structure. ~ Ibrahim Ibrahim, #NFDB
477:I have learned over the years that the higher the level of emotion, the lower the level of reasoning. For example, if your emotions are at the highest level of 10, your ability to reason is at a 0. If it’s a 9 then your reasoning is a 1. I am not suggesting that emotions don’t have their place, but taking actions based purely on emotions is dangerous and could cost you everything. ~ Eric Thomas, #NFDB
478:The instructor turned to the easel and wrote 100/0 on the paper in big black letters. “You have to be willing to give 100 percent with zero expectation of receiving anything in return,” he said. “Only when you’re willing to take 100 percent responsibility for making the relationship work will it work. Otherwise, a relationship left to chance will always be vulnerable to disaster. ~ Darren Hardy, #NFDB
479:There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1. There's .1 and .12 and .112 and an infinite collection of others. Of course, there is a bigger infinite set of numbers between 0 and 2, or between 0 and a million. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities... I cannot tell you how grateful I am for our little infinity. You gave me forever within the numbered days, and I'm grateful. ~ John Green, #NFDB
480:1 ========== Я смотрю на тебя (Ирэне Као) – Ваш выделенный отрывок в месте 3020–3024 | Добавлено: четверг, 8 января 2015 г. в 0:13:37 – Если ты ищешь романтической любви, то я не тот, кто тебе нужен. Если думаешь просто о приключении на стороне, чтобы отвлечься от ежедневной рутины, то опять ошибаешься, Элена. Я предлагаю тебе путешествие – опыт, который навсегда изменит твою жизнь. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
481:However, if they become too high, taking a dose of medication will bring it back down. I consider the optimal blood sugar range while fasting to be 8.0 to 10.0 mmol/L, if you are taking medication. This range is higher than the nonfasting norm, but the mildly elevated levels are not harmful in the short term while we are attempting to improve the diabetes, and the primary goal while ~ Jason Fung, #NFDB
482:Convenient though it would be if it were true, Mozilla [Netscape 1.0] is not big because it's full of useless crap. Mozilla is big because your needs are big. Your needs are big because the Internet is big. There are lots of small, lean web browsers out there that, incidentally, do almost nothing useful. But being a shining jewel of perfection was not a goal when we wrote Mozilla. ~ Jamie Zawinski, #NFDB
483:One group was given AF and then fed diets containing 20% protein. The second group was given the same level of AF and then fed diets containing only 5% protein. Every single rat fed 20% protein got liver cancer or its precursor lesions, but not a single animal fed a 5% protein diet got liver cancer or its precursor lesions. It was not a trivial difference; it was 100% versus 0%. ~ T Colin Campbell, #NFDB
484:For this astonishing wealth, God deserves reverent praise. What mind but his, what compass of understanding but his, what providential oversight over the production of Scripture but his, could produce a work so unified yet so profoundly diverse? Here, too, is reason to join our "Amen" to the words of 108:5: "Be exalted, 0 God, above the heavens, and let your glory be over all the earth. ~ D A Carson, #NFDB
485:One million diagonal units of the Great Pyramid's base equal to the length of the Great Pyramid's Squared-Volume Side (SVS). And when we apply the 365~ Ibrahim Ibrahim366 days count to the barque's RC Squared-Length Diagonal (SLD), i.e. SQR(44/0.5236), we get the GP's prime magnification (2*2*2*5) factor; and that is how the solar barque got its name as the boat of a million years. ~ Ibrahim Ibrahim, #NFDB
486:Take a Somalian toddler. She has a 20% probability of dying before reaching the age of five. Now compare: American frontline soldiers had a mortality rate of 6.7% in the Civil War, 1.8% in World War II, and 0.5% in the Vietnam War.30 Yet we won’t hesitate to send that Somalian toddler back if it turns out her mother isn’t a “real” refugee. Back to the Somalian child-mortality front. ~ Rutger Bregman, #NFDB
487:When the term “cyber war” is used in this book, it refers to actions by a nation-state to penetrate another nation’s computers or networks for the purposes of causing damage or disruption. When the Israelis attacked Syria, they used light and electric pulses, not to cut like a laser or stun like a taser, but to transmit 1’s and 0’s to control what the Syrian air defense radars saw. ~ Richard A Clarke, #NFDB
488:In a universe where visible matter accounts for only 0.01 percent of creation, it would be foolish to undertake science without a sense that reality is extremely mysterious. Dark energy exists on the fringe of the unknowable, and so does a saint who exists without eating. The simplistic logic and outmoded science applied by Dawkins and company don’t remotely approach how reality works. ~ Deepak Chopra, #NFDB
489:There are only two answers for the handling of people from 2.0 down on the Tone Scale, neither one of which has anything to do with reasoning with them or listening to their justification of their acts. The first is to raise them on the Tone Scale by un-enturbulating some of their theta by any one of the three valid processes. The other is to dispose of them quietly and without sorrow. ~ L Ron Hubbard, #NFDB
490:Over the period from 1988 to 2005, the income share of the top five percent has grown by about 3.5 percent of global household income, and the shares of all the other groups have diminished. The greatest relative reduction was in the bottom quarter, which lost about one third of its share of global household income, declining from 1.155 to 0.775 percent, and now is even more marginalized. ~ Thomas Pogge, #NFDB
491:All types of fasts can have therapeutic benefit. The key to therapy is prolonged therapeutic ketosis (blood ketones in the range of 3–6mM), together with reduced blood glucose levels (3–4 mM). Patients will need to use the Precision Xtra meter from Medisense to determine when they can enter the therapeutic zone. GKI ratios of 1.0 of below would best represent the therapeutic range. Intensive ~ Jason Fung, #NFDB
492:Human beings are afraid of very simple things: we fear suffering, we fear mortality. What I was doing in Rhythm 0—as in all my other performances—was staging these fears for the audience: using their energy to push my body as far as possible. In the process, I liberated myself from my fears. And as this happened, I became a mirror for the audience—if I could do it, they could do it, too. ~ Marina Abramovi, #NFDB
493:A recent canvass of professional philosophers found the percentage of respondents who “accept or leans toward” various positions. On normative ethics, the results were deontology 25.9%; consequentialism 23.6%; virtue ethics 18.2%. On metaethics, results were moral realism 56.4%; moral anti-realism 27.7%. On moral judgment: cognitivism 65.7%; non-cognitivism 17.0% (Bourget and Chalmers 2009). ~ Nick Bostrom, #NFDB
494:God will not hold us responsible to understand the mysteries of election, predestination, and the divine sovereignty. The best and safest way to deal with these truths is to raise our eyes to God and in deepest reverence say, "0 Lord, Thou knowest." Those things belong to the deep and mysterious Profound of God's omniscience. Prying into them may make theologians, but it will never make saints. ~ A W Tozer, #NFDB
495:Recent research, based on matching declared income on tax returns with corporate compensation records, allows me to state that the vast majority (60 to 70 percent, depending on what definitions one chooses) of the top 0.1 percent of the income hierarchy in 2000–2010 consists of top managers. By comparison, athletes, actors, and artists of all kinds make up less than 5 percent of this group. ~ Thomas Piketty, #NFDB
496:Taking advantage of the method, found by me, of the black staining of the elements of the brain, staining obtained by the prolonged immersion of the pieces, previously hardened with potassium or ammonium bichromate, in a 0.50 or 1.0% solution of silver nitrate, I happened to discover some facts concerning the structure of the cerebral gray matter that I believe merit immediate communication. ~ Camillo Golgi, #NFDB
497:When I sat on the chair at 5-0, I was like, 'Okay, now you can try to break her, and if not, you have the serve.' So I was a little bit more relaxed since I had a few chances to do that. But I still knew I could break her. Then suddenly I did a winner from the backhand, and I was so happy. I didn't really know what was going to happen, and I just had tears in my eyes, I was just so, so happy. ~ Petra Kvitova, #NFDB
498:Alan Butler & Christopher Knight state in their book 'The Hiram Key' that the Star Families brought forth the unit 'avoirdupois pound' which equals to 16 Oz and that Thomas Jefferson was the first to note that 1,000 lbs fill a cubic foot. I therefore believe that the reason behind such a choice was, the same Temperature level of 16 in which the water density takes its place at about 0.9988. ~ Ibrahim Ibrahim, #NFDB
499:The Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) own computer model easily shows that President Obama's proposed regulations would reduce global warming by around 0.02 of a degree Celsius by the year 2100. Actually, the true number is probably even smaller because that calculation assumes a future rate of warming - there hasn't been any for 17 years now - quite a bit higher than it is likely to be. ~ Patrick Michaels, #NFDB
500:Equations are classified by the highest power (value of the exponent) of its unknowns. If this is one, the equation is of first degree. If this is two, the equation is of second degree, and so on. Equations of higher degree than one yield multiple possible values for their unknown quantities. These values are known as roots. The first-degree equation (the linear equation): 3x – 9 = 0 (root: x = 3) ~ Stieg Larsson, #NFDB
501:uma fabricante canadense acaba de lançar uma cerveja focada para o público adepto aos exercícios físicos que, além de ser baixa em calorias, promete uma série de benefícios. Chamada Lean Machine Ale, a bebida tem teor alcóolico de 0,5% e a composição foi enriquecida com uma variedade de vitaminas e sete gramas de proteína. Uma latinha contém apenas 77 calorias e não conta com glúten em sua formulação. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
502:Örneğin, 50 gr toz şekerin glisemik indeksi hızlı bir şekilde kan şekerini yükselttiği için çok yüksektir ve 100 (yüz) olarak kabul edilir. Diğer karbonhidrat içeren yiyeceklerin glisemik indeksleri ise 100 (yüz) üzerinden -100'e (yüze) oranla- hesaplanır. Karbonhidrat içeren yiyecekler düşük, orta ve yüksek glisemik indeksli olarak üç gruba ayrılır: • Yüksek Gİ: 100-70 • Orta Gİ: 70-50 • Düşük Gİ: 0-55 ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
503:And then there were the imaginary dragons, and the a-, anti- and minus- dragons (colloquially termed nots, noughts and oughtn'ts by the experts), the minuses being the most interesting on account of the well-known dracological paradox: when two minuses hypercontiguate (an operation in the algebra of dragons corresponding roughly to simple multiplication), the product is 0.6 dragon, a real nonplusser. ~ Stanis aw Lem, #NFDB
504:India Version 2.0 was now up and running. Indians championed their nation as a global superpower, expounding its potential to overtake everyone as the fastest-growing economy. Yet for all its advances and progression, this was still a country where, in a village in Orissa, a 2-year-old boy could be married off to a dog called Jyoti to ward off evil spirits and ease the bad omen of his rotting tooth. ~ Monisha Rajesh, #NFDB
505:The idea that the United States of American might shut down its government over abortion and funding to an organization that is 0.01% of the U.S. budget seems completely insane. Anyone looking at this debate around the world is thinking 'What is this country doing? They have three wars going on, they're trying to manage major problems and they're thinking of shutting down their government over abortion?' ~ Katty Kay, #NFDB
506:The primordial gases accounted for 98 percent of the material in the cloud from which our sun formed (hydrogen made up ca. 72 percent; helium, ca. 27 percent). But many other elements were also present, including carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen (which now account for 1.4 percent of all matter in the universe), and also iron, magnesium, silicon, sulfur, and neon (which account for another 0.5 percent). ~ David Christian, #NFDB
507:I said to myself & to my coleagues at Melwood that I'd probably never play for a better club with a better players than Liverpool ever again, Then I went to Real Madrid & in 2009 we met Liverpool in the CL first knock-out round. Liverpool beat us 5-0 on aggregate. I wasn't happy because my team had lost but I was happy with my promise. I did NOT play for a better club with a better players than LIVERPOOL ~ Jerzy Dudek, #NFDB
508:May obedience conquer disobedience within this house; may peace triumph here over discord; free-hearted giving over avarice, truthful speech over deceit, reverence over contempt. That our minds be delighted, and our souls uplifted, let our bodies be glorified as well; and 0 Light Divine, may we see Thee, and may we, approaching, come round about Thee, and attain unto Thine entire companionship! ~ Paramahansa Yogananda, #NFDB
509:Now the primary requirement of a AI based system is that not only it should serve humanity but also should not do any harm to the human liberty, society, environment and the humanity at large. Moreover, AI should act morally, socially, responsibly and compassionately. It should also prevent humanity from corrupt governments and other evil forces. This is Compassionate Artificial Superintelligence or "AI 5.0 ~ Amit Ray, #NFDB
510:if we consider the total growth of the US economy in the thirty years prior to the crisis, that is, from 1977 to 2007, we find that the richest 10 percent appropriated three-quarters of the growth. The richest 1 percent alone absorbed nearly 60 percent of the total increase of US national income in this period. Hence for the bottom 90 percent, the rate of income growth was less than 0.5 percent per year. ~ Thomas Piketty, #NFDB
511:The Moon’s low gravity and slow rotation mean that a space elevator could be built with materials already available. The honeycomb fiber called M5 is lighter and stronger than Kevlar; a ribbon 3 centimeters wide and 0.02 millimeter thick could support 2,000 kilograms on the lunar surface or 100 climbers with a mass of 600 kilos each, evenly spaced along the ribbon. We could build a lunar elevator right now. ~ Chris Impey, #NFDB
512:One of the key lessons of the Web 2.0 era is this: Users add value. But only a small percentage of users will go to the trouble of adding value to your application via explicit means. Therefore, Web 2.0 companies set inclusive defaults for aggregating user data and building value as a side-effect of ordinary use of the application. As noted above, they build systems that get better the more people use them. ~ Tim O Reilly, #NFDB
513:GASTRIC BYPASS SURGERY COMPLICATIONS: 14-YEAR FOLLOW-UP11 Vitamin B12 deficiency 239 39.9 percent Readmit for various reasons 229 38.2 percent Incisional hernia 143 23.9 percent Depression 142 23.7 percent Staple line failure 90 15.0 percent Gastritis 79 13.2 percent Cholecystitis 68 11.4 percent Anastomotic problems 59 9.8 percent Dehydration, malnutrition 35 5.8 percent Dilated pouch 19 3.2 percent ~ Joel Fuhrman, #NFDB
514:The new buzz word in Silicon Valley is "integration". Work-life "balance" is very 2.0. All these women share ways in which they integrate their family life and work. Facebook's head of Global Solutions, Carolyn Everson, for example, takes her children along on her business trips once a quarter. They meet her clients, visit new places and get a better understanding of what mom does when she isn't at home with them. ~ Willow Bay, #NFDB
515:This will gauge your thyroid health (optimal values included): TSH: optimal value: less than 2 μU/ML FREE T4: optimal value: more than 1.1 NG/DL FREE T3: optimal value: more than 3.0 PG/ML REVERSE T3: optimal value: less than a 10:1 ratio RT3:FT3 THYROID PEROXIDASE ANTIBODIES (TPOAB): optimal value: less than 4 IU/ML or negative THYROGLOBULIN ANTIBODIES (TGAB): optimal value: less than 4 IU/ML or negative Already ~ Kelly Brogan, #NFDB
516:Umanii faceau mereu lucruri pe care nu la placea sa le faca. De fapt, in conformitate cu cea mai buna estimare a mea, in orice moment dat, doar 0.3 procente dintre umani faceau, in mod activ, ceva ce le placea sa faca si, chiar si cand o faceau, simteau o cantitate arzatoare de vina in legatura cu asta si isi promiteau, cu ravna lor insisi ca se vor reintoarce la a face ceva oribil de neplacut foarte, foarte curand. ~ Matt Haig, #NFDB
517:Confronted with the twin disasters of climate change and an impending oil peak, it is hard to see how anyone could justify the assertion that the need to drive a car which can accelerate from 0 to 60 miles an hour in 4.5 seconds (the Audi S4 for example) overrides the Ethiopians' need to avoid recurrent famines, or the whole world's need to avoid the economic catastrophe we'll suffer if petroleum peaks too soon. ~ George Monbiot, #NFDB
518:ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND Lewis Carroll THE MILLENNIUM FULCRUM EDITION 3.0 CHAPTER I Down the Rabbit-Hole Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, 'and what is the use of a book,' thought Alice 'without pictures or conversation?' So ~ Lewis Carroll, #NFDB
519:Russians. They hate foreigners only a little less than they hate themselves, and they’re born conspirators. Oh, they know very well they’re superior, but your Russki is insecure, wants to be respected, to be feared like the old Soviet Union. They need recognition, and they hate their second-tier status in the superpower stakes. That’s why Putin’s putting together USSR 2.0, and no one is going to stand in his way. ~ Jason Matthews, #NFDB
520:Michael supposed this ship might be considered ArchAngel 0, since the original, ArchAngel I, had gone to the stars and was far superior to this craft. He guessed he was being a little romantic in wanting a ship named after one his love had flown out into the beyond. Or he really was self-absorbed, to name a ship after himself. While the information was belated, he preferred to think he was romantic over the truth. ~ Michael Anderle, #NFDB
521:the population of the world grew at an average annual rate of barely 0.8 percent between 1700 and 2012. Over three centuries, however, this meant that the global population increased more than tenfold. A planet with about 600 million inhabitants in 1700 had more than 7 billion in 2012 (see Figure 2.1). If this pace were to continue for the next three centuries, the world’s population would exceed 70 billion in 2300. ~ Thomas Piketty, #NFDB
522:44 7 The Energy Exchange Gradient: Gibbs Energy (G) Table 7.1 Standard Gibbs energy of formation (∆G ◦ ) for some well-known biological materials Substance ∆G ◦ (kJ mol −1 ) C 0 C6H12O6 −910.52 O2 0 H2 0 H2O −237.13 CO2 −394.36 Similar to the [products–reactants] methodology seen previously with ∆H and ∆S, the change in Gibbs energy of a given chemical reaction is defined as: ∆G ◦ reaction = ∆G ◦ products − ∆G ◦ reactants ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
523:A window of opportunity might present itself in tomorrow's battle. The odds of that happening may be 0.1 percent, or even 0.01 percent, but if I could improve my combat skills even the slightest bit- if that window were to open even a crack- I'd find a way to force it open wide. If I could learn to jump every hurdle this little track meet of death threw at me, maybe someday I'll wake up in a world with a tomorrow. ~ Hiroshi Sakurazaka, #NFDB
524:Equal pay is not yet equal. A woman makes $0.77 on a dollar and women of color make $0.67... We feel so passionately about this because we are not only running for office, but we each, in our own way, have lived it. We have seen it. We have understood the pain and the injustice that has come because of race, because of gender. And it's imperative that... we make it very clear that each of us will address these issues. ~ Hillary Clinton, #NFDB
525:In fact, during this study, the highest levels of blood ketones detected was 0.34mmol/L. True diabetic ketoacidosis typically appears at blood ketone levels of 10-20mmol/L, at least 30-fold higher than the highest level recorded throughout this study. That means that even women subjected to very-low-calorie diets (which, in this case, were also low in carbohydrates) didn’t experience harmful levels of ketones in their blood. ~ Lily Nichols, #NFDB
526:My eyes flipped open at exactly six A.M. This was no avian fluttering of the lashes, no gentle blink toward consciousness. The awakening was mechanical. A spooky ventriloquist-dummy click of the lids: The world is black and then, showtime! 6-0-0 the clock said -in my face, first thing I saw. 6-0-0. It felt different. I rarely woke at such a rounded time. I was a man of jagged risings: 8:43, 11:51, 9:26. My life was alarmless. ~ Gillian Flynn, #NFDB
527:Repertitious has not had nearly the success in entering the language that serendipitous has had, most likely because its PR team isn’t nearly as good. The noun form of the latter, serendipity, was made up in the 1750s by the novelist Horace Walpole, based on Serendip (a former name for Sri Lanka). Repertitious, on the other hand, has its first mention in Thomas Blount’s dictionary of 1656. Writers—1, lexicographers—0. Resentient ~ Ammon Shea, #NFDB
528:If we move even higher up the salary and bonus scale to look at the top 0.1 or 0.01 percent, we find even greater increases, with hikes in purchasing power greater than 50 percent in ten years.22 In a context of very low growth and virtual stagnation of purchasing power for the vast majority of workers, raises of this magnitude for top earners have not failed to attract attention. Furthermore, the phenomenon was radically new, ~ Thomas Piketty, #NFDB
529:I think it was good, we wanted to win no matter if it was 1-0 or 8-2, we got to win. The Russians are a great team, but so are we. So we've gotta prepare the way we can and play the way we can tomorrow. I think that every game, every practice together we've continue to get better. It's tough in these short tournaments you gotta bond quickly and you've gotta have good chemistry; so hopefully now we can build on that and keep going. ~ Shea Weber, #NFDB
530:This section begged the same sort of question as the first. Was there an Unreasonable Mathematics test? How would that work? Would it have questions like Sally and Sammy were angry at each other. They went to KFC and got an 8-piece bucket. How did they divide the bucket? A) 4/4 B) 2/6 C) 6/2 or D) 0/0. The answer was obviously D. They’re unreasonable, so they would throw the chicken on the floor so the other wouldn’t get any. ~ Marshall Thornton, #NFDB
531:The church has been so harsh with heretics only because she deemed that there is no worse enemy than a child who has gone astray. But the record of Gnostic effronteries and the persistence of Manichean currents have contributed more to the construction of orthodox dogma than all the prayers. ~ Albert Camus, in "Absurd Creation" in The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), as translated by Justin O'Brien, Vantage International, 1991, ISBN 0-679-73373-6, p. 113, #NFDB
532:0 true and heavenly grace, without which our own merits are nothing, and our natural gifts of no account! Neither arts nor riches, beauty nor strength, genius nor eloquence have any value in Your eyes, Lord, unless allied to grace. For the gifts of nature are common to good men and bad alike, but grace or love are Your especial gift to those whom You choose, and those who are sealed with this are counted worthy of life everlasting. ~ Thomas Kempis, #NFDB
533:If the actors speaking Dothraki or High Valyrian or Castithan or whatever make a mistake, who would know but the creator? Who would care? The truth is probably one in a thousand people will notice, and of those who do, maybe a quarter will care. In the 1980s that amounts to nothing. In the new millennium, though, one quarter of 0.001 percent can constitute a significant minority on Twitter. Or on Tumblr. Or Facebook. Or Reddit. Or ~ David J Peterson, #NFDB
534:It seems like thin people should not be running around dissing overweight people, and overweight people should not be running around dissing thinner people... if you like your body, love it, if you feel beautiful, cool. If you're a size 24 and you are feeling fierce, heat. If you're a size 0 and feeling fierce, be fierce. I think we need to stop worrying about what other people are doing and start focusing on manifesting on ourselves. ~ Kelly Cutrone, #NFDB
535:Se fazer fosse tão fácil como saber o que se deve fazer bem, as capelas teriam sido igrejas e as choupanas dos pobres, palácios principescos. Bom predicador é o que segue suas próprias instruções. Ume mais fácil ensinar a vinte pessoas como devem comportar-se, do que ser uma das vinte, para seguir a minha própria doutrina. 0 cérebro pode inventar leis para o sangue, mas os temperamentos ardentes saltam por cima de um decreto frio. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
536:The Great Pyramid's base can be drawn to accommodate John Michell's New Jerusalem diagram to show how both firmly tied they get to their foundation figure of the Squared Circle. With 6 months projecting half the base's area, we also get 432 per year for counting the decans on monthly basis where each month corresponds to 30 Royal Cubits (0.5236*180/pi=30), and 180 RCs (0.5236*6=PI) project half a circle/rotation (i.e. 6) of 12 months. ~ Ibrahim Ibrahim, #NFDB
537:……At some point, it dawns on you that this is the afterlife: the world is only made up of people you've met before.
It's a small fraction of the world population — about 0.00002 percent — but it seems like plenty to you…[…]
The missing crowds make you lonely. You begin to complain about all the people you could be meeting. But no one listens or sympathizes with you, because this is precisely what you chose when you were alive. ~ David Eagleman,#NFDB
538:Despite its greater sophistication and higher aspirations, Motivation 2.0 still wasn’t exactly ennobling. It suggested that, in the end, human beings aren’t much different from livestock—that the way to get us moving in the right direction is by dangling a crunchier carrot or wielding a sharper stick. But what this operating system lacked in enlightenment, it made up for in effectiveness. It worked well—extremely well. Until it didn’t. As ~ Daniel H Pink, #NFDB
539:The Soviet Union suffered 65 percent of all Allied military deaths, China 23 percent, Yugoslavia 3 percent, the United States and Britain 2 percent each, France and Poland 1 percent each. About 8 percent of all Germans died, compared with 2 percent of Chinese, 3.44 percent of Dutch people, 6.67 percent of Yugoslavs, 4 percent of Greeks, 1.35 percent of French, 3.78 percent of Japanese, 0.94 percent of British and 0.32 percent of Americans. ~ Max Hastings, #NFDB
540:C o n s ume r goo d s are attract i v e a n d p l e a s u rable e n o u g h o n t h e i r o w n witho u t t h e i de o l o g i c al e l emen t ; t h e y don ' t n e e d a d e mo c ra t i c s u p p l eme n t . T h e tre a tme n t o f c o n sume r good s a s markers o f e q u al i ty a n d i n d ic ators of d emo c ra c y wa s for the Sov i e t o t h e r b e fore whos e j u dg i n g g a z e t h e U S i m ag in e d i t s e lf. 2 I bi d . , 2 0 4 ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
541:Dereferencing pointers in Cython is different than in C. Because the Python language already uses the *args and **kwargs syntax to allow arbitrary positional and keyword arguments and to support function argument unpacking, Cython does not support the *a syntax to dereference a C pointer. Instead, we index into the pointer at location 0 to dereference a pointer in Cython. This syntax also works to dereference a pointer in C, although that’s rare. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
542:Thus, oxytocin and vasopressin facilitate bonding between parent and child and between couples.fn10 Now for something truly charming that evolution has cooked up recently. Sometime in the last fifty thousand years (i.e., less than 0.1 percent of the time that oxytocin has existed), the brains of humans and domesticated wolves evolved a new response to oxytocin: when a dog and its owner (but not a stranger) interact, they secrete oxytocin. ~ Robert M Sapolsky, #NFDB
543:0.8-standard-deviation increase in the average sprinting ability in West Africans would be expected to lead to a hundredfold enrichment in the proportion of people above the 99.9999999th percentile point in Europeans. But an alternative explanation that would predict the same magnitude of effect is that there is simply more variation in sprinting ability in people of West African ancestry—with more people of both very high and very low abilities. ~ David Reich, #NFDB
544:Where did the substance of the universe come from? . . If 0 equals ( + 1) + (-1),
then something which is 0 might just as well become + 1 and -1. Perhaps in an
infinite sea of nothingness, globs of positive and negative energy in equal-sized pairs
are constantly forming, and after passing through evolutionary changes, combining
once more and vanishing. We are in one of these globs between nothing and nothing
and wondering about it. ~ Isaac Asimov,#NFDB
545:Mathematicians call it “the arithmetic of congruences.” You can think of it as clock arithmetic. Temporarily replace the 12 on a clock face with 0. The 12 hours of the clock now read 0, 1, 2, 3, … up to 11. If the time is eight o’clock, and you add 9 hours, what do you get? Well, you get five o’clock. So in this arithmetic, 8 + 9 = 5; or, as mathematicians say, 8 + 9 ≡ 5 (mod 12), pronounced “eight plus nine is congruent to five, modulo twelve. ~ John Derbyshire, #NFDB
546:Otro aspecto esencial del código abierto es que los usuarios pueden fabricar los productos por sí mismos, si quieren; no necesitan pagar por ello. Lo cual es magnífico para el 0,1 por ciento del usuario básico, que muchas veces es la mejor fuente de ideas e innovaciones en torno al producto. Pero la realidad es que el otro 99,9 por ciento de usuarios más bien pagarían para que alguien se los fabricase si les garantizan que funcionarán. Éste es el ~ Chris Anderson, #NFDB
547:Take the Traders’ method of timekeeping. The frame corrections were incredibly complex – and down at the very bottom of it was a little program that ran a counter. Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth’s moon. But if you looked at it still more closely … the starting instant was actually about fifteen million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind’s first computer operating systems. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
548:Reading is a way to live more lives, to experience more worlds, to meet people we care about and want to know more about, to understand others and develop a compassion for what they confront and endure. It is a way to learn how to knit or build a house or solve an equation, a way to be moved to laughter and wonder and to learn how to live. ~ Roxanne J. Coady in Roxanne J. Coady and Joy Johannessen (eds.) The Book That Changed My Life (2006), ISBN 1-592-40210-0, p. xiv, #NFDB
549:I think the body image thing, everybody can identify with that. In our culture there's just so much pressure and so much attention placed on the way we look. You just turn on the TV or flip open a magazine and there's people who don't look like any of us. I think this movie is like, finally, a celebration of reality and of our imperfections. We're not all a size 2 and we're not all a size 0, and you know what? That's OK, because some of us like to eat! ~ America Ferrera, #NFDB
550:More evidence against abstinence-only programs may be gleaned from the 2013 National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health published in the British Medical Journal and conducted by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill between 1995 and 2009 on more than seventy-eight hundred women; remarkably, it was discovered that 0.5 percent—or one in two hundred—of adolescent girls had reported that they’d become pregnant without sex. Are ~ Michael Shermer, #NFDB
551:NBA players made roughly the same percentage of shots from 23 feet as they did from 24. But because the three-point line ran between them, the values of those two shots were radically different. Shot attempts from 23 feet had an average value of 0.76 points, while 24-footers were worth 1.09. This, the Warriors concluded, was an opportunity. By moving back a few inches before shooting, a basketball player could improve his rate of return by 43 percent.41 ~ Michael W Covel, #NFDB
552:9. Solving quadratic equations: using a standard formula and by completing the square Solve each of the following quadratic equations twice: once by using the formula, then again by completing the square. Obtain your answers in surd, not decimal, form.1. x 2 + 8x + 1 = 0 2. x 2 + 7x − 2 = 0 3. x 2 + 6x − 2 = 0 4. 4x 2 + 3x − 2 = 0 5. 2x 2 + 3x − 1 = 0 6. x 2 + x − 1 = 0 7.−x 2 + 3x + 1 = 0 8.−2x 2 − 3x + 1 = 0 9. 2x 2 + 5x − 3 = 0 10.−2s 2 − s + 3 = 0 11. 9x 2 ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
553:US Ship: Please change course 0.5 degrees to the south to avoid a collision. CND reply: Recommend you divert your course 15 degrees to the South to avoid a collision. US Ship: This is the Captain of a US Navy Ship. I say again, divert your course. CND reply: No. I say again, you divert YOUR course! US Ship: THIS IS THE AIRCRAFT CARRIER USS CORAL SEA, WE ARE A LARGE WARSHIP OF THE US NAVY. DIVERT YOUR COURSE NOW!! CND reply: This is a lighthouse. Your call. ~ Presh Talwalkar, #NFDB
554:There is one brain organ that is optimised for understanding and articulating logical processes and that is the outer layer of the brain, called the cerebral cortex. Unlike the rest of the brain, this relatively recent evolutionary development is rather flat, only about 0.32 cm (0.12 in) thick and includes a mere 6 million neurons. This elaborately folded organ provides us with what little competence we do possess for understanding what we do and who we do it. ~ Ray Kurzweil, #NFDB
555:Zawinski: Sometimes. I end up doing all the sysadmin crap, which I can't stand-I've never liked it. I enjoy working on XScreenSaver because in some ways screen savers-the actual display modes rather than the XScreenSaver framework-are the perfect program because they almost always start from scratch and they do something pretty and there's never a version 2.0. There's very rarely a bug in a screen saver. It crashes-oh, there's a divide-by-zero and you fix that. ~ Peter Seibel, #NFDB
556:only between 5 percent and 20 percent of forcible rapes in the United States are reported to the police; a paltry 0.4 percent to 5.4 percent of rapes are ever prosecuted; and just 0.2 percent to 2.8 percent of forcible rapes culminate in a conviction that includes any time in jail for the assailant. Here’s another way to think about these numbers: When an individual is raped in this country, more than 90 percent of the time the rapist gets away with the crime. — ~ Jon Krakauer, #NFDB
557:Between 1750 and 2000 the number of human beings increased from approximately 770 million to almost 6 billion, close to an eightfold increase in just 250 years. This increase is the equivalent of a growth rate of about 0.8 percent per annum and represents a doubling time of about eighty-five years. (Compare this with estimated doubling times of fourteen hundred years during the agrarian era and eight thousand to nine thousand years during the era of foragers.) ~ David Christian, #NFDB
558:Earth’s axis precesses 360 degrees in 25,772 years; which means that it precesses one degree in 71.5888 years marking thereby an offset of 0.4111 from a full 72 years. This offset scales up the precessional cycle by an amount of 148 years - which happens to equal the exact amount of days in the ancient Egyptian calendar of 360 days (i.e., 0.4111*360=148). In other words, the precision of the precession is already encoded in the decanal calendar of ancient Egypt. ~ Ibrahim Ibrahim, #NFDB
559:Your Financial Mission To secure your basic needs both now and in the future, and to do nothing that would harm your ability to secure them on an ongoing basis. Three Strategies to Accomplish Your Mission 1. Live below your means and save the rest for a rainy day. 2. If at all possible, live without using debt. 3. Follow a financial road map. A Financial Road Map That Supports Your Mission Step 0: On a monthly basis, make sure you are not spending more than you earn. ~ Erik Wecks, #NFDB
560:There are roughly 28 million firms in the US, of which only 4% ever reach more than $1 million in revenue. Of those firms, only about one out of 10, or 0.4% of all companies, ever make it to $10 million in revenue, and only 17,000 companies surpass $50 million. Finishing out the list, the top 2,500 firms in the US are larger than $500 million, and the top 500 public and private firms exceed $5 billion. Data indicate that there are similar ratios in other countries. ~ Verne Harnish, #NFDB
561:I felt so strange. Mac 1.0, bartender, daydreamer, and professional sun worshipper, would have wanted nothing more than to pass off any and all responsibility to someone else. To be taken care of. Not to be the one taking care. I no longer knew that woman. I liked making the hard decisions and fighting the good fight. Getting to lay down responsibility no longer felt like relinquishing a burden—it felt like being shut out of the most important parts of my life. ~ Karen Marie Moning, #NFDB
562:One curve I'll always remember was when I was pitching for Pittsburgh. Terry Kennedy was a young player with St. Louis. I threw him an 0-2 curve and it snapped. Terry's reaction was to swing straight down, like he was chopping the plate with an axe. It was the last out of the inning. After I ran off the mound, I looked over at the St. Louis dugout. There were players rolling around on the floor, laughing. Poor Terry. I'll have to admit that was a hell of a curveball. ~ Bert Blyleven, #NFDB
563:The Gods on the death of his wife Yang Kai-hui I lost my proud poplar and you your willow As poplar and willow they soar straight up into the ninth heaven and ask the prisoner of the moon, Wu Kang' what is there. He offers them wine from the cassia tree. The lonely lady on the moon, Chang 0, spreads her vast sleeves and dances for these good souls in the unending sky. Down on earth a sudden report of the tiger's defeat. Tears fly down from a great upturned bowl of rain. ~ Mao Zedong, #NFDB
564:By selecting and growing those few species of plants and animals that we can eat, so that they constitute 90 percent rather than 0.1 percent of the biomass on an acre of land, we obtain far more edible calories per acre. As a result, one acre can feed many more herders and farmers—typically, 10 to 100 times more—than hunter-gatherers. That strength of brute numbers was the first of many military advantages that food-producing tribes gained over hunter-gatherer tribes. ~ Jared Diamond, #NFDB
565:John Cadman says that he and the acoustic engineers are demonstrating that the King‘s chamber and the coffer in the Great Pyramid are tuned to resonate at a specific frequency, i.e. 440Hz. This confirms my discovery of the theological application of the Great Pyramid since the projecting factor that triggers that frequency equals to 3 (i.e. 440/146.6) which happens to be the same factor that modulates the flow of the barque in one single step (i.e. 440 * 0.5236/77). ~ Ibrahim Ibrahim, #NFDB
566:public class MergeBU
{
private static Comparable[] aux; // auxiliary array for merges
// See page 271 for merge() code.
public static void sort(Comparable[] a)
{ // Do lg N passes of pairwise merges.
int N = a.length;
aux = new Comparable[N];
for (int sz = 1; sz < N; sz = sz+sz) // sz: subarray size
for (int lo = 0; lo < N-sz; lo += sz+sz) // lo: subarray index
merge(a, lo, lo+sz-1, Math.min(lo+sz+sz-1, N-1));
}
} ~ Robert Sedgewick,#NFDB
567:Ultimately, Leibniz argued, there are only two absolutely simple concepts, God and Nothingness. From these, all other concepts may be constructed, the world, and everything within it, arising from some primordial argument between the deity and nothing whatsoever. And then, by some inscrutable incandescent insight, Leibniz came to see that what is crucial in what he had written is the alternation between God and Nothingness. And for this, the numbers 0 and 1 suffice. ~ David Berlinski, #NFDB
568:The Internet will not become a money machine until the banking industry figures out how to transfer money for free so you can charge USD 0.005 (half a cent) for some simple service like, say, reading a newspaper article you have searched for. With today's payment system, the cost of the transfer of the funds completely dwarf the cost of the service paid for. ... This situation, however, is what acutely prevents the Internet from taking off as a network for paid services. ~ Erik Naggum, #NFDB
569:As it turned out, Microsoft wasn’t able to get Windows 1.0 ready for shipping until the fall of 1985. Even then, it was a shoddy product. It lacked the elegance of the Macintosh interface, and it had tiled windows rather than the magical clipping of overlapping windows that Bill Atkinson had devised. Reviewers ridiculed it and consumers spurned it. Nevertheless, as is often the case with Microsoft products, persistence eventually made Windows better and then dominant. ~ Walter Isaacson, #NFDB
570:God," prayed my grandmother, "purge the devil from this poor boy's body! Just look at all those sores! They make me sick, God! Look at them! It's the devil, God, dwelling in this boy's body. Purge the devil from his body, Lord!"
"God," said my grandmother, "why do you allow the devil to dwell inside this body's body? Don't you see how the devil is enjoying this? Look at these sores, 0 Lord, I am about to vomit just looking at them! They are red and big and full! ~ Charles Bukowski,#NFDB
571:Sık kullandığımız bazı sebzelerin (çiğ olarak) 100 üzerinden glisemik indeks değerleri şöyledir: • Lahana (her türlüsü), karnabahar, brokoli = 0 • Enginar, kereviz = 0 (karaciğer için sağlıklı olarak bilinmelerinin nedeni de, sıfır düzeyde karbonhidrat içermelerinden dolayıdır!) • Patlıcan, kabak, biber (yeşil, kırmızı) = 0 • Salatalık, domates, marul, kuru soğan = 0 • Taze yeşil fasulye = 48 • Turp (her türlüsü) = 15 • Yer elması = 15 • Çiğ havuç = 40, (havuç haşlanınca = 70) ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
572:E-learning as we know it has been around for ten years or so. During that time, it has emerged from being a radical idea---the effectiveness of which was yet to be proven---to something that is widely regarded as mainstream. It's the core to numerous business plans and a service offered by most colleges and universities. And now, e-learning is evolving with the World Wide Web as a whole and it's changing to a degree significant enough to warrant a new name: E-learning 2.0. ~ Stephen Downes, #NFDB
573:Over the past 60 years, marketing has moved from being product-centric (Marketing 1.0) to being consumer-centric (Marketing 2.0). Today we see marketing as transforming once again in response to the new dynamics in the environment. We see companies expanding their focus from products to consumers to humankind issues. Marketing 3.0 is the stage when companies shift from consumer-centricity to human-centricity and where profitability is balanced with corporate responsibility. ~ Philip Kotler, #NFDB
574:THE LARGEST SINGLE COMPONENT of the federal budget, and perhaps the greatest and most financially devastating burden imposed on younger people and future generations, is the Social Security program. This is not a recent development. Since 1993, it has outspent defense appropriations. As a percentage of federal spending, Social Security’s expenditures have ranged from 0.22 percent during World War II to 24 percent in 2013.1 And Social Security costs are actually skyrocketing. ~ Mark R Levin, #NFDB
575:Education 2000 was designed to increase our children's learning capacity while destroying their ability to critically think for themselves. You can learn more about Education 2000, also referred to as America 2000 and Global 2000, through reading: Educating for the New World Order by B.K. Eakman, published by Halcyon House ISBN # 0-89420-278-2-3441000, and A Critique of America 2000: An Educational Strategy by Kathi Simonds, published by Citizens for Excellence in Education. ~ Cathy O Brien, #NFDB
576:As for building something users love, here are some general tips. Start by making something clean and simple that you would want to use yourself. Get a version 1.0 out fast, then continue to improve the software, listening closely to users as you do. The customer is always right, but different customers are right about different things; the least sophisticated users show you what you need to simplify and clarify, and the most sophisticated tell you what features you need to add. ~ Paul Graham, #NFDB
577:Getting even was the basis of many primate semantic confusions, such as"expropriating the expropriators," "an absolute crime demands an absolute penalty," "they did it to me so I can do it to them," and, in general, the emotional mathematics of "one plus one equals zero" (1 + 1 = 0).
The primates were so dumb they didn't realize that one plus one equals two (1 + 1 = 2) and one murder plus one murder equals two murders, one crime plus one crime equals two crimes, etc. ~ Robert Anton Wilson,#NFDB
578:Now, 2.6 million years after we started making tools, the last 0.016 per cent of our history as produced the most change, an exponential curve turning vertical. It's why I keep saying 'a recent idea' to anything less than a couple of centuries old. That change is young, its paint is still wet. And it's still external, due to mechanisation and its effects, it hasn't really changed humans except to make the affluent fat—and by affluent I mean anyone who shits in good drinking water. ~ D B C Pierre, #NFDB
579:universe is almost incompatible with life—or at least what we understand as necessary for life: Even if every star in a hundred billion galaxies had an Earthlike planet, without heroic technological measures life could prosper in only about 10-37 the volume of the Universe. For clarity, let’s write it out: only 0.000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 1 of our universe is hospitable to life. Thirty-six zeroes before the one. The rest is cold, radiation-riddled black vacuum. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
580:Cancer can be attacked directly by metabolic enzymes and then be assisted by the enzyme diet programme. The second greatest cancer breakthrough of the 20th century is the metabolic organic effect on malignant tumours of correcting the body fluid pH to a non-acidic pH 7.1 to 7.5. A neutral pH 7.0 resists cancer formation. An acid body fluid pH of 6.44 and below permits tumours to biochemically become malignant. At pH 7.5 cancer may become inactive; at 8.5 tumours may disintegrate. ~ Benjamin Carson, #NFDB
581:40 Million Invisible Planes In 2016 a total of 40 million commercial passenger flights landed safely at their destinations. Only ten ended in fatal accidents. Of course, those were the ones the journalists wrote about: 0.000025 percent of the total. Safe flights are not newsworthy. Imagine: “Flight BA0016 from Sydney arrived in Singapore Changi airport without any problems. And that was today’s news.” 2016 was the second safest year in aviation history. That is not newsworthy either. ~ Hans Rosling, #NFDB
582:Maybe God isn't the sex police, Richard. Sometimes I think Christians get all hung up on the sex thing because it's easier to worry about sex than to ask yourself, am I a good person? […] It makes it easy to be cruel, because as long as you're not fucking around, nothing you do can be that bad. Is that really all you think of God? ~ Anita Blake, to Richard Zeeman ~ Laurell K. Hamilton (June 2007). "chapter 44". The Harlequin (1st edition ed.). Berkley Books. pp. pp. 391-392. ISBN 978-0-425-21724-5., #NFDB
583:Ufak bir karınca 1 milimetre kadardır. Bu, 1000 mikrometreye denk gelir. İnsanın ortalama kalınlıktaki bir saçı 80-100 mikrometre arasıdır. Mikoplazmalar ise bunlardan çok daha ufaktır. Klasik bir bakteriden bile çok ufaktırlar ve 0.1-0,3 µm civarında boya sahiptirler. Bu yüzden "ultramikrobakteri" olarak da anılırlar. Öyle ki, en küçük canlı-benzeri cansız formlarından biri olan virüsler 0.02-0.25 mikrometre arasında değişirler. Yani bazı mikoplazmalar, bazı virüslerden bile küçüktür! ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
584:I know of an ‘older boy’ who stuck to his own path without rotting despite being a Level 0. On that day back then when he spoke with his back turned and protecting me, he clearly surpassed me and my all-too-pathetic Level 5 ability. Your actual skill doesn’t matter. Coolly calculating out all the numbers is pointless. No matter how many arguments you prepare, you have no choice but to accept defeat once he walks in from beyond the horizon. I am very familiar with a Level 0 like that☆ ~ Kazuma Kamachi, #NFDB
585:put the facts very briefly, but they are indisputable. Education. The percentage to the whole population of children receiving education is 2.8, the percentage having risen by 0.9 since Mr. Gokhale moved his Education Bill six years ago. The percentage of children of school-going age attending school is 18.7. In 1913 the Government of India put the number of pupils at 4-1/2 millions; this has been accomplished in 63 years, reckoning from Sir Charles Wood's Educational Despatch in 1854, ~ Annie Besant, #NFDB
586:Vernor Vinge's novel, A Deepness in the Sky, describes a spacefaring trading civilization tens of thousands of years (hundreds of gigaseconds) in the future that apparently still uses the Unix epoch. The "programmer-archaeologist" responsible for finding and maintaining usable code in mature computer systems first believes that the epoch refers to the time when man first walked on the Moon, but then realizes that it is "the 0-second of one of Humankind’s first computer operating systems. ~ Vernor Vinge, #NFDB
587:Note, moreover, that the demographic growth anticipated for the second half of the twenty-first century (0.2 percent in the period 2050–2100) is entirely due to the continent of Africa (with annual growth of 1 percent). On the three other continents, the population will probably either stagnate (0.0 percent in America) or decrease (−0.1 percent in Europe and −0.2 percent in Asia). Such a prolonged period of negative demographic growth in peacetime would be unprecedented (see Table 2.3). ~ Thomas Piketty, #NFDB
588:As we already know from the poverty numbers, the bottom fifth of families gained very little. The growth in their average incomes was less than 0.2 percent a year over the past forty-four years and, even before the recession, their real incomes were no higher than they had been in the late 1970s. Average incomes of the top fifth, by contrast, grew more quickly, at 1.6 percent a year, though not as quickly as those of the top 5 percent, whose average incomes grew at 2.1 percent a year. Once ~ Angus Deaton, #NFDB
589:Life 1.0”: life where both the hardware and software are evolved rather than designed. You and I, on the other hand, are examples of “Life 2.0”: life whose hardware is evolved, but whose software is largely designed. By your software, I mean all the algorithms and knowledge that you use to process the information from your senses and decide what to do—everything from the ability to recognize your friends when you see them to your ability to walk, read, write, calculate, sing and tell jokes. ~ Max Tegmark, #NFDB
590:[of 1933] will be fully justified if it drives the government into the investment banking business. (William 0. Douglas)'
' In correspondence to Felix Frankfurter on February 19, 1934, quoted in Skeel (2001: 123).
Justice Harold R. Medina stated in 1954 that 'it would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of investment banking to the national econ- omy.'2 This remark remains true today. Investment banks lie at the heart of the capital allocation process in both America and England, and ~ Anonymous,#NFDB
591:When Social Security began making monthly distributions in 1940, there were 160 workers for every senior receiving benefits. In 1950, there were 16.5; today, 3; in 20 years, there will be but 2. Now, the average senior receives in Social Security about a third of what the average worker makes. Applying that ratio retroactively, this means that in 1940, the average worker had to pay only 0.2% of his salary to sustain the older folks of his time; in 1950, 2%; today, 11%; in 20 years, 17%. ~ Charles Krauthammer, #NFDB
592:I O N S c. Suppose that public policy raises the saving production function, but they have different parameter values. Atlantis has a saving rate of 28 percent and a population growth rate of 1 percent per year. Xanadu has a saving rate of 10 percent and a population growth rate of 4 percent per year. In both countries, g = 0.02 and = 0.04. Find the steady-state value of y for each country.2. In the United States, the capital share of GDP is about 30 percent, the average growth in output is about ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
593:California has often led the country, indeed the world, in the technology, consumption, trends, lifestyles, and of course, mass entertainment. It is where the car found its earliest and fullest expression, where suburbs blossomed, where going to gym replaced going to church, where forces that lead so many to assume that direct democracy is the wave of the future - declining political parties, telecommuting, new technology, the internet generation 0 are all most well developed in this vast land. ~ Fareed Zakaria, #NFDB
594:Pomyślałem sobie, że laptop będzie działał na zewnątrz. To tylko elektronika, nie? Będzie wystarczająco ciepły, żeby działać przez krótki czas na zewnątrz, no i nie potrzebuje powietrza. Natychmiast się rozwalił. Ekran poczerniał, zanim opuściłem śluzę. Wygląda na to, że L w LCD nie znalazło się przypadkiem. Znaczy, że to jest ekran ciekłokrystaliczny. Zgaduję, że albo kryształy wyparowały, albo się zamroziły. Może napiszę opinię klienta. „Zabrałem go na powierzchnię Marsa i przestał działać. 0/10”. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
595:Efficiency alone doesn’t guarantee effectiveness, however. An engineer who efficiently builds infrastructure that can scale to millions of requests for an internal tool that would be used by at most a hundred people isn’t effective. Nor is someone who builds a feature that only 0.1% of users adopt, when other features could reach 10% adoption—unless that 0.1% generates disproportionately more business value. Effective engineers focus on value and impact—they know how to choose which results to deliver. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
596:I agree with those who say that managers are responsible for making personal coaches available to their employees, but they should not aim to fulfill this role themselves. I am against the idea of “managers as coaches”. My first argument is that managers should manage the system, not the people.Therefore, personal coaching is not a primary task in the manager’s role.[Appelo, Management 3.0 loc:4754] Management’s responsibility is the coaching capability of the system, not the day-to-day implementation of ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
597:It is possible for one with a well-trained memory to compose clearly in an organized fashion on several different subjects. Once one has the all-important starting-place of the ordering scheme and the contents firmly in their places within it, it is quite possible to move back and forth from one distinct composition to another without losing one's place or becoming confused. ~ Mary Carruthers, (1990). The Book of Memory (first ed.). Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-38282-3. (limited preview on Google Books), p.7, #NFDB
598:Motivation 1.0 presumed that humans were biological creatures, struggling to obtain our basic needs for food, security and sex.
Motivation 2.0 presumed that humans also responded to rewards and punishments. That worked fine for routine tasks but incompatible with how we organize what we do, how we think about what we do, and how
we do what we do. We need an upgrade.
Motivation 3.0, the upgrade we now need, presumes that humans also have a drive to learn, to create, and to better the world. ~ Daniel H Pink,#NFDB
599:Claire Colebrook following Gilles Deleuze differentiates a philosophical concept from an everyday concept. Rather help fully for my purposes she uses the concept of happiness to make her point. As she describes: «our day-to-day usage of concepts works like shorthand or habit; we use concepts so that we do not have to think" ( 2 0 0 2 : 15). A philo sophical concept of happiness, she suggests, "would not refer to this or that instance of happiness: it would enact or create a new possibility or thought of happiness (17 ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
600:It's humbling to realise that the developmental gulf between a miniscule ant colony and our modern human civilisation is only a tiny fraction of the distance between a Type 0 and a Type III civilisation - a factor of 100 billion billion, in fact. Yet we have such a highly regarded view of ourselves, we believe a Type III civilisation would find us irresistible and would rush to make contact with us. The truth is, however, they may be as interested in communicating with humans as we are keen to communicate with ants. ~ Michio Kaku, #NFDB
601:People have been beaten to death in front of crowds that could easily overtake the attacker. The bigger the crowd, the more likely it is that nobody will intervene. The principle is called "diffusion of responsibility," and boils down to the pressure for conformity overwhelming the need to act. Any guilt over not acting is shared between the people not acting. You didn't stand by and watch someone get killed, after all. It was a crowd of 1000. You only stood around to the tune of 0.1% of the incident as a whole. ~ Johnny B Truant, #NFDB
602:Robin Schnapper (DOB – 6/6/1951) Meds & Surgeries - (Updated: 7/11/13) Gilenya - ( 0.5 mg) - 1 in a.m. HCTZ - ( 25 mg) - 1 in a.m. Ranitidine - ( 150 mg) - 1 in a.m. Cymbalta - ( 60 mg) - 1 in a.m. Synthroid - (0.5 mg) - 1 in a.m. Provigil - (150 mg) - 1 in a.m./1 by 2 pm Lipitor - ( 10 mg) - 1 in p.m. Gabapentin - (600 mg) - 2 in p.m./2 in a.m. Lunesta - ( 3mg). - 1 in p.m. Flexeril - (10mg) - 1 in p.m. as needed Caltrate & Vit. D3 - (400 IU + Calcium 600 --- mg) - 1 in p.m. Vitamin D3 - (2000 IU) - 2 in p.m. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
603:Some have asked whether a language can communicate complicated information with only eleven phonemes. A computer scientist knows, however, that computers can communicate anything we program them to do, and that they do this with only two “letters” — 1 and 0, which can be thought of as phonemes. Morse code also has only two “letters,” long and short.
And that is all any language needs. In fact, a language could get by with a single phoneme. In such a language words might look like a, aa, aaa, aaaa, and so on. ~ Daniel L Everett,#NFDB
604:Q. What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90 percent the speed of light? —Ellen McManis Let’s set aside the question of how we got the baseball moving that fast. We’ll suppose it’s a normal pitch, except in the instant the pitcher releases the ball, it magically accelerates to 0.9c. From that point onward, everything proceeds according to normal physics. A. The answer turns out to be “a lot of things,” and they all happen very quickly, and it doesn’t end well for the batter (or the pitcher). I ~ Randall Munroe, #NFDB
605:Polska znalazła się w 2014 r. na ostatnim miejscu pod względem proporcji dochodu narodowego brutto przeznaczanego na pomoc rozwojową (po to by w biednych krajach żyło się trochę lepiej). W 2014 r. zmniejszyła się ona z 0,1 proc. dochodu narodowego brutto do 0,08. Złamaliśmy w ten sposób uroczyście powzięte przez rząd zobowiązania, z których wynikało, że w tym roku powinniśmy wydawać na pomoc 0,33 proc. dochodu narodowego. To postawa uderzająca w kraju, który od trzech dziesięcioleci garściami bierze pieniądze od obcych. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
606:While you don’t want to make career moves on 0 percent information, you also don’t want to wait till you have 100 percent information—or else you’ll wait forever. Jetting off to vacation in Hawaii with no set itinerary introduces many uncertainties about what will transpire, but it’s not particularly risky. After all, how likely are you to have a bad time in Hawaii? But the biggest and best opportunities frequently are the ones with the most question marks. Don’t let uncertainty lull you into overestimating the risk. ~ Reid Hoffman, #NFDB
607:Where the fuck’ve you been? It’s been over a month. Pull a stunt like that again without telling me what you’re doing first, and I’m chaining you to my bed when you get back.”
Was that supposed to be a deterrent or an incentive? I pictured myself sprawled on my back, his dark head moving between my legs. I imagined Mac 1.0, knowing what I knew now: that in a few months Barrons would be doing everything a man could do to a woman in bed. Would she have run screaming or torn off her clothes right then and there? ~ Karen Marie Moning,#NFDB
608:'Who am I?' The answer is 'I am God'. The body comes and goes, but the Atma is permanent. The body has birth and death, but the spirit does not have any of these. You reach the stage where you say, 'I am God', but even there, there is duality, 'God and I'. That is not the full Truth. When we breathe, the breath makes the sound of 'So-Hum', 'He am I'. There is still the body consciousness, the 'I'. But in deep sleep, the declaration of 'He' and 'I' falls away and only '0' and 'M' remain, 'Om'; there is only the One. ~ Sathya Sai Baba, #NFDB
609:assignment in addition to the copy constructor: Click here to view code image Vector& Vector::operator=(const Vector& a) // copy assignment { double* p = new double[a.sz]; for (int i=0; i!=a.sz; ++i) p[i] = a.elem[i]; delete[] elem; // delete old elements elem = p; sz = a.sz; return *this; } The name this is predefined in a member function and points to the object for which the member function is called. 4.6.2. Moving Containers We can control copying by defining ~ Bjarne Stroustrup, #NFDB
610:In 2012, in the United Kingdom, the number of people (regardless of race) shot and killed by police officers: 1 In 2013, in the United Kingdom, the number of times police officers fired guns in the line of duty/the number of people fatally shot: 3/0 In the United States, in the seven year period ending in 2012, a white police officer killed a black person nearly two times a week. “I’m not much of a talker,” she finished up. “You know that. But I know numbers. The numbers don’t lie, kids. The numbers always tell a story. ~ Jason Reynolds, #NFDB
611:many of the oldest programs still ran in the bowels of the Qeng Ho system. Take the Traders’ method of timekeeping. The frame corrections were incredibly complex—and down at the very bottom of it was a little program that ran a counter. Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth’s moon. But if you looked at it still more closely…the starting instant was actually about fifteen million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind’s first computer operating systems. ~ Vernor Vinge, #NFDB
612:Days pass when I forget the mystery. Problems insoluble and problems offering their own ignored solutions jostle for my attention, they crowd its antechamber along with a host of diversions, my courtiers, wearing their colored clothes; caps and bells. And then once more the quiet mystery is present to me, the throng's clamor recedes: the mystery that there is anything, anything at all, let alone cosmos, joy, memory, everything, rather than void: and that, 0 Lord, Creator, Hallowed one, You still, hour by hour sustain it. ~ Denise Levertov, #NFDB
613:The Soviet Union suffered 65 percent of all Allied military deaths, China 23 percent, Yugoslavia 3 percent, the United States and Britain 2 percent each, France and Poland 1 percent each. About 8 percent of all Germans died, compared with 2 percent of Chinese, 3.44 percent of Dutch people, 6.67 percent of Yugoslavs, 4 percent of Greeks, 1.35 percent of French, 3.78 percent of Japanese, 0.94 percent of British and 0.32 percent of Americans. Within the armed forces, 30.9 percent of Germans conscripted into the Wehrmacht died, ~ Max Hastings, #NFDB
614:Not only have the country's two main political parties split further apart on such issues, but political feeling also runs deeper than it did in the past. In 1960, when a survey asked American adults whether it would "distrub" them if their child married a member of the other political party, no more than 5 percent of either party answered "yes." But in 2010, 33 percent of Democrats and 0 percent of Republicans answered "yes." In fact, partyism, as some call it, now beats race as the source of divisive prejudice. ~ Arlie Russell Hochschild, #NFDB
615:By analyzing data from Greenwich Observatory in the period 1836-1953, John A. Eddy [Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and High Altitude Observatory in Boulder] and Aram A. Boornazian [mathematician with S. Ross and Co. in Boston] have found evidence that the sun has been contracting about 0.1% per century during that time, corresponding to a shrinkage rate of about 5 feet per hour. And digging deep into historical records, Eddy has found 400-year-old eclipse observations that are consistent with such a shrinkage. ~ Jonathan Sarfati, #NFDB
616:less than 1% of new businesses started each year in the U.S. receive venture funding, and total VC investment accounts for less than 0.2% of GDP. But the results of those investments disproportionately propel the entire economy. Venture-backed companies create 11% of all private sector jobs. They generate annual revenues equivalent to an astounding 21% of GDP. Indeed, the dozen largest tech companies were all venture-backed. Together those 12 companies are worth more than $2 trillion, more than all other tech companies combined. ~ Peter Thiel, #NFDB
617:There is, however, one feature that I would like to suggest should be incorporated in the machines, and that is a 'random element.' Each machine should be supplied with a tape bearing a random series of figures, e.g., 0 and 1 in equal quantities, and this series of figures should be used in the choices made by the machine. This would result in the behaviour of the machine not being by any means completely determined by the experiences to which it was subjected, and would have some valuable uses when one was experimenting with it. ~ Alan Turing, #NFDB
618:As Hoover radically streamlined the bureau, eliminating overlapping divisions and centralizing authority, White, like other special agents in charge, was given greater command over his men in the field, but he also became more accountable to Hoover for anything the agents did, good or bad. White had to constantly fill out Efficiency Rating sheets, grading agents, on a scale of 0 to 100, in such categories as “knowledge,” “judgment,” “personal appearance,” “paper work,” and “loyalty.” The average score became an agent’s overall grade. ~ David Grann, #NFDB
619:Analogously, I like to think of the critical intelligence threshold required for AI design as the threshold for universal intelligence: given enough time and resources, it can make itself able to accomplish any goal as well as any other intelligent entity. For example, if it decides that it wants better social skills, forecasting skills or AI-design skills, it can acquire them. If it decides to figure out how to build a robot factory, then it can do so. In other words, universal intelligence has the potential to develop into Life 3.0. ~ Max Tegmark, #NFDB
620:It's not often you find yourself writing about a game that you haven't seen one kick of. But it's not often that the favourites lose 5-0 in one of their most important matches of the season. But all things considered - the difference between expectations of success and margin of victory, the fact of Strachan's debut, the injury to Chris Sutton, the joy it will bring Rangers fans, and the potential financial loss of going out of Europe completely in the first week in August - it is hard to remember the last defeat this bad for any team. ~ Phil Cornwell, #NFDB
621:What we want is another sample of life, which is not on our tree of life at all. All life that we've studied so far on Earth belongs to the same tree. We share genes with mushrooms and oak trees and fish and bacteria that live in volcanic vents and so on that it's all the same life descended from a common origin. What we want is a second tree of life. We want alien life, alien not necessarily in the sense of having come from space, but alien in the sense of belonging to a different tree altogether. That is what we're looking for, "life 2.0." ~ Paul Davies, #NFDB
622:28.6 Soybeans, boiled (1 cup) 24.0 Mediterranean pine nuts (½ cup) 18.2 Almonds (3 oz.) 17.9 Lentils, boiled (1 cup) 15.3 Kidney beans, boiled (1 cup) 15.2 Spinach, frozen (2 cups) 14.5 Chickpeas, boiled (1 cup) 13.2 Hemp seeds (½ cup) 12.8 Sesame seeds (½ cup) 11.5 Sunflower seeds (½ cup) 11.4 Broccoli, frozen (2 cups) 11.0 Tofu, extra firm (4 oz.) 10.3 Collards, boiled (2 cups) 8.2 Peas, frozen (1 cup) ~ Joel Fuhrman, #NFDB
623:If you don't like it here, Grandpa—" he said, and he finished the thought with the trick telephone number that people who didn't want to live any more were supposed to call. The zero in the telephone number he pronounced "naught." The number was: "2 B R 0 2 B." It was the telephone number of an institution whose fanciful sobriquets included: "Automat," "Birdland," "Cannery," "Catbox," "De-louser," "Easy-go," "Good-by, Mother," "Happy Hooligan," "Kiss-me-quick," "Lucky Pierre," "Sheepdip," "Waring Blendor," "Weep-no-more" and "Why Worry?" "To ~ Kurt Vonnegut, #NFDB
624:The Amazon will soon be just another fantastical postmodern location, so familiar to North Americans, where the names of places no longer have any relationship to what’s actually in the place. Mato Grasso (“dense jungle”) will refer to a place that is no more than a factory exchange value in a soybean mono-culture, just as Illinois is a “prairie state” with a mere 0.1 percent of its original prairie remaining. Of course, once the original plant/animal/human inhabitants are gone, we wax sentimental. The things we slaughter become our heritage. ~ Curtis White, #NFDB
625:In the APS (American Physical Society) it is ok to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible? The claim (how can you measure the average temperature of the whole earth for a whole year?) is that the temperature has changed from ~288.0 to ~288.8 degree Kelvin in about 150 years, which (if true) means to me is that the temperature has been amazingly stable, and both human health and happiness have definitely improved in this 'warming' period.' ~ Ivar Giaever, #NFDB
626:the Yellowstone caldera had been rising several inches a year and earthquakes above 4.0 on the Richter scale happened frequently. Yellowstone National Parks’ trees and animals died in increasing numbers as poisonous gas, boiling water, and the heat increased throughout the park from the rising magma. While geologists knew the super volcano would explode eventually, probably thousands of years from now, they never once considered asking the United States government to close or cordon off parts of Yellowstone Park as a result of the imminent threat. ~ Cliff Ball, #NFDB
627:Elektroiskrové rezanie je určené hlavne na: . výrobu tvarovo-zložitých priechodných otvorov a obvodov, napr. funkčných tvarov v priestrižniciach, zIožitých tvarov šablón, rezných a strižných nástrojov zo spekaných k a r b i d o v a p o d . ( o b r . I I . 2 3 , o b r . I L 2 4 ) , . Superpresné elektroiskrové brusenie jemných ihiel drótovou elektródou. Presnosť b r r i s e n e h o p r i eme r u 3 0 pm j e p o z d \ z o s i l pm, čo z o d p o v e d á p r e s n o s t i N C s y s tému ( o b r . I L 2 5 ) , . presné tvarové dokončovanie alebo orovnávanie ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
628:I remember sitting in the Beth Shalom synagogue in Cambridge on the night of Kol Nidre. Peter Lipton, a friend and an atheist philosopher, was giving a sermon on the theme of “atonement:” “If we treat another person as essentially bad, we dehumanize him or her. If we take the view that every human being has some good in them, even if it is only 0.1 percent of their makeup, then by focusing on their good part, we humanize them. By acknowledging and attending to and rewarding their good part, we allow it to grow, like a small flower in a desert. ~ Simon Baron Cohen, #NFDB
629:The inclusion of just one contradiction (like 0 = 1) in an axiomatic system allows any statement about the objects in the system to be proved true (and also proved false). When Bertrand Russell pointed this out in a lecture he was once challenged by a heckler demanding that he show how the questioner could be proved to be the Pope if 2 + 2 = 5. Russell replied immediately that 'if twice 2 is 5, then 4 is 5, subtract 3; then 1 = 2. But you and the Pope are 2; therefore you and the Pope are 1'! A contradictory statement is the ultimate Trojan horse. ~ John D Barrow, #NFDB
630:Total retail sales rose 0.7 percent in November, as holiday shopping began, and that came despite a sharp tumble in gasoline prices that reduced the dollar value of sales at gas stations by 0.8 percent. Analysts had expected a rise of only 0.4 percent. Read narrowly, the results show that some survey data suggesting weak post-Thanksgiving Black Friday sales was misleading at best; retail trade groups said at the time that they believed consumers spread their spending more evenly through November than they have in the past, and that appears to hold up. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
631:public class Merge
{
private static Comparable[] aux; // auxiliary array for merges
public static void sort(Comparable[] a)
{
aux = new Comparable[a.length]; // Allocate space just once.
sort(a, 0, a.length - 1);
}
private static void sort(Comparable[] a, int lo, int hi)
{ // Sort a[lo..hi].
if (hi <= lo) return;
int mid = lo + (hi - lo)/2;
sort(a, lo, mid); // Sort left half.
sort(a, mid+1, hi); // Sort right half.
merge(a, lo, mid, hi); // Merge results (code on page 271).
}
} ~ Robert Sedgewick,#NFDB
632:I don't think young black men, or anybody, should get a criminal record for low-level use. You know, I don't think that we should spend our law enforcement time jailing or imprisoning marijuana users. But to solve that problem, you don't need to go to the other extreme of creating Big Tobacco 2.0. Make no mistake about it: Legalization is not about, you know, Cheech & Chong smoking marijuana or, you know, a Grateful Dead concert; it's about creating the next Marlboro of our time, the next Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds, the Big Tobacco all over again. ~ Kevin Sabet, #NFDB
633:CHART 11.2: NUTRIENT COMPOSITION OF PLANT AND ANIMAL-BASED FOODS (PER 500 CALORIES OF ENERGY) Nutrient Plant-Based Foods* Animal-Based Foods** Cholesterol (mg) — 137 Fat (g) 4 36 Protein (g) 33 34 Beta-carotene (mcg) 29,919 17 Dietary Fiber (g) 31 — Vitamin C (mg) 293 4 Folate (mcg) 1168 19 Vitamin E (mg ATE) 11 0.5 Iron (mg) 20 2 Magnesium (mg) 548 51 Calcium (mg) 545 252 * Equal parts of tomatoes, spinach, lima beans, peas, potatoes ** Equal parts of beef, pork, chicken, whole milk As you can see, plant foods have dramatically more antioxidants, ~ T Colin Campbell, #NFDB
634:Although we take this for granted, the cancellation of positive and negative charges is quite remarkable, and has been experimentally checked to 1 part in 1021. (Of course, there are local imbalances between the charges, and that’s why we have lightning bolts. But the total number of charges, even for thunderstorms, adds up to zero.) If there were just 0.00001 percent difference in the net positive and negative electrical charges within your body, you would be ripped to shreds instantly, with your body parts thrown into outer space by the electrical force. ~ Michio Kaku, #NFDB
635:In recent years, annual trading in stocks—necessarily creating, by reason of the transaction costs involved, negative value for traders—averaged some $33 trillion. But capital formation—that is, directing fresh investment capital to its highest and best uses, such as new businesses, new technology, medical breakthroughs, and modern plant and equipment for existing business—averaged some $250 billion. Put another way, speculation represented about 99.2 percent of the activities of our equity market system, with capital formation accounting for 0.8 percent. ~ John C Bogle, #NFDB
636:The importance of the Industrial Revolution is hard to overstate. Throughout essentially all of human history, economic growth had proceeded at a rate of perhaps 0.1 percent per year, enough to allow for a very gradual increase in population, but not any growth in per capita living standards.26 And then, suddenly, there was progress when there had been none. Economic growth began to zoom upward much faster than the growth rate of the population, as it has continued to do through to the present day, the occasional global financial meltdown notwithstanding.27 ~ Nate Silver, #NFDB
637:THE “AUSTRALOPITHS” At 4.2 million years ago, in northern Kenya, we find the first evidence of a hominid species called Australopithecus anamensis. This is the first member of our family whose fossil leg and foot bones speak directly of upright bipedality. Its jaws and teeth were also comfortingly similar to the next-in-time Australopithecus afarensis, a hominid whose fossils are widely known in eastern Africa between about 3.6 and 3.0 million years ago. Most famously represented by the 3.2-million-year-old partial skeleton “Lucy,” from Hadar in Ethiopia, ~ Ian Tattersall, #NFDB
638:Consumer prices in August rose just 0.3 per cent from the year before as lower energy and food costs took their toll. The dip comes after inflation had already slowed from 0.5 per cent in June to 0.4 per cent in July, putting it at less than a quarter of the ECB’s official inflation target of 2 per cent. Individual countries were even harder hit. In Italy, inflation reached its lowest level since 1959 as consumer prices slumped 0.2 per cent in August, triggering calls for the eurozone central bank to signal to markets when it meets next week that it is ready to act. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
639:Others again participate ©f paffions impaffively, others with mediocrity of pafF^on, and others with perfe6l paflivity. But all things are moved by the Gods, according to their refpedive aptitudes. So that the violation of oaths did not proceed from Jupiter and Minerva, but from Pandarus and the Trojans. This a61ion however is fufpended from the Gods, as being the forerunner of ' See the loth Book. juflice. 1<)0 INTRODUCTION TO ROOKS II. AND III. OF TIIK REPUBLIC: juftice, and as preparing thofc by whom it was perpetrated for the perfed: punifhment of their guilt. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
640:Actually, under stellar conditions matter is generally so highly ionized that, as we shall see in greater detail in chapter vii, the uncertainty in the chemical composition s essentially due to the uncertainty in the abundance of the two lightest elements, namely, hydrogen and helium. The abundance of the lightest elements, has then to be considered as a fresh parameter in the discussion. We can thus summarize by saying that our fundamental problem is to seek a theoretical relation of the kind
F[L, M, R, abundance of hydrogen and helium] = 0. ~ Subrahmanijan Chandrasekhar,#NFDB
641:Days pass when I forget the mystery.
Problems insoluble and problems offering
their own ignored solutions
jostle for my attention, they crowd its antechamber
along with a host of diversions, my courtiers, wearing
their colored clothes; caps and bells.
And then
once more the quiet mystery
is present to me, the throng's clamor
recedes: the mystery
that there is anything, anything at all,
let alone cosmos, joy, memory, everything,
rather than void: and that, 0 Lord,
Creator, Hallowed one, You still,
hour by hour sustain it. ~ Denise Levertov,#NFDB
642:Vero
TO ONE I LOVE TO ONE I GIVE
THIS VERY SPECIAL BIRTHDAY GIFT
THE LOVE I HAVE THE LOVE I SHARE
WITH YOU FOR AS LONG AS YOU LIVE
NOT 12 0 1 OR 11 59
BUT 12 ON THE DOT
I WISH TO SAY HAPPY BIRTHDAY BABY
I LOVE YOU
THROUGH OUR DOWNS AND UPS
HOPE I THE FIRST
AND WISH YOU MANY MORE
SWEETEST VERO
MOON TO MY SUN
SUN TO MY MOON
THE WORLD REVOLVES AROUND YOU
............................
AT LEAST FOR TODAY
JUST KIDDING
BECAUSE I LOVE YOU MORE AND MORE
EVERY SINGLE DAY
HAPPY BIRTHDAY BABY
~ david bailey,#NFDB
643:We have seen that integration is a duality pairing between manifolds and forms. Since manifolds push forward under Φ from X to Y, we expect forms to pull back from y to X. Indeed, given any k-form ω on Y, we can define the pullback Φ* ω as the unique k-form on X such that we have the change-of-variables formula ∫ Φ(s) ω = ∫s Φ*(ω). In the case of 0-forms (i.e., scalar functions), the pullback Φ* f : x → of a scalar function f: y → is given explicitly by Φ* f (x) = f (Φ(x)), while the pullback of a 1-form ω is given explicitly by the formula (Φ* ω) x(v) = ωΦ(x) (Φ*v). ~ Timothy Gowers, #NFDB
644:Mathematics has the dubious honor of being the least popular subject in the curriculum … Future teachers pass through the elementary schools learning to detest mathematics. They drop it in high school as early as possible. They avoid it in teachers' colleges because it is not required. They return to the elementary school to teach a new generation to detest it. ~ Report of the Educational Testing Service, Princeton, N. J., as quoted in TIME magazine (18 June 1956), cited by George Pólya, How to Solve It, Page ix in Expanded Princeton Science Library Edition (2004), ISBN 0-691-11966-X., #NFDB
645:Then, when the Fed's fire hoses started spraying an elephant soup of liquidity injections in every direction, and its balance sheet grew by $1.3 trillion in just thirteen weeks compared to $850 billion during its first ninety-four years, I became convinced that the Fed was flying by the seat of its pants, making it up as it went along. It was evident that its aim was to stop the hissy fit on Wall Streetm and that the thread of a Great Depression 2.0 was just a cover story for a panicked spree of money printing that exceeded any other episode in recorded human history. ~ David Stockman, #NFDB
646:The ruble’s fall, described by analysts as “staggering” and “extreme,” prompted Russia’s central bank to hike a key interest rate by 6.5 percentage points, to 17%, after New York’s trading day had ended. One dollar now buys more than 65 rubles, compared with 33 rubles at the start of the year. Before Russia’s late move, U.S. stocks posted their fifth loss in six sessions, with the Dow industrials dropping 99.99 points, or 0.6%, to 17180.84. The selling was more intense in other markets, with Europe’s main index down 2.2%. Stock markets from Thailand to Mexico also dropped. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
647:The single genetic variant identified that most powerfully predicted height explained all of 0.4 percent—four tenths of one percent—of the variation in height, and all those hundreds of variants put together explained only about 10 percent of the variation. Meanwhile, an equally acclaimed study did a GWAS regarding body mass index (BMI). Similar amazingness—almost a quarter million genomes examined, even more authors than the height study. And in this case the single most explanatory genetic variant identified accounted for only 0.3 percent of the variation in BMI. ~ Robert M Sapolsky, #NFDB
648:Our 7-million-year evolutionary path was dominated by two seasonal challenges—calorie scarcity and mild cold stress. In the last 0.9 inches of our evolutionary path we solved both.” The inevitable result of losing seasonal variation is obesity and chronic disease. As proof, he doesn’t point only to the population of his home state, which ranks at #5 of the most obese states in the nation, but also to the fact that our pets are fat, too. “The only two animals in the world that suffer chronic obesity are humans and the pets we keep at home,” he says. “There’s a connection. ~ Scott Carney, #NFDB
649:the bomb exploded, and it destroyed a third of the building. Hundreds of people, including children in the daycare of the building, were killed, not just in the Federal Building itself, but in surrounding areas from the damage the bomb caused. The explosion created a 30 foot wide by eight foot deep crater, and damaged, or destroyed hundreds of buildings within a sixteen block radius. The blast could be heard and felt from over 55 miles away, and seismometers registered it as a 3.0 on the Richter scale. It was the largest terrorist attack on American soil in all of US history. ~ Cliff Ball, #NFDB
650:Agile leaders encourage their teams to adjust and experiment constantly. In today's age of oversharing, the best leaders also have to be more open and accessible. To be effective, you also have to be aware of how others perceive you and cop to your flaws every now and then. One of the lesson to successful leadership may be quite challenging but very important. Expose yourself. Allow yourself to be vulnerable - less super and more human. These "Leadership 3.0" practices, as I call them, are critical to being an effective manager when you're getting started in today's world. ~ Linda Rottenberg, #NFDB
651:The positive psychology field has taught us about the benefits of optimism and happiness. One study correlated the life spans of Major League Baseball players with their smiles. In 2010, researchers Ernest Abel and Michael Kruger analyzed 230 baseball cards from 1952, a time when cards featured athletes looking straight at the camera. The results will make you want to smile.
* Players not smiling had an average life span of 72.9 years.
* Players partially smiling had an average life span of 75.0 years.
* Players with a full smile had an average life span of 79.9 years. ~ Jim Afremow,#NFDB
652:But leanness is a methodology, not a goal. Making small changes to things that already exist might lead you to a local maximum, but it won’t help you find the global maximum. You could build the best version of an app that lets people order toilet paper from their iPhone. But iteration without a bold plan won’t take you from 0 to 1. A company is the strangest place of all for an indefinite optimist: why should you expect your own business to succeed without a plan to make it happen? Darwinism may be a fine theory in other contexts, but in startups, intelligent design works best. ~ Peter Thiel, #NFDB
653:Consider the difference in size between some of the very tiniest and the very largest creatures on Earth. A small bacterium weights as little as 0.00000000001 gram. A blue whale weighs about 100,000,000 grams. Yet a bacterium can kill a whale … . Such is the adaptability and versatility of microorganisms as compared with humans and other so-called “higher” organisms, that they will doubtless continue to colonise and alter the face of the Earth long after we and the rest of our cohabitants have left the stage forever. Microbes, not macrobes, rule the world. —Bernard Dixon, 1994 ~ Laurie Garrett, #NFDB
654:Of all the transitions, perhaps the most difficult is the transition from Type 0 to Type I, which we are undergoing at present. This is because a Type 0 civilization is the most uncivilized, both technologically and socially. It has risen only recently from the swamp of sectarianism, dictatorship, and religious strife, et cetera. It still has all the scars from its brutal past, which was full of inquisitions, persecutions, pogroms, and wars. Our own history books are full of horrid tales of massacres and genocide, much of it driven by superstition, ignorance, hysteria, and hatred. ~ Michio Kaku, #NFDB
655:To become a developed country, therefore, India’s GDP will have to grow at 12 per cent per year for at least a decade. Technically this is within India’s reach, since it would require the rate of investment to rise from the present 28 per cent of GDP to 36 per cent, while productivity growth will have to ensure that the incremental output-capital ratio declines from the present 4.0 to 3.0. These are modest goals that can be attained by an efficient decision-making structure, tackling corruption, increased Foreign direct investment (FDI) and use of IT software in the domestic industry. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
656:Wounded Child (emotionally 0–5) Adapted Adolescent (emotionally 6 –18) Functional Adult (emotionally mature) Worthless Arrogant Esteemed from Within Extremely Vulnerable Invulnerable Healthy Boundaries Extremely Needy Needless Communicates Needs Feels Bad / Naughty Feels Blameless / Perfect Honest and Self-Aware Out of Control Hypercontrolling Flexible and Moderate Fears Abandonment Fears Suffocation Interdependent Seeks Attention Seeks Intensity Lives in Integrity and Harmony Idealizes Caretakers/ Partners Disillusioned by Caretakers / Partners In Reality About Caretakers / Partners ~ Neil Strauss, #NFDB
657:Some of these results were predictable, but others took me totally by surprise. Here’s what happened to various blood markers prior to and immediately after my fast: PRE-FAST POST-FAST Total cholesterol 295 195 LDL-C 216 131 HDL-C 61 50 Triglycerides 90 68 LDL-P 2889 1664 Small LDL-P 1446 587 Lp(a) 441 143 Fasting insulin 13.9 10.0 hsCRP 1.6 .94 Most of those numbers are related to cardiovascular health, including advanced cholesterol tests. ~ Jason Fung, #NFDB
658:The euro fell to as low as $1.18605, its weakest level since March 2006, having fallen below an important support at $1.20. The common currency last traded at $1.1926, down 0.6 percent from late U.S. trade on Friday. In an interview with German financial daily Handelsblatt published on Friday, ECB President Mario Draghi said the risk of the central bank not fulfilling its mandate of preserving price stability was higher now than half a year ago. "The market took his comments to mean that he is ready to adopt quantitative easing," said Shin Kadota, chief forex strategist at Barclays in Tokyo. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
659:Twenty minutes later, Three Body’s Von Neumann architecture human-formation computer had begun full operations under the Qin 1.0 operating system. “Run solar orbit computation software ‘Three Body 1.0’!” Newton screamed at the top of his lungs. “Start the master computing module! Load the differential calculus module! Load the finite element analysis module! Load the spectral method module! Enter initial condition parameters … and begin calculation!” The motherboard sparkled as the display formation flashed with indicators in every color. The human-formation computer began the long computation. ~ Liu Cixin, #NFDB
660:Si l’on ramène les 4,5 milliards d’années de notre planète à une seule journée terrestre, en supposant que celle-ci soit apparue à 0 heure, alors la vie naît vers 5 heures du matin et se développe pendant toute la journée. Vers 20 heures seulement viennent les premiers mollusques. Puis à 23 heures arrivent les dinosaures qui disparaîtront à 23h40. Quant à nos ancêtres, ils ne débarquent enfin que dans les 5 dernières minutes avant 24 heures et ne voient leur cerveau doubler de volume que dans la toute dernière minute. La révolution industrielle n’a commencé que depuis un centième de seconde. ~ Hubert Reeves, #NFDB
661:The value for which P=0.05, or 1 in 20, is 1.96 or nearly 2; it is convenient to take this point as a limit in judging whether a deviation ought to be considered significant or not. Deviations exceeding twice the standard deviation are thus formally regarded as significant. Using this criterion we should be led to follow up a false indication only once in 22 trials, even if the statistics were the only guide available. Small effects will still escape notice if the data are insufficiently numerous to bring them out, but no lowering of the standard of significance would meet this difficulty. ~ Ronald A Fisher, #NFDB
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“Hugo est surréaliste quand il n’est pas bête.”
― André Breton, Manifestes du surréalisme
tags: surrealism, victor-hugo
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“Aucun des sophismes de la folie, - la folie qu'on enferme, - n'a été oublié par moi : je pourrais les redire tous, je tiens le système.”
― Arthur Rimbaud, Une saison en enfer & Le bateau ivre: A season in hell & The drunken boat
tags: madness
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Hugo est surréaliste quand il n'est pas bête. ~ Andr Breton,#NFDB
663:4. Priceless versus worthless: The cost of materials today ranges from $0.1 per kg for wood to $4 trillion per kg for certain pharmaceuticals (reimbursable by health insurance). With revolutions in smart materials and molecular engineering, all materials and objects could be reduced to the range of $0.2 per kg (electronics, clothes, foods, cosmetics, and so on)—or people could spend more and more for less and less via clever branding, copyright and patent laws, elaborate licensing and regulatory schemes, and the like. Or is there a way of artfully combining and integrating all of the above? ~ George M Church, #NFDB
664:Spring Breezes
Spring breezes over the blue,
now lightly frolicking in some tropic bay,
go forth to meet her way,
for here the spell hath won and dream is true.
0 happy wind, thou that in her warm hair
mayst rest and play!
could I but breathe all longing into thee,
so were thy viewless wing
as flame or thought, hastening her shining way.
And now I bid thee bring
tenderly hither over a subject sea
that golden one whose grace hath made me king,
and, soon to glad my gaze at shut of day,
loosen'd in happy air
her charmed hair.
~ Christopher John Brennan,#NFDB
665:Song Of Myself
Because I remain quiet at home,
the earth still goes on its rounds;
because I snore lying in my bed,
the solar systems shine;
because I chew and munch and spit,
Time is on the move;
because I care for the girl I married,
birth and life and death do merge.
If I'm not there, 0 people, no action is there,
neither flower nor honey nor bee;
the peacocks, the clouds, the gardens:
my kindness makes them glow.
Bow to me, and sing my glory,
and fall at my feet;
for those who go about praising me,
even hell is heaven for ever!
~ Ayyappa Paniker,#NFDB
666:Think of trying to balance a pencil vertically on its tip. No matter how we try to balance the pencil, it usually falls down. In fact, it requires a fine-tuning of great precision to start the pencil balanced just right so it doesn’t fall over. Now try to balance the pencil on its tip so that it stays vertical not just for one second but for years! You see the enormous fine-tuning that is involved to get Omega to be 0.1 today. The slightest error in fine-tuning Omega would have created Omega vastly different from 1. So why is Omega so close to 1 day, when by rights it should be astronomically different? ~ Michio Kaku, #NFDB
667:When we think about the future, we hope for a future of progress. That progress can take one of two forms. Horizontal or extensive progress means copying things that work—going from 1 to n. Horizontal progress is easy to imagine because we already know what it looks like. Vertical or intensive progress means doing new things—going from 0 to 1. Vertical progress is harder to imagine because it requires doing something nobody else has ever done. If you take one typewriter and build 100, you have made horizontal progress. If you have a typewriter and build a word processor, you have made vertical progress. ~ Peter Thiel, #NFDB
668:DORYDY chórem, przepływając przed Nereuszem,
wszystkie na delfinach
Cieniów nie szczędź nam i blasków!
Luno, na tę młodość świeć!
Bowiem miłych naszych gaszków *
Z prośbą ojcu śpieszym nieść.
do Nereusza
Sameśmy tych chłopców miłych
Wybawiły z paszczy mórz
I ogrzawszy utuliły
W cieple mchem moszczonych łóż.
Żarem żądzy swej młodzieńczej
Każdy z nich się nam wywdzięczy,
Więc łaskawie na nich spójrz.
(...)
MŁODZIEŃCY
Już tylko chciejcie tak nadal dbać
O nas, młodziutkich żeglarzy!
Rodzona o nas nie dbała tak mać,
0 niczym lepszym nie marzym. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,#NFDB
669:Red activities are extremely sedentary, such as lounging and watching TV, and burn just 0 to 50 calories per hour. Yellow activities generally have you up on your feet and puttering about. Activities such as standing and stretching while on the phone and chopping vegetables for dinner fall in this category. A few of the more energetic sitting activities, such as board games (e.g., Cranium), crafts, and sewing, also fall into yellow. They burn 50 to 100 calories per hour. Green activities have you on the move and include things such as mowing the lawn and playing with your kids. They burn 100 to 200 calories an hour. ~ James A Levine, #NFDB
670:Although the NYPD frequently attempts to justify stop-and-frisk operations in poor communities of color on the grounds that such tactics are necessary to get guns off the streets, less than 1 percent of stops (0.15 percent) resulted in guns being found, and guns and other contraband were seized less often in stops of African Americans and Latinos than of whites.112 As Darius Charney, a lawyer for the Center for Constitutional Rights, observed, these studies “confirm what we have been saying for the last 10 or 11 years, which is that with stop-and-frisk patterns—it is really race, not crime, that is driving this.”113 ~ Michelle Alexander, #NFDB
671:We’ve seen several of these oscillations just in the last decade or so since the web became prominent. At first we thought all the computer power would be in server farms, and the browsers would be stupid. Then we started putting applets in the browsers. But we didn’t like that, so we moved dynamic content back to the servers. But then we didn’t like that, so we invented Web 2.0 and moved lots of processing back into the browser with Ajax and JavaScript. We went so far as to create whole huge applications written to execute in the browsers. And now we’re all excited about pulling that JavaScript back into the server with Node. ~ Robert C Martin, #NFDB
672:They point out that we never know for sure which hypothesis is the true one, and so we shouldn’t just pick one hypothesis, like a value of 0.7 for the probability of heads; rather, we should compute the posterior probability of every possible hypothesis and entertain all of them when making predictions. The sum of the probabilities of all the hypotheses must be one, so if one becomes more likely, the others become less. For a Bayesian, in fact, there is no such thing as the truth; you have a prior distribution over hypotheses, after seeing the data it becomes the posterior distribution, as given by Bayes’ theorem, and that’s all. ~ Pedro Domingos, #NFDB
673:From the walls of Baidi high in the coloured dawn
To Jiangling by night-fall is three hundred miles,
Yet monkeys are still calling on both banks behind me
To my boat these ten thousand mountains away.
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Under The Moon
Under the crescent moon's faint glow
The washerman's bat resounds afar,
And the autumn breeze sighs tenderly.
But my heart has gone to the Tartar war,
To bleak Kansuh and the steppes of snow,
Calling my husband back to me.
by owner. provided at no charge for educational purposes
~ Li Bai, Through The Yangzi Gorges
,#NFDB
674:Politycy są wyraźnie nadreprezentowani wśród ludzi chodzących z bronią. Jak wynika z danych Komendy Głównej Policji na koniec 2014 r., pozwolenie na broń do ochrony osobistej ma niespełna 63 tys. osób (cywili) w całej Polsce, czyli zaledwie 0,16 proc. obywateli. Znaczną ich część stanowią, prócz polityków, ludzie będący blisko władzy – np. w Ministerstwie Spraw Wewnętrznych (czasem mający z tego powodu kłopoty, jak pewien wiceminister, który strzelał po alkoholu w powietrze, żeby zatrzymać przejeżdżający samochód). Dość licznie reprezentowani są sędziowie (niektórzy zabierają broń na salę rozpraw), prokuratorzy, z racji wykonywanej pracy. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
675:Matthieu Ricard es un biólogo molecular que hace treinta años decidió convertirse al budismo y actualmente es el asesor personal del Dalái Lama. Este hombre de sesenta y un años, que vive en un pequeño cuarto en Nepal con las mínimas comodidades, es considerado por los científicos de la Universidad de Wisconsin el hombre más feliz de la Tierra. Los puntajes de “felicidad” obtenidos por él mediante los métodos más modernos de la neurociencia y en sesiones continuas superaron todas las expectativas. En una calificación posible que iba de 0.3 (muy infeliz) a -0.3 (muy feliz), Ricard logró un sostenido -0.45, un récord imposible de imaginar. ~ Walter Riso, #NFDB
676:Ocean warming dominates that total heating rate, with full ocean depth warming accounting for about 93% (high confidence), and warming of the upper (0 to 700 m) ocean accounting for about 64%. Melting ice (including Arctic sea ice, ice sheets and glaciers) and warming of the continents each account for 3% of the total. Warming of the atmosphere makes up the remaining 1%. The 1971–2010 estimated rate of ocean energy gain is 199 × 10 12 W from a linear fit to data over that time period, equivalent to 0.42 W m–2 heating applied continuously over the Earth’s entire surface, and 0.55 W m–2 for the portion owing to ocean warming applied over the ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
677:The transition between our current Type 0 civilization and a future Type I civilization is perhaps the greatest transition in history. It will determine whether we will continue to thrive and flourish, or perish due to our own folly. This transition is extremely dangerous because we still have all the barbaric savagery that typified our painful rise from the swamp. Peel back the veneer of civilization, and we still see the forces of fundamentalism, sectarianism, racism, intolerance, etc., at work. Human nature has not changed much in the past 100,000 years, except now we have nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons to settle old scores. ~ Michio Kaku, #NFDB
678:The psychology of the religious experience has been well-researched and taped. There are many paths up the mountain—sensory deprivation or sensory overload—emotional response to stimuli or the lack thereof is common. Drugs, of course, from psychoactives to the more mundane depressants. Electropophy can bring it about, as can organic brain damage, lack or excess of oxygen, even sex can trigger it. And what it is, according to the science of man and mue, is a subjective mental state, somewhere to the left of hypnosis. A trick the mind plays on itself. A delusion, void of reality. ~ Steve Perry, The Man Who Never Missed (1985), ISBN 0-441-51916-4, pp. 56-57, #NFDB
679:For that matter," said Toussaint, "it's true. We would be assassinated before we'd have time to say Boo!
And then, since Monsieur doesn't sleep in the house. But don't be afraid, mademoiselle, I fasten the windows like
Bastilles. Women alone ! I'm sure that's enough to make us shudder! Just imagine! To see men come into the room
at night and say Hush ! to you and set themselves about cutting your throat. It isn't so much the dying, people
die, that's all right, we know very well that we have to die, but it is the horror of having such people touch yhaving such people touch you. And then their knives, they must cut badly ! 0 God ! ~ Victor Hugo,#NFDB
680:Over that 18-year period, we trained about 45,000 students for a state issued carry permit, and about 45% of those went on to further training. Over that period, we had 65 students that I know of involved in defensive gunplay. These are students that reported back to the school or were reported to me through law enforcement channels. Of these, we had 62 victories, 0 losses and 3 forfeits. Of the 62 students who were armed on the Big Day, all 62 won. However, we had three students that were unarmed when their moment of truth came, and they all died. All three were murdered in separate street robberies, and ALL THREE WERE UNARMED AT THE TIME. ~ Massad Ayoob, #NFDB
681:Mindless conformity is what turns us from humans into sheep. People have been beaten to death in front of crowds that could easily overtake the attacker. The bigger the crowd, the more likely it is that nobody will intervene. The principle is called "diffusion of responsibility," and boils down to the pressure for conformity overwhelming the need to act. Any guilt over not acting is shared between the people not acting. You didn't stand by and watch someone get killed, after all. It was a crowd of 1000. You only stood around to the tune of 0.1% of the incident as a whole. If your friends jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge, would you jump too? ~ Johnny B Truant, #NFDB
682:the wealthiest 0.1 percent of people on the planet, some 4.5 million out of an adult population of 4.5 billion, apparently possess fortunes on the order of 10 million euros on average, or nearly 200 times average global wealth of 60,000 euros per adult, amounting in aggregate to nearly 20 percent of total global wealth. The wealthiest 1 percent—45 million people out of 4.5 billion—have about 3 million euros apiece on average (broadly speaking, this group consists of those individuals whose personal fortunes exceed 1 million euros). This is about 50 times the size of the average global fortune, or 50 percent of total global wealth in aggregate. ~ Thomas Piketty, #NFDB
683:There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1. There's .1 and .12 and .112 and an infinite collection of others. Of course, there is a bigger infinite set of numbers between 0 and 2, or between 0 and a million. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities. A writer we used to like taught us that. There are days, many of them, when I resent the size of my unbounded set. I want more numbers than I'm likely to get, and God, I want more numbers for Augustus Waters than he got. But, Gus, my love, I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity. I wouldn't trade it for the world. You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I'm grateful. ~ John Green, #NFDB
684:The high tower is a hundred feet tall,
From here one's hand could pluck the stars.
I do not dare to speak in a loud voice,
I fear to disturb the people in heaven.
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Midnight Song of Wu
In Chang'an city is the disk of the moon,
The sound of pounding clothes in ten thousand households.
The autumn wind is blowing without cease,
All the time I think of Yuguan pass.
When will we pacify the pillaging Hu,
So my husband can end his long journey?
by owner. provided at no charge for educational purposes
~ Li Bai, Staying The Night At A Mountain Temple
,#NFDB
685:applications designed from the ground up to span multiple devices. TiVo is another good example. iTunes and TiVo also demonstrate many of the other core principles of Web 2.0. They are not web applications per se, but they leverage the power of the web platform, making it a seamless, almost invisible part of their infrastructure. Data management is most clearly the heart of their offering. They are services, not packaged applications (although in the case of iTunes, it can be used as a packaged application, managing only the user’s local data.) What’s more, both TiVo and iTunes show some budding use of collective intelligence, although in each case, their ~ Tim O Reilly, #NFDB
686:The fact that the nutritional quality of a given food (and of that food's food) can vary not just in degree but in kind throws a big wrench into an industrial food chain, the very premise of which is that beef is beef and salmon salmon. It also throws a new light on the whole question of cost, for it quality matters so much more than quantity, then the price of a food may bear little relation to the value of the nutrients in it. If units of omega-3s and beta-cartene and vitamin E are what an egg shopper is really after, then Joel's $2.20 a dozen pastured eggs actually represents a much better deal than the $0.79 a dozen industrial eggs at the supermarket. ~ Michael Pollan, #NFDB
687:In 2008, there were about 800 million people in the world living on less than $1.00 a day. On average, each of these people is “short” about $0.28 a day; their average daily expenditure is $0.72 instead of the $1.00 it would take to lift them out of poverty.1 We could make up the shortfall with less than a quarter of a billion dollars a day; $0.28 times 800 million is $0.22 billion. If the United States were to try to do this on its own, each American man, woman, and child would have to pay $0.75 each day, or $1.00 a day each if children were exempted. We could cut this to $0.50 a person per day if the adults of Britain, France, Germany, and Japan joined in. Even ~ Angus Deaton, #NFDB
688:the United Church of Christ, has gone from more than two million members in 1957 (the year two denominations merged to form the current one) to less than one million today. And each of the other mainline denominations can tell a similar story. At the same time, more conservative traditions are seeing growth, or at least declining at a much slower rate. Evangelical Christians saw only a 0.9 percent decline in the same seven-year period mentioned above. For Orthodox Christians and Mormons that rate was only 0.1 percent. But what is most interesting is what traditions (and nontraditions) are growing. Islam, Judaism, and Buddhism all saw modest gains in the United States. ~ Emily C Heath, #NFDB
689:What of the chain? Its position, defined by C, begins at 0 and reaches 1 when its next link moves forward to the fatal position, then 2 and so on. The chain must move in synch with the teeth on the sprocket at the center of the rear wheel, and that sprocket has n teeth, and so after a complete revolution of the rear wheel, when theta = 0 again, C = n. After a second complete revolution of the rear wheel, once again theta = 0 but now C = 2n. The next time it’s C = 3n and so on. But remember that the chain is not an infinite linear thing, but a loop having only l positions; at C = l it loops back around to C = 0 and repeats the cycle. So when calculating the value of C ~ Neal Stephenson, #NFDB
690:I had become a girl, then a woman, living in shadow, who could not bear the weight of her own heart - my heart, sunk as stone, silt cradled at the bottom of a lake.
It was easy to live in that place for all those years. I had eroticized myself as unbreakable: beyond the reach of any lover I lay with, protected. Fiercely independent, I was a girl who could accelerate from 0 to 140 in ten seconds flat, a good-time girl who left them wanting more.
When I started to want more for myself, when that lake became too murky to navigate, I wrestled with the big lie that had become the bedrock of my gender, my desire, my whole self: I am unbreakable. I am not broken. ~ Anna Camilleri,#NFDB
691:This isn’t just a theoretical argument. Economists have studied this issue and worked out how, on average, a consumer affects the number of animal products supplied by declining to buy that product. They estimate that, on average, if you give up one egg, total production ultimately falls by 0.91 eggs; if you give up one gallon of milk, total production falls by 0.56 gallons. Other products are somewhere in between: economists estimate that if you give up one pound of beef, beef production falls by 0.68 pounds; if you give up one pound of pork, production ultimately falls by 0.74 pounds; if you give up one pound of chicken, production ultimately falls by 0.76 pounds. ~ William MacAskill, #NFDB
692:In a city of twenty million like New York, there might be one or two terrorists. Maybe ten of them at the outside. 10/20,000,000 = 0.00005 percent. One twenty-thousandth of a percent. That’s pretty rare all right. Now, say you’ve got some software that can sift through all the bank records, or toll pass records, or public transit records, or phone call records in the city and catch terrorists 99 percent of the time. In a pool of twenty million people, a 99 percent accurate test will identify two hundred thousand people as being terrorists. But only ten of them are terrorists. To catch ten bad guys, you have to haul in and investigate two hundred thousand innocent people. ~ Cory Doctorow, #NFDB
693:The Enfield I’ve realized, is really a temperamental woman disguised as a motorcycle and ours is not a relationship of convenience. Sometimes she can be adamant and uncooperative and very difficult to reason with. She can sense my moods and even my intentions. Once, attracted to a more advanced model, I had considered a trading alliance with her. The modern motorcycle beckoned me enticingly from billboards and newspapers in full seductive colour. I visited the showroom and took a test ride on the sleeker machine. This new one felt different. Lighter and easily excited into full flight with her ‘0 to 100 in x seconds’ flat! To an Enfield, that’s premature ejaculation. ~ Ajit Harisinghani, #NFDB
694:Red Rover, Red Rover, send Ardor right over," Eliza said. They laughed. The asteroid was a little bigger now, brighter, and still they went on laughing. Laughing in the face of what they couldn't predict or change or control. Would it be fire and brimstone? Would it be Armageddon? Or would it be a second chance? Eliza held tight to her friends, laughing, and a pair of hands land soft as feathers on her shoulders, like the hands of a ghost, laughing and laughing as Ardor swept along its fated course, laughing and through that laughter, praying. Praying for forgiveness. Praying for grace. Praying for mercy.
0 ~ Tommy Wallach,#NFDB
695: Mountain flowers open in our faces.
You and I are triply lost in wine.
Im drunk, my friend, sleepy. Rise and go.
With your dawn lute, return, if you wish, and stay.
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Ballads Of Four Seasons: Summer
On Mirror Lake outspread for miles and miles,
The lotus lilies in full blossom teem.
In fifth moon Xi Shi gathers them with smiles,
Watchers o'erwhelm the bank of Yuoye Stream.
Her boat turns back without waiting moonrise
To yoyal house amid amorous sighs.
by owner. provided at no charge for educational purposes
~ Li Bai, Drinking in the Mountains
,#NFDB
696:The major obstacle here is binary thinking that forces us to pigeonhole into two distinct categories a problem best conceived as a continuous scale. So-called pro-life proponents believe that human life begins at conception; before conception there is no life—after conception there is. For them, it is a binary system. With continuous thinking we can assign a probability to human life—before conception 0, the moment of conception 0.1, multicellular blastocyst 0.2, one-month-old embryo 0.3, two-month-old fetus 0.4, and so on until birth, when the fetus becomes a 1.0 human life-form. It is a continuum, from sperm and egg, to zygote, to blastocyst, to embryo, to fetus, to newborn infant. ~ Michael Shermer, #NFDB
697:But perhaps the most alarming ingredient in a Chicken McNugget is tertiary butylhydroquinone, or TBHQ, an antioxidant derived from petroleum that is either sprayed directly on the nugget or the inside of the box it comes in to "help preserve freshness." According to A Consumer's Dictionary of Food Additives, TBHQ is a form of butane (i.e. lighter fluid) the FDA allows processors to use sparingly in our food: It can comprise no more than 0.02 percent of the oil in a nugget. Which is probably just as well, considering that ingesting a single gram of TBHQ can cause "nausea, vomiting, ringing in the ears, delirium, a sense of suffocation, and collapse." Ingesting five grams of TBHQ can kill. ~ Michael Pollan, #NFDB
698:For any reasonable value of Omega at the beginning of time, Einstein’s equations show that it should almost be zero today. For Omega to be so close to 1 so many billions of years after the big bang would require a miracle. This is what is called in cosmology the finetuning problem. God, or some creator, had to “choose” the value of Omega to within fantastic accuracy for Omega to be about 0.1 today.
For Omega to be between 0.1 and 10 today, it means that Omega had to be 1.00000000000000 one second after the big bang. In other words, at the beginning of time the value of Omega had to be “chosen” to equal the number 1 to within one part in a hundred trillion, which is difficult to comprehend. ~ Michio Kaku,#NFDB
699:Flocks of birds have flown high and away;
A solitary drift of cloud, too, has gone, wandering on.
And I sit alone with the Ching-ting Peak, towering beyond.
We never grow tired of each other, the mountain and I.
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To Wang Lun
I was about to sail away in a junk,
When suddenly I heard
The sound of stamping and singing on the bank
It was you and your friends come to bid me farewell.
The Peach Flower Lake is a thousand fathoms deep,
But it cannot compare, O Wang Lun,
With the depth of your love for me.
by owner. provided at no charge for educational purposes
~ Li Bai, The Ching-Ting Mountain
,#NFDB
700:Leibniz's calculus had the same power as Newton's, and thanks to its notation, even a bit more. Nevertheless, underneath all the mathematics, Leibniz's differentials still had the same forbidden 0/0 nature that plagued Newton's fluxions. As long as this flaw remained, calculus would be based upon faith rather than logic. (In fact, faith was very much on Leibniz's mind when he derived new mathematics, such as the binary numbers. Any number can be written as a string of zeros and ones; to Leibniz, this was the creation ex nihilo, the creation of the universe out of nothing more than God/1 and void/0. Leibniz even tried to get the Jesuits to use this knowledge to convert the Chinese to Christianity.) ~ Charles Seife, #NFDB
701:One of the more influential recent estimates by demographer Massimo Livi-Bacci suggests that thirty thousand years ago there were a few hundred thousand humans, but by ten thousand years ago there may have been as many as 6 million. If we assume that approximately 500,000 humans existed thirty thousand years ago, this implies a growth rate between thirty thousand and ten thousand years ago of less than 0.01 percent per annum, which implies that human populations were doubling approximately every eight thousand to nine thousand years. This rate of growth can be compared with an average doubling time of about fourteen hundred years during the agrarian era and eighty-five years during the modern era. ~ David Christian, #NFDB
702:I’m heading into Nephi for a little refreshment and possibly a game of pool. That honky-tonk is still on Main, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. We don’t call it a honky-tonk though, Texas. That’s stretching it a little. We call it a bar. But there’s a pool table in the back, and if you’re lucky, someone to play with who can still stand,” Georgia said dryly.
“Did ya hear that, Moses? She’s already given me a nickname. Tag 1, Moses 0.” He cackled and let himself out the front door before I could respond.
Georgia laughed, but I wanted to follow him out and throw his ass to the ground. Tag didn’t always know when to shut his mouth.
But as soon as he was gone, I would have gladly welcomed him back. ~ Amy Harmon,#NFDB
703:The spread is often measured by the Gini coefficient, named after Corrado Gini, an Italian economist who worked in the first half of the twentieth century. Gini’s coefficient, or simply the Gini, is a number that lies between 0 (perfect equality—everyone has the same) and 1 (perfect inequality, with one person having everything). It measures how far people are apart on average. (If you really want know the details, it is the average difference in income between all pairs of people divided by twice the average income. If there are two of us, and you have everything, the difference between us is twice the mean, and the Gini is 1. If we both have the same, the difference between us is 0, and so is the Gini.) ~ Angus Deaton, #NFDB
704:Imagine, a First World country founded on egalitarian principles in which the top 20 per cent of households have 84 per cent of the wealth, while the bottom 40 per cent have 0.3 per cent; and one family, the Waltons, owns more than the bottom 40 per cent of US families combined; and the ratio of CEO salary to unskilled worker is 354 to 1 (fifty years ago it was 20 to 1). A minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, which is 34 per cent less than workers on the minimum were getting in 1968. More than 20 per cent of children in the United States live in poverty, more than twice the rate of any European country. With a quarter of totalitarian China’s population, democratic America has about the same number of people in jail. ~ Don Watson, #NFDB
705:Under Grossman’s Regulation 2.0 scheme, government regulatory agencies would operate quite differently from the way they do today. Rather than establishing rules of market access, their primary job would be to establish and enforce requirements for after-the-fact transparency. Grossman imagines a city government responding to the arrival of Uber by passing an ordinance that states: “Anyone offering for-hire vehicle services may opt out of existing regulations as long as they implement mobile dispatch, e-hailing, and e-payments, 360-degree peer-review of drivers and passengers, and provide an open data API for public auditing of system performance with regards to equity, access, performance, and safety.”54 ~ Geoffrey G Parker, #NFDB
706:Arrogance and fanatical belief had become a racial trait. The galaxy belonged to them, having been fashioned for them by their God, so everything belonged to them, and they could do with it what they wanted, and what they wanted usually involved subjugation, destruction, and death. Religion, a vicious and hearty meme at best, usually collapsed as civilizations became spacefaring, for most such belief systems, initiated when the world was still flat and thunder was the bellowing of gods, usually could not survive the realities of the universe and the steady abrasion of science. ~ Neal Asher, Shell Game (2009) in Gardner Dozois & Jonathan Strahan (eds.) The New Space Opera 2 (mass market paperback edition, ISBN 978-0-06-156236-5), p. 248, #NFDB
707:Me, while I'm heading west, asleep at Mach 0.83, or 455 miles an hour, or true airspeed, the FBI is bomb-squading my suitcase on a vacated runway back in Dulles. Nine out of ten times, the security task force guy says, the vibration is an electric razor. The other time, it's a vibrating dildo.
Imagine, the task force guy says, telling a passenger on arrival that a dildo kept her baggage on the East Coast. Sometimes it's even a man. It's airline policy not to imply ownership in the event of a dildo. Use the indefinite article.
A dildo.
Never your dildo.
Never say the dildo accidentally turned itself on.
A dildo activated itself and created an emergency situation that required the evacuating of your baggage. ~ Chuck Palahniuk,#NFDB
708:En eina grundvallaraðgerð hafði honum ekki tekist að framkvæma, að uppfæra sjálfan sig, útgáfu 2.0. Þótt hann væri fæddur fréttaskýrandi, með virðingu fyrir málfrelsinu í merg og beinum, fífldirfsku í hjartanu, tæknisnilli í heilanum og liminn sem áttavita, hafði það ekki dugað til, dagarnir höfðu verið of stuttir, runnið of hratt úr greipum hans, og nú var allt um seinan. Tíminn var takmarkalaus þar til hann var allt í einu liðinn. Hin óhlutdræga, rannsakandi, upplýsandi blaðamennska, eins og hún var í augum þeirra allra, allra nútíma-þátttakendanna, hún yrði ekkert annað en stutt málsgrein í sögu mannsins, og það var hann, hann sjálfur í eigin persónu, sem hafði haldið um stýrið þegar þau hröpuðu beint niður til helvítis. ~ Liza Marklund, #NFDB
709:The pistol had been one hell of a find, because it hadn't quite been what she'd thought it was at first blush. Not simply the S&W Mk 39, but rather a modified version of the same, the Mk 22 Mod 0, also called the "hush puppy". It was Vietnam-era, not the most reliable gun in the world, but wonderfully silent, not only equipped with a silencer to eliminate the sound of gunfire, but also with a slide lock, to keep the actual mechanical operation of the gun quiet as well. She'd test-fired the gun at the market before purchasing, and been stunned that it still worked. The Uzbek vendor had offered to sell it to her cheap.
"It's too quiet," he'd explained. "No one wants it."
Chace shut her eyes, half smiling at the memory. ~ Greg Rucka,#NFDB
710:With that said, Operation LUCKY-7 had its cut-out. The FSB’s Information Warfare Management Cell (IWMC) would create a false flag source to feed Assange the data taken from the DNC and any subsequent hacks through Guccifer 2.0. Assange was desperate to be relevant and the IWMC was going to create a new era where his own hatreds and agenda could be skillfully manipulated by the FSB’s active measures officers, while the cyber teams would keep him well fed. Assange was primed to do LUCKY-7’s bidding and now only needed the data they had stolen. WikiLeaks was now a wholly owned subsidiary of the FSB and essentially the cyber equivalent of a Laundromat, a Russian laundry —ready to clean and give a white appearance to the dirt. ~ Malcolm W Nance, #NFDB
711:The religious instinct, at its best, builds vast cathedrals and motivates people to be empathic, to help others, to share, to do no harm. At it worst, it is a means of creating sharply defined classes of people—those in power, who can bully with impunity, and those without power, without human rights, who must submit or be hurt, ostracized, or even killed. This is the history of all religions through all time. In an initiate, pathways of thought are established in the mind that, is some cases, claim to obviate the need for deep thought regarding morally complex issues. ~ Kathleen Ann Goonan, Girl in Wave : Wave in Girl, in Ed Finn & Kathryn Cramer (eds.) Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future (2014), ISBN 978-0-06-220469-1, p. 67, #NFDB
712:Your beliefs are rational, logical and fact-based, right? Well, consider a topic such as spanking. Is it right or wrong? Is it harmless or harmful? Is it lazy parenting or tough love? Science has an answer, but let’s get to that later. For now, savor your emotional reaction to the issue and realize you are willing to be swayed, willing to be edified on a great many things, but you keep a special set of topics separate. The last time you got into, or sat on the sidelines of, an argument online with someone who thought she knew all there was to know about health care reform, gun control, gay marriage, climate change, sex education, the drug war, Joss Whedon, or whether or not 0.9999 repeated to infinity was equal to one—how did it go? ~ David McRaney, #NFDB
713:Documentation: • Azure Websites Portal page for azure.microsoft.com documentation about Azure Websites. • Azure Websites, Cloud Services, and Virtual Machines Comparison Azure Websites as shown in this introduction is just one of three ways you can run web apps in Azure. Read this article for guidance on how to choose which one is right for your scenario. Like Websites, Cloud Services is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) feature of Azure. VMs are an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) feature. For an explanation of PaaS versus IaaS, see Chapter 6, “Data storage options.” Videos: • Scott Guthrie starts at Step 0 - What is the Azure Cloud OS? • Websites Architecture - with Stefan Schackow. • Windows Azure Websites Internals with Nir Mashkowski. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
714:Dans son éditorial publié en ligne vendredi soir, le Financial Times qualifie l’épisode de « débâcle » pour l’exécutif britannique. « La colère du premier ministre contre l’UE est une réponse excessive à une question assez mineure », écrit le quotidien financier, qui calcule que la « rallonge » demandée équivaut à 0,1 % du revenu national brut. « Pareille somme, poursuit l’éditorial, mérite à peine une note de bas de page dans les comptes annuels britanniques. » L’opposition travailliste pilonne, elle aussi : « Qu’a bien pu faire notre premier ministre ? Comment a-t-il pu être surpris ? », a demandé, Ed Balls, responsable des finances dans le Shadow cabinet. M. Cameron est à présent « isolé, un pied dehors et ignoré » en Europe, estime le Labour. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
715:You ask for what reason I stay on the green mountain,
I smile, but do not answer, my heart is at leisure.
Peach blossom is carried far off by flowing water,
Apart, I have heaven and earth in the human world.
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About Tu Fu
I met Tu Fu on a mountaintop
in August when the sun was hot.
Under the shade of his big straw hat
his face was sad
in the years since we last parted,
he'd grown wan, exhausted.
Poor old Tu Fu, I thought then,
he must be agonizing over poetry again.
Li Po
tr. Hamil
by owner. provided at no charge for educational purposes
~ Li Bai, Question And Answer On The Mountain
,#NFDB
716:Love Poem with Peanut Shells"
Now I am in the warm oil of your mouth,
comfortably sleeping in your throat. We build
with flagstone, shop for sconces and radiance.
Your large hands bundle and stack wood into walls.
You digest my shape, unlit layer, lung. Light
begins here, where we are one decimal point, where
I stand with a cool blue hat that covers my eyes,
red shoes that drop anchor. Where we sit in bars
with peanut shells with Mikes and Leroys and Toms.
Where you counsel me on lips and throat. Where
you love the hiss of my atom. Where the ocean is zero
miles from everywhere. Here, madness has no map.
Here, God is abridged. 0 to be loved this way.
To have lips that bear fruit. To be cancelled. ~ Victoria Chang,#NFDB
717:I can’t talk about our love story, so I will talk about math. I am not a mathematician, but I know this: There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1. There’s .1 and .12 and .112 and an infinite collection of others. Of course, there is a bigger infinite set of numbers between 0 and 2, or between 0 and a million. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities. A writer we used to like taught us that. There are days, many of them, when I resent the size of my unbounded set. I want more numbers than I’m likely to get, and God, I want more numbers for Augustus Waters than he got. But, Gus, my love, I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity. I wouldn’t trade it for the world. You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I’m grateful. ~ John Green, #NFDB
718:My clear obligation now is to see that God’s will for people everywhere is not being deliberately thwarted, not being ignored in favor of our own. How can we enslave a people to make our shoes and our children’s toys and our clothes in sweatshops across the world? How can we agree to buy without protest foreign imports that pay their makers—often children under twelve years old—$0.70 a day to send us what we will sell here for $125.00? How can we allow the genetic manipulation of seeds that cannot reproduce so that we become the food basket of the world as well as the arms merchant of the world? How can we count our will to power and wealth a greater good than others’ will for a decent life? And how can we call ourselves humble—spiritual—if we do? ~ Joan D Chittister, #NFDB
719:I can’t talk about our love story, so I will talk about math. I am not a mathematician, but I know this: There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1. There’s .1 and .12 and .112 and an infinite collection of others. Of course, there is a bigger infinite set of numbers between 0 and 2, or between 0 and a million. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities. A writer we used to like taught us that. There are days, many of them, when I resent the size of any unbounded set. I want more numbers than I’m likely to get, and God, I want more numbers for Augustus Waters than he got. But, Gus, my love, I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity. I wouldn't trade it for the world. You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I’m grateful. ~ John Green, #NFDB
720:I can’t talk about our love story, so I will talk about math. I am not a mathematician, but I know this: There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1. There’s .1 and .12 and .112 and an infinite collection of others. Of course, there is a bigger infinite set of numbers between 0 and 2, or between 0 and a million. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities. A writer we used to like taught us that. There are days, many of them, when I resent the size of my unbounded set. I want more numbers than I’m likely to get, and God, I want more numbers for Augustus Waters than he got. But, Gus, my love, I cannot tell “you how thankful I am for our little infinity. I wouldn’t trade it for the world. You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I’m grateful. ~ John Green, #NFDB
721:Old measures of health not only have failed to improve significantly but have stayed the same: some have even worsened. Mainstream newspapers and magazines often report disease in an ethnocentric manner that shrouds its true cost among African Americans. For example, despite the heavy emphasis on genetic ailments among blacks, fewer than 0.5 percent of black deaths—that’s less than one death in two hundred—can be attributed to hereditary disorders such as sickle-cell anemia. A closer look at the troubling numbers reveals that blacks are dying not of exotic, incurable, poorly understood illnesses nor of genetic diseases that target only them, but rather from common ailments that are more often prevented and treated among whites than among blacks. ~ Harriet A Washington, #NFDB
722:People who have seen the latest Greek plan said Athens was proposing new savings in the pension system — the biggest sticking point — which will amount to about 0.4 per cent of gross domestic product this year and just over 1 per cent next year. But this is short of the 1 per cent savings this year and next that Greece’s creditors had demanded. It also relies on higher employer contributions which, alongside proposed tax changes targeting corporate profits, could crimp economic growth, some creditor officials fear. The two sides also remain at loggerheads over rates of valued added tax on electricity and processed food. According to officials who attended the eurogroup meeting, Christine Lagarde, the International Monetary Fund chief, was particularly tough. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
723:The Theorem reste upon the validity of my longstanding argument that the world contains precisely two kinds of people:
Dumpers and Dumpees.
Everyone is predisposed to being either one or the other, but of course not all people are COMPLETE
Dumpers and Dumpees.
Hence the bell curve:"
The majority of people fall somewhere close to the vertical dividing line with the occasional statisticaly outliner (e.g., me) representing a tiny percentage of overall individuals. The numerical expression of the graph can be something like 5 being extreme Dumper, and 0 being me. Ergo, if the Great One was a 4 and I am a 0, total size of the Dumper/Dumpee differetial = -4 (Assuming negative numbers if the guy is more of a Dumpee; positive if the girl is.) ~ John Green,#NFDB
724:Chocolate Peanut Butter Fudge Makes over 100 1inch x 1inch treats for $23 in 90 minutes 2 cups deep yellow, unpasteurized butter[92] from grass-fed cows – [$10] 1 cup creamy, organic peanut butter [$3] 1 1/2 cups raw, local honey [$6] 1 cup organic carob powder [$3] 1 teaspoon sea salt [pennies] 2 teaspoons organic vanilla extract [$0.20] 1 tablespoon organic chocolate extract [$0.50] ● Soften the raw butter to room temperature. ● Mix all ingredients well in a large, glass bowl. ● Spread parchment paper across a 13 x 9 pan that is 1-2 inches deep and spread fudge evenly so that it is about ½ inch in depth. ● Put pan in freezer to set for about 1 hour. Cut into squares and serve as a snack or even a very fast, healthy breakfast on the go! ~ Sarah Pope, #NFDB
725:According to a large study from Kaiser Permanente, for every 0.05 increase above 4.72, patients had an additional 6 percent increased risk of developing diabetes in the next ten years (4.82 = 12 percent increased risk, etc.) Above 5 indicates that vascular damage has already occurred and a patient is at risk for having damage to the kidneys and eyes. Why is high fasting blood sugar a problem? High blood sugar causes vascular problems throughout your whole body, including your brain. Over time, it causes blood vessels to become brittle and vulnerable to breakage. It leads not only to diabetes but also to heart disease, strokes, visual impairment, impaired wound healing, wrinkled skin, and cognitive problems. Diabetes doubles the risk for Alzheimer’s disease. ~ Daniel G Amen, #NFDB
726:Arrange these threats in ascending order of deadliness: wolves, vending machines, cows, domestic dogs and toothpicks. I will save you the trouble: they have been ordered already.
The number of deaths known to have been caused by wolves in North America in the twenty-first century is one: if averaged out, that would be 0.08 per year. The average number of people killed in the US by vending machines is 2.2 (people sometimes rock them to try to extract their drinks, with predictable results). Cows kill some twenty people in the US, dogs thirty-one. Over the past century, swallowing toothpicks caused the deaths of around 170 Americans a year. Though there are sixty thousand wolves in North America, the risk of being killed by one is almost nonexistent. ~ George Monbiot,#NFDB
727:Novice forecasters often ask why not just say 0.5, coin toss, whenever they “know nothing” about a problem. There are several reasons why not. One is the risk of being ensnared in self-contradictions. Imagine you are asked whether the Nikkei stock index will close above 20,000 by June 30, 2015. Knowing nothing, you say 0.5 chance. Now suppose you are asked whether it will close above 22,000—and you again say 0.5—or between 20,000 and 22,000, and you again say 0.5. The more possibilities the questioner unpacks, the more obvious it becomes that the casual user of 0.5 is assigning incoherent probabilities that far exceed 1.0. See Amos Tversky and Derek Koehler, “Support Theory: A Nonextensional Representation of Subjective Probability,” Psychological Review ~ Philip E Tetlock, #NFDB
728:We tend to underplay the significance of something when it is not significant to our immediate frame of reference. In the mid-1990s, Clifford Stoll said that the internet couldn’t survive in part because of a “wasteland of unfiltered data” where there was no way to search for information easily. Because Stoll was an early super-user, his vision was naturally limited to the Internet v1.0’s significant shortcomings. Robert Metcalfe was similarly biased by his own expertise. He was questioning capacity—How could the internet continue to grow without suffering outages? A lack of coordination and cooperation between the first Internet Service Providers had already led to big network problems. Without any changes in sight, Metcalfe saw outages rather than advancements ~ Amy Webb, #NFDB
729:In an examination of 250 Maori skulls--all from an uncivilized age--I found carious teeth present in only two skulls or 0.76 per cent. By taking the average of Mummery's and my own investigations, the incidence of caries in the Maori is found to be 1.2 per cent in a total of 326 skulls. This is lower even than the Esquimaux, and shows the Maori to have been the most immune race to caries, for which statistics are available. Comparing these figures with those applicable to the present time, we find that the descendants of the Britons and Anglo-Saxons are afflicted with dental caries to the extent of 86 per cent to 98 per cent; and after examining fifty Maori school children living under European conditions entirely, I found that 95 per cent of them had decayed teeth ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
730:The semanticists maintained that everything depends on how you interpret the words “potato,” “is” and “moving.” Since the key here is the operational copula “is,” one must examine “is” rigorously. Whereupon they set to work on an Encyclopedia of Cosmic Semasiology, devoting the first four volumes to a discussion of the operational referents of “is.” The neopositivists maintained that it is not clusters of potatoes one directly perceives, but clusters of sensory impressions. Then, employing symbolic logic, they created terms for “cluster of impressions” and “cluster of potatoes,” devised a special calculus of propositions all in algebraic signs and after using up several seas of ink reached the mathematically precise and absolutely undeniable conclusion that 0=0. ~ Stanis aw Lem, #NFDB
731:No puedo hablar sobre nuestra historia de amor, así que hablaré sobre matemáticas. No soy una matemática, pero sé esto: hay infinitos números entre el 0 y el 1. Hay .1 y .12 y .112 y una infinita colección de otros. Por supuesto, hay una colección más grande de números entre 0 y 2 o entre 0 y un millón. Algunos infinitos son más grandes que otros. Un escritor que nos gustaba nos enseñó eso.
Hay días, muchos de ellos, cuando me resiento por el infinito. Quiero más números de los que soy capaz de conseguir, y Dios, quiero más números para Augustus Waters que los que tiene. Pero, Gus, mi amor, no puedo decir cuán agradecida estoy por nuestro pequeño infinito. No lo comercializaría con el mundo. Me diste un para siempre dentro de los días numerados y estoy agradecida. ~ John Green,#NFDB
732:O Poor People
Let us invoke a healthy heart-breaking
Towards the horrible world:
Let us say 0 poor people
How can they help being so absurd,
Misguided, abused, misled?
With unsifted saving graces jostling about
On a mucky medley of needs,
Like love-lit shit,
Year after cyclic year
The unidentifiable flying god is missed.
Emotions sit in their heads disguised as judges,
Or are twisted to look like mathematical formulae,
And only a scarce god-given scientist notices
His trembling lip melting the heart of the rat.
Whoever gave us the idea somebody loved us?
Far in our wounded depths faint memories cry,
A vision flickers below subliminally
But immanence looms unbearably: TURN IT OFF! they hiss.
~ Elizabeth Smart,#NFDB
733:My personal life is as monotonous as ever; but they have given me permission to walk in the garden, where there are almost seventeen trees ! This is a great happiness for me. Moreover, I am given a candle in the evenings—that's my second piece of luck. The third will be mine if you answer as soon as possible, and send me the next number of the 0. Z. I am in the same position as a country subscriber, and await each number as a great event, like some landed proprietor dying of boredom in the provinces. Will you send me some historical works ? That would be splendid. But best of all would be the Bible (both Testaments). I need one. Should it prove possible, send it in a French translation. But if you could add as well a Slav edition, it would be the height of bliss. Of ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
734:Base two especially impressed the seventeenth-century religious philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. He observed that in this base all numbers were written in terms of the symbols 0 and 1 only. Thus eleven, which equals 1 · 23 + 0 · 22 + 1 · 2 + 1, would be written 1011 in base two. Leibniz saw in this binary arithmetic the image and proof of creation. Unity was God and zero was the void. God drew all objects from the void just as the unity applied to the zero creates all numbers. This conception, over which the reader would do well not to ponder too long, delighted Leibniz so much that he sent it to Grimaldi, the Jesuit president of the Chinese tribunal for mathematics, to be used as an argument for the conversion of the Chinese emperor to Christianity. ~ Morris Kline, #NFDB
735:Deception. What follows digitalization is deception, a period during which exponential growth goes mostly unnoticed. This happens because the doubling of small numbers often produces results so minuscule they are often mistaken for the plodder’s progress of linear growth. Imagine Kodak’s first digital camera with 0.01 megapixels doubling to 0.02, 0.02 to 0.04, 0.04 to 0.08. To the casual observer, these numbers all look like zero. Yet big change is on the horizon. Once these doublings break the whole-number barrier (become 1, 2, 4, 8, etc.), they are only twenty doublings away from a millionfold improvement, and only thirty doublings away from a billionfold improvement. It is at this stage that exponential growth, initially deceptive, starts becoming visibly disruptive. ~ Peter H Diamandis, #NFDB
736:In what house, the jade flute that sends these dark notes drifting,
scattering on the spring wind that fills Lo-yang?
Tonight if we should hear the willow-breaking song,
who could help but long for the gardens of home?
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Parting At A Wine-Shop In Nan-King
A wind, bringing willow-cotton, sweetens the shop,
And a girl from Wu, pouring wine, urges me to share it.
With my comrades of the city who are here to see me off;
And as each of them drains his cup, I say to him in parting,
Oh, go and ask this river running to the east
If it can travel farther than a friend's love!
by owner. provided at no charge for educational purposes
~ Li Bai, Spring Night In Lo-Yang Hearing A Flute
,#NFDB
737:ADOBE ACROBAT 6.0 73 Section Eight: Manipulating Tagged PDF Structural Elements 6 Click OK. The Progress dialog box that appears as Acrobat 6.0 Professional creates the PDF document Acrobat 6.0 Professional opens each application and converts the document to an accessible PDF document. A PDF document created from a Microsoft Word document, a Microsoft PowerPoint document, and a Microsoft Excel document The tags tree contains a tag and three tags representing the three combined documents. In the previous example, the author correctly tagged the text in the slide presentation and the table in the spreadsheet. Perform a Full Check on combined documents to ensure that all structural elements have been made accessible. Options for combining documents If you choose to combine PDF documents ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
738:Along the bottom of each chart, the x-axis, the doctors plotted the number of ACEs that patients had experienced. Along the y-axis, they indicated the prevalence of a specific undesirable outcome: obesity, depression, early sexual activity, history of smoking, and so on. On each chart, the bars rose steadily and consistently from left (0 ACEs) to right (more than 7 ACEs). Compared to people with no history of ACEs, people with ACE scores of 4 or higher were twice as likely to smoke, seven times more likely to be alcoholics, and seven times more likely to have had sex before age fifteen. They were twice as likely to have been diagnosed with cancer, twice as likely to have heart disease, twice as likely to have liver disease, four times as likely to suffer from emphysema or chronic bronchitis. ~ Paul Tough, #NFDB
739:We have seen that our numerical zero derives originally from the Hindu sunya, meaning void or emptiness, deriving from the Sanskrit name for the mark denoting emptiness, or sunya-bindu, meaning an empty dot. These developed between the sixth and eighth centuries. By the ninth century, the assimilation of Indian mathematics by the Arab world led to the literal translation of sunya into Arabic as as-sifr, which also means 'empty' or the 'absence of anything'. We still see a residue of this because it is the origin of the English word 'cipher'. Originally, it meant 'Nothing', or if used insultingly of a person it would mean that they were a nonentity-a nobody-as in King Lear where the fool says to the King "Now thou art an 0 without a figure. I am better than thou art now. I am a fool, thou art nothing. ~ John D Barrow, #NFDB
740:An easy direct calculation shows that d dt exp[!g(t)][$(t) ! a] = 0, so, indeed, exp[!g(t)][$(t) ! a] = $(0) ! a. Taking t = 1, exp[!2"in($; a)][$(1) ! a] = $(0) ! a, or, exp[!2"in($; a)] = 1, which implies that n($; a) is indeed integral. The function is obviously continuous, and being integer, it is constant on connected components. Clearly also, it tends to 0 as a tends to +, so it is identically 0 on the unbounded component. ! The next result is an immediate corollary of the invariance of path integrals of analytic functions under homotopy.Proposition. If $0 and $1 are paths which are homotopic in C \ {a} for some point a, then n($0; a) = n($1; a). Cauchy’s Integral Formula. Let $ a piecewise smooth curve in a region G which is null homotopic there, and let f be an analytic function on G. Then n($; a) ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
741:Rees maintains that six numbers in particular govern our universe, and that if any of these values were changed even very slightly things could not be as they are. For example, for the universe to exist as it does requires that hydrogen be converted to helium in a precise but comparatively stately manner—specifically, in a way that converts seven one-thousandths of its mass to energy. Lower that value very slightly—from 0.007 percent to 0.006 percent, say—and no transformation could take place: the universe would consist of hydrogen and nothing else. Raise the value very slightly—to 0.008 percent—and bonding would be so wildly prolific that the hydrogen would long since have been exhausted. In either case, with the slightest tweaking of the numbers the universe as we know and need it would not be here. I ~ Bill Bryson, #NFDB
742:Deerfield, Massachusetts
February 29, 1704
Temperature 0 degrees
The rock-hard wetness of her heavy leather shoes had frozen her toes and blistered her heels. But now her feet were cozy inside the soft moccasins. She felt guilty about the others, still suffering, and then, astonished, saw that all the prisoners were being given moccasins.
She and Eben Nims stared at each other.
“They knew they would take this many prisoners, Eben,” whispered Mercy. “They have enough moccasins to go around. They have little pairs and big pairs.”
She thought of them back in Canada, around their fires, among their French allies, planning how many pairs of moccasins they would need when they sacked Deerfield.
They mean us to live, thought Mercy. But why? What will they do with all of us? ~ Caroline B Cooney,#NFDB
743:To recap, Motivation 2.0 suffers from three compatibility problems. It doesn't mesh with the way many new business models are organizing what we do - because we're intrinsically motivated purpose maximizers, not only extrinsically motivated profit maximizers. It doesn't comport with the way that twenty-first-century economics thinks about what we do - because economists are finally realizing tht we're full-fledged human beings, not single-minded economic robots. And perhaps most important, it's hard to reconcile with much of what we actually do at work - because for growing numbers of people, work is often creative, interesting, and self-directed rather than routine, boring and other-directed. Taken together, these compatibility problems warn us that something's gone awry in our motivational operating system. ~ Daniel H Pink, #NFDB
744:No puedo hablar de nuestra historia de amor, así que hablaré de matemáticas. No soy matemática, pero de algo estoy segura: entre el 0 y el 1 hay infinitos números. Están el 0,1, el 0,12, el 0,112 y toda una infinita colección de otros números. Por supuesto, entre el 0 y el 2 también hay una serie de números infinita, pero mayor, y entre el 0 y un millón. Hay infinitos más grandes que otros. Nos lo enseñó un escritor que nos gustaba. En estos días, a menudo siento que me fastidia que mi serie infinita sea tan breve. Quiero más números de los que seguramente obtendré, y quiero más números para Augustus de los que obtuvo. Pero, Gus, amor mío, no puedo expresar lo mucho que te agradezco nuestro pequeño infinito. No lo cambiaría por el mundo entero. Me has dado una eternidad en esos días contados, y te doy las gracias. ~ John Green, #NFDB
745:BF7BA421: "Eric Allman " 44 new signatures gpg: key A00E1563: "Gregory Neil Shapiro " 48 new signatures gpg: key 22327A01: "Claus Assmann (PGP2) " 14 new signatures gpg: Total number processed: 15 gpg: imported: 1 gpg: new user IDs: 4 gpg: new signatures: 222 gpg: 3 marginal(s) needed, 1 complete(s) needed, classic trust model gpg: depth: 0 valid: 1 signed: 0 trust: 0-, 0q, 0n, 0m, 0f, 1u Notice that the newest key imported in the preceding output was key 7093B841 (the signing key for 2007). To verify that this key is valid (not forged) print its fingerprint with a command like this: % gpg --fingerprint 7093B841 pub 1024R/7093B841 2006-12-16 Key fingerprint = D9 FD C5 6B EE 1E 7A A8 CE 27 D9 B9 55 8B 56 B6 uid Sendmail Signing Key/2007 Now compare the fingerprint displayed to the following list of valid fingerprints: ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
746:The River Chu cuts through the middle of heaven's gate,
The green water flowing east reaches here then swirls.
On either bank the blue hills face towards each other,
The flatness of a lonely sail comes from by of the sun.
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Visiting The Taoist Priest Dai Tianshan But Not Finding Him
A dog's bark amid the water's sound,
Peach blossom that's made thicker by the rain.
Deep in the trees, I sometimes see a deer,
And at the stream I hear no noonday bell.
Wild bamboo divides the green mist,
A flying spring hangs from the jasper peak.
No-one knows the place to which he's gone,
Sadly, I lean on two or three pines.
by owner. provided at no charge for educational purposes
~ Li Bai, Viewing Heaven's Gate Mountains
,#NFDB
747:Não posso falar da nossa história de amor, portanto vou falar de matemática. Não sou matemática, mas uma coisa eu sei: Entre 0 e 1 existem números infinitos. Existe o 0,1 e o 0,12 e o 0,112 e uma série infinita de outros. Claro está que existe um maior conjunto infinito de números entre 0 e 2, ou entre 0 e um milhão. Algumas infinidades são maiores do que outras. Quem nos ensinou isto foi um escritor, de quem gostávamos. Há dias, muitos dias, em que sinto um rancor do tamanho do meu conjunto iluminado. Quero mais números do que é provável que tenha e, oh Deus, quero mais números para o Augustus Waters do que os que ele tem. Mas Gus, meu amor, não te consigo dizer como estou grata pela nossa pequena infinidade. Não a trocaria por nada deste mundo. No meio dos dias numerados, tu deste-me um para sempre, e eu estou grata ~ John Green, #NFDB
748:No matter how rich or poor we are, each of us gets twenty-four hours in a day. In order to consume YouTube, Facebook, or e-mail, we must ‘pay’ attention. In fact, Americans nearly doubled the amount of leisure time they spent on Internet between 2000 and 2011. This implies that they valued it more than the other ways they could spend their time. By considering the value of users’ time and comparing leisure time spent on the Internet to time spent in other ways, Erik and Joo Hee estimated that the Internet created about $ 2,600 of value per user each year. None of this showed up in the GDP statistics but if it had, GDP growth—and thus productivity growth—would have been about 0.3 percent higher each year. In other words, instead of the reported 1.2 percent productivity growth for 2012, it would have been 1.5 percent. ~ Erik Brynjolfsson, #NFDB
749:Dear Merlin, How empty is empty space? ARTHUR LEVY HOUSTON, TEXAS When a rabbit disappears into “thin air” at a magic show nobody tells you the thin air already contains over 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 (ten quintillion) atoms per cubic centimeter. The very best laboratory vacuum chambers have as few as 10,000 atoms per cubic centimeter. Interplanetary space gets down to about 10 atoms per cubic centimeter while interstellar space is as low as 0.5 atoms per cubic centimeter. The award for nothingness, however, must be given to intergalactic space. There it is difficult to find more than 0.0000001 atoms per cubic centimeter. It has been postulated that outside the universe, where there is no space, there is no nothing. We might call this hypothetical region (where we are certain to find multitudes of rabbits) nothing-nothing ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson, #NFDB
750:Queen of the Night Salsa 2.0 This is a jazzed-up version of an earlier recipe from our Precious Darlin’ George. He is ever seeking new and more delicious ways to please us and we adore him for this and other reasons. MIX ALL THIS stuff together—1 15-ounce can drained and rinsed black beans, 1 11-ounce can Niblets corn, 1 small can chopped green chilis, 1 small can chopped black olives, 2 to 3 chopped fresh tomatoes, at least 8 ounces shredded Monterey Jack, 1 bunch chopped green onions, some cilantro (fresh or dried, to taste), 1/2 teaspoon chili powder, 1/2 teaspoon cumin, 1/2 to 3/4 of a 16-ounce bottle of Wishbone Robusto Italian dressing, and a whole big lot of chopped-up bacon. Obviously, the more bacon, the better—duh. Chill all that overnight in the refrigerator and then eat it all at one sitting the next day with Fritos. ~ Jill Conner Browne, #NFDB
751:THE AMERICAN League Championship was so hotly contentious that year, I could barely stand to watch the games. The tension of being a Red Sox fan as they battled back from 0–3 made my stomach hurt, and my surroundings didn’t make it any easier. The running joke in the Camp was that half the population of the Bronx was residing in Danbury, and of course they were all ferocious Yankees fans. But the Red Sox had plenty of partisans too; a significant percentage of the white women were from Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, and the always-suspect border state of Connecticut. Daily life was usually racially peaceful in the Camp, but the very obvious racial divide between Yankees and Sox fans made me nervous. I remembered the riot at UMass in 1986 after the Mets defeated the Sox in the World Series, when black Mets fans were horribly beaten. ~ Piper Kerman, #NFDB
752:According to our estimates, the optimal top tax rate in the developed countries is probably above 80 percent.50 Do not be misled by the apparent precision of this estimate: no mathematical formula or econometric estimate can tell us exactly what tax rate ought to be applied to what level of income. Only collective deliberation and democratic experimentation can do that. What is certain, however, is that our estimates pertain to extremely high levels of income, those observed in the top 1 percent or 0.5 percent of the income hierarchy. The evidence suggests that a rate on the order of 80 percent on incomes over $500,000 or $1 million a year not only would not reduce the growth of the US economy but would in fact distribute the fruits of growth more widely while imposing reasonable limits on economically useless (or even harmful) behavior. ~ Thomas Piketty, #NFDB
753:If at large gatherings or parties, or around people with whom you feel distant, your hands sometimes hang awkwardly at the ends of your arms 0 if you find yourself at a loss for what to do with them, overcome with sadness that comes when you recognize the foreignness of your own body - it's because your hands remember a time when the division between mind and body, brain and heart, what's inside and what's outside, was so much less. It's not that we've forgotten the language of gestures entirely. The habit of moving our hands while we speak is left over from it. Clapping, pointing, giving the thumbs-up: all artifacts of ancient gestures. Holding hands, for example, is a way tor member how it feels to say nothing together. And at night, when it's too dark to see, we find it necessary to gesture on each other's bodies to make ourselves understood. ~ Nicole Krauss, #NFDB
754:Vào năm 1966, tờ báo tên là Eastern Sun được tung ra bởi Aw Kow, con trai của một trong số anh em nhà Tiger Balm Aw và được biết là một tay chơi hơn là ông trùm báo chí nghiêm túc. Sau những thương lượng bí mật với các quan chức cấp cao của một cơ quan Cộng hòa Nhân dân Trung Hoa đóng ở Hong Kong, họ cho ông ta vay 3 triệu đôla Singapore với thời hạn trên năm năm cùng lãi suất buồn cười là 0,1% mỗi năm. Đổi lại, tờ báo này không được chống đối Cộng hòa Nhân dân Trung Hoa về những vấn đề chính yếu và sẽ giữ trung lập đối với những vấn đề thứ yếu. Tờ Eastern Sun bị lỗ lã nặng do quản lý yếu kém. Vào năm 1968, tờ báo này nhận thêm khoản trợ cấp 600.000 đôla Singapore. Vào năm 1971, chúng tôi phanh phui ra "quỹ đen" này được tài trợ bởi một thế lực nước ngoài. Aw Kaw thừa nhận điều đó là sự thật. Ban biên tập bị xúc phạm nên đã từ chức và tờ báo bị đóng cửa. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
755:But the world is changing at warp speed, and cities have to evolve to stay ahead of the curve. Which brings us to the third generation of cities, Cities 3.0, where the city is a hub of innovation, entrepreneurship and technology. Cities 3.0 is paperless, wireless and cashless. In Cities 3.0, we have more cell phones than telephone landlines, more tablets than desktop computers, more smart devices than toothbrushes. We know that in order to keep up in the modern era, we have to be innovative. If cities are going to drive the nation's economic revitalization, then we need to become laboratories and incubators of change. Yet the pending state legislation, which seeks to require the same insurance for ride-sharing companies as for old-style taxi companies, would discourage innovation and force out-of-date thinking on Next Economy companies such as Uber and Lyft. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
756:During the period in question, the changes in the empty space in
the womb can only be identified by an anatomical or gynecological
examination. Yet these changes, only recently identified by scientists,
are miraculously indicated in Surat ar-Ra‘d:
Allah knows what every female bears and
every shrinking of the womb and every
swelling. Everything has its measure with
Him. (Qur'an, 13:8)
At the beginning of the menstrual
period, the mucous on the walls of the
womb (the endometrium layer) is 0.5
mm (0.02 inch) thick. Under the effect
of hormones secreted by the egg, this
layer grows and reaches a thickness of
5-6 mm (0.2 inch). This layer is then
discarded in the absence of fertilisation. As
we see from the above verse, this monthly
increase and reduction in the walls of the
womb is indicated in the Qur'an. ~ Harun Yahya,#NFDB
757:Most Web activities do not generate jobs and revenue at the rate of past technological breakthroughs. When Ford and General Motors were growing in the early part of the twentieth century, they created millions of jobs and helped build Detroit into a top-tier U.S. city. Today, Facebook creates a lot of voyeuristic pleasure, but the company doesn’t employ many people and hasn’t done much for Palo Alto; a lot of the “work” is performed more or less automatically by the software and the servers. You could say that the real work is done by its users, in their spare time and as a form of leisure. Web 2.0 is not filling government coffers or supporting many families, even though it’s been great for users, programmers, and some information technology specialists. Everyone on the Web has heard of Twitter, but as of Fall 2010, only about three hundred people work there. ~ Tyler Cowen, #NFDB
758:To see what happens in the real world when an information cascade takes over, and the bidders have almost nothing but one another’s behavior to estimate an item’s value, look no further than Peter A. Lawrence’s developmental biology text The Making of a Fly, which in April 2011 was selling for $23,698,655.93 (plus $3.99 shipping) on Amazon’s third-party marketplace. How and why had this—admittedly respected—book reached a sale price of more than $23 million? It turns out that two of the sellers were setting their prices algorithmically as constant fractions of each other: one was always setting it to 0.99830 times the competitor’s price, while the competitor was automatically setting their own price to 1.27059 times the other’s. Neither seller apparently thought to set any limit on the resulting numbers, and eventually the process spiraled totally out of control. ~ Brian Christian, #NFDB
759:Hispanics are half as likely to enlist in the military as either whites or blacks. The recruit-to-population ratio for whites is 1.06. For blacks it is 1.08. For Hispanics, it’s only 0.65. The media not only neglect to highlight this particular underrepresentation, they lie about it. An article published by the Population Reference Bureau—subsidized by taxpayers—is titled: “Latinos Claim Larger Share of U.S. Military Personnel.” To the untrained eye, this would seem to be saying that Latinos claim a larger share of U.S. military personnel. In fact, however, by “larger share,” the headline means “larger” compared with the past—not compared with other groups. The actual article admits that Hispanics constitute less than 12 percent of all enlistees, compared with 16 percent of the civilian workforce. Moreover, despite their machismo culture, a majority of Hispanic troops are women.15 ~ Ann Coulter, #NFDB
760:First, to understand why the standard and extended ping results have different effects, consider first the standard ping 172.16.1.51 command on R1, as shown previously in Figure 23-7. As a standard ping command, R1 used its LAN interface IP address (172.16.1.1) as the source of the ICMP Echo. So, when the host (A) sent back its ICMP echo reply, host A considered the destination of 172.16.1.1 as being on the same subnet. Host A’s ICMP echo reply message, sent back to 172.16.1.1, would work even if host A did not have a default router setting at all! In comparison, Figure 23-8 shows the difference when using an extended ping on Router R1. An extended ping from local Router R1, using R1’s S0/0/0 IP address of 172.16.4.1 as the source of the ICMP echo request, means that host A’s ICMP echo reply will flow to an address in another subnet, which makes host A use its default router setting. ~ Wendell Odom, #NFDB
761:You should focus relentlessly on something you’re good at doing, but before that you must think hard about whether it will be valuable in the future. For the startup world, this means you should not necessarily start your own company, even if you are extraordinarily talented. If anything, too many people are starting their own companies today. People who understand the power law will hesitate more than others when it comes to founding a new venture: they know how tremendously successful they could become by joining the very best company while it’s growing fast. The power law means that differences between companies will dwarf the differences in roles inside companies. You could have 100% of the equity if you fully fund your own venture, but if it fails you’ll have 100% of nothing. Owning just 0.01% of Google, by contrast, is incredibly valuable (more than $35 million as of this writing). ~ Peter Thiel, #NFDB
762:Sonnet On Famous And Familiar Sonnets And
Experiences
(With much help from Robert Good, William Shakespeare,
John Milton, and little Catherine Schwartz)
Shall I compare her to a summer play?
She is too clever, too devious, too subtle, too dark:
Her lies are rare, but then she paves the way
Beyond the summer's sway, within the jejune park
Where all souls' aspiration to true nobility
Obliges Statues in the Frieze of Death
And when this pantomime and Panama of Panorama Fails,
"I'll never speak to you agayne" -- or waste her panting breath.
When I but think of how her years are spent
Deadening that one talent which -- for woman is -Death or paralysis, denied: nature's intent
That each girl be a mother -- whether or not she is
Or has become a lawful wife or bride
-- 0 Alma Magna Mater, deathless the living death of pride.
~ Delmore Schwartz,#NFDB
763:I figured they would be better off hanging here with the guys to keep them occupied while we're gone." "I had the same idea," another voice said as I moved into the doorway, seeing a woman with another dog at her side, a bigger, light-colored, Pitbull. "Since Adler is on patrol tonight, Linny would be home alone." "Well, the surprise is ruined," yet another voice announced, shaking her head. I recognized her from the party. She'd been the one to get behind the bar. Edison's woman. Lenny. "So, you're Freddie." "I'm Freddie," I agreed with a smile. "And you're the girls club." "Kinda 2.0," Lou told me. "We wouldn't deign to think we are quite as badass as the OGs are." "I heard what you did to West. I think you're pretty badass," I told her. "That little shit," she said, smiling fondly. "I like him," she added. "He just needed a little reminder that we don't take that nonsense. Anyway, I'm ~ Jessica Gadziala, #NFDB
764:Evernote’s CEO Phil Libin shared some revealing insights about how the company turns non-paying users into revenue generating ones.[xxiii] In 2011, Libin published a chart now known as the “smile graph.” With the percentage of sign-ups represented on the Y-axis and time spent on the service on the X-axis, the chart showed that, although usage plummeted at first, it rocketed upward as people formed a habit of using the service. The resulting down and up curve gave the chart its emblematic smile shape (and Evernote’s CEO a matching grin). In addition, as usage increased over time, so did customers’ willingness to pay. Libin noted that after the first month, only 0.5 percent of users paid for the service; however, this rate gradually increased. By month 33, 11 percent of users had started paying. At month 42, a remarkable 26 percent of customers were paying for something they had previously used for free. ~ Nir Eyal, #NFDB
765:So, in one slightly technical line, here's the mathematical skinny. There's an equation in string theory that has a contribution of the form (D-10) times (Trouble), where D represents the number of spacetime dimensions and Trouble is a mathematical expression resulting in troublesome physical phenomena, such as the violation of energy conservation mentioned above. As to why the equation takes this precise form, I can't offer any intuitive, nontechnical explanation. But if you do the calculation, that's where the math leads. Now, this simple but key observation is that if the number of spacetime dimensions is ten, not the four we expect, the contribution becomes 0 times Trouble. And since 0 times anything is 0, in a universe with ten spacetime dimensions the trouble gets wiped away. That's how the math plays out. Really. And that's why string theorists argue for a universe with more than four spacetime dimensions. ~ Brian Greene, #NFDB
766:Giant Fungus
40-acre growth found in Michigan.
— The Los Angeles Times
The sky is full of ruddy ducks
and widgeon's, mockingbirds,
bees, bats, swallowtails,
dragonflies, and great horned owls.
The land below teems with elands
and kit foxes, badgers, aardvarks,
juniper, banana slugs, larch,
cactus, heather, humankind.
Under them, a dome of dirt.
Under that, the World's
Largest Living Thing spreads
like a hemorrhage poised
to paralyze the earth—like a tumor
ready to cause 9.0 convulsions,
or a brain dreaming this world
of crickets and dung beetles,
sculpins, Beethoven, coots,
Caligula, St. Augustine grass, Mister
Lincoln roses, passion fruit, wildebeests,
orioles like sunspots shooting high,
then dropping back to the green
arms of trees, their roots
sunk deep in the power
of things sleeping and unknown.
~ Charles Harper Webb,#NFDB
767:One planet, one experiment15.’ If this book has a lesson, it is that we are awfully lucky to be here – and by ‘we’ I mean every living thing. To attain any kind of life at all in this universe of ours appears to be quite an achievement. As humans we are doubly lucky, of course. We enjoy not only the privilege of existence, but also the singular ability to appreciate it and even, in a multitude of ways, to make it better. It is a trick we have only just begun to grasp. We have arrived at this position of eminence in a stunningly short time. Behaviourally modern humans have been around for less than 0.01 per cent of Earth’s history – almost nothing, really – but even existing for that little while has required a nearly endless string of good fortune. We really are at the beginning of it all. The trick, of course, is to make sure we never find the end. And that, almost certainly, will require a lot more than lucky breaks. ~ Bill Bryson, #NFDB
768:In the last year, ancestral DNA had become popular with people curious about their genealogy and, though this was much less publicized, as a tool for finding unidentified criminals. Many in law enforcement were wary. There were quality-assurance issues. Privacy issues. Holes knew DNA. Knew it well. In his opinion, ancestral DNA was a tool, not a certainty. He had a Y-DNA profile generated from the EAR’s DNA, which means he isolated the EAR’s paternal lineage. The Y-DNA profile could be input into certain genealogical websites, the kind that people use to find first cousins and the like. You input a set of markers from your Y-DNA profile, anywhere from 12 to 111, and a list of matches is returned, surnames of families with whom you might share a common ancestor. Almost always the matches are at a genetic distance of 1 from you, which doesn’t mean much, relative-seeking-wise. You’re looking for the elusive 0—a close match. ~ Michelle McNamara, #NFDB
769:My old friend's said goodbye to the west, here at Yellow Crane Tower,
In the third month's cloud of willow blossoms, he's going down to Yangzhou.
The lonely sail is a distant shadow, on the edge of a blue emptiness,
All I see is the Yangtze River flow to the far horizon.
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Taking Leave of a Friend
Blue mountains lie beyond the north wall;
Round the citys eastern side flows the white water.
Here we part, friend, once forever.
You go ten thousand miles, drifting away
Like an unrooted water-grass.
Oh, the floating clouds and the thoughts of a wanderer!
Oh, the sunset and the longing of an old friend!
We ride away from each other, waving our hands,
While our horses neigh softly, softly . . . .
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~ Li Bai, Seeing Off Meng Haoran For Guangling At Yellow Crane Tower
,#NFDB
770:After A Year
YES, you have guessed it. Do not blame me, dear.
Indeed, I did not dream, 0 tender eyes,
When first we met, that in a little year
My words would dim you with pain's dumb surprise.
Do not reproach me, for I suffer too
An agony of shame and self-contempt;
And know that I shall miss, far more than you,
The lost illusions of this dream we've dreamt.
Why did you ever learn to love me, child?
If you had let me only be your friend
Instead of weeping, had you only smiled
Coldly, I might have worshipped to the end.
Worthless and aimless, what I was you knew,
By all the wretched past to you confessed;
The one good in me was my love of you,
And that has proved as fickle as the rest.
Ah ! dear, the worst wrong in this world of shame,
The hardest question to explain, is why
Women like you, who barely know sin's name,
Can be so wounded by such men as I.
~ Alice Duer Miller,#NFDB
771:The Impact of You (Kendall Ryan) - Tu subrayado en la página 22 | posición 331-333 | Añadido el domingo, 26 de abril de 2015 23:23:38 She’s also blessed with a flawless olive complexion, while I’m pale except for the fine dusting of freckles across the bridge of my nose and top of my chest. Speaking of chests, hers fits politely inside her shirt, two nicely rounded lady bumps. ========== The Impact of You (Kendall Ryan) - Tu subrayado en la página 71 | posición 1076-1077 | Añadido el lunes, 27 de abril de 2015 0:41:03 But Avery arouses in me things I’ve never felt. It’s insane. She’s not even mine, and I’m acting like an over-protective alpha male. ========== The Impact of You (Kendall Ryan) - Tu subrayado en la página 79 | posición 1202-1203 | Añadido el lunes, 27 de abril de 2015 0:53:24 That hurt was reserved just for her. I wondered if her nose was tiny, upturned and dotted with freckles like mine. ========== The Impact of You (Kendall Ryan) ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
772:As for “absolute certainty”—well, if you say that something is 99.9999% probable, it means you think you could make one million equally strong independent statements, one after the other, over the course of a solid year or so, and be wrong, on average, around once. This is incredible enough. (It’s amazing to realize we can actually get that level of confidence for “Thou shalt not win the lottery.”) So let us say nothing of probability 1.0. Once you realize you don’t need probabilities of 1.0 to get along in life, you’ll realize how absolutely ridiculous it is to think you could ever get to 1.0 with a human brain. A probability of 1.0 isn’t just certainty, it’s infinite certainty. In fact, it seems to me that to prevent public misunderstanding, maybe scientists should go around saying “We are not INFINITELY certain” rather than “We are not certain.” For the latter case, in ordinary discourse, suggests you know some specific reason for doubt. ~ Eliezer Yudkowsky, #NFDB
773:Even in engineering-driven Silicon Valley, the buzzwords of the moment call for building a “lean startup” that can “adapt” and “evolve” to an ever-changing environment. Would-be entrepreneurs are told that nothing can be known in advance: we’re supposed to listen to what customers say they want, make nothing more than a “minimum viable product,” and iterate our way to success. But leanness is a methodology, not a goal. Making small changes to things that already exist might lead you to a local maximum, but it won’t help you find the global maximum. You could build the best version of an app that lets people order toilet paper from their iPhone. But iteration without a bold plan won’t take you from 0 to 1. A company is the strangest place of all for an indefinite optimist: why should you expect your own business to succeed without a plan to make it happen? Darwinism may be a fine theory in other contexts, but in startups, intelligent design works best. ~ Peter Thiel, #NFDB
774:In this way the extortion game is similar to the economics of sending spam e-mail. When receiving an e-mail promising a share of a lost Nigerian inheritance or cheap Viagra, nearly everyone clicks delete. But a tiny number takes the bait. Computer scientists at the University of California–Berkeley and UC–San Diego hijacked a working spam network to see how the business operated. They found that the spammers, who were selling fake “herbal aphrodisiacs,” made only one sale for every 12.5 million e-mails they sent: a response rate of 0.00001 percent. Each sale was worth an average of less than $100. It doesn’t look like much of a business. But sending out the e-mails was so cheap and easy—it was done using a network of hijacked PCs, which the fraudsters used free of charge—that the spammers made a healthy profit. Pumping out hundreds of millions of e-mails a day, they had a daily income of about $7,000, or more than $2.5 million a year, the researchers figured.3 ~ Tom Wainwright, #NFDB
775:The most price elastic food item is eggs, at 0.32. This means if the price of eggs goes up 1 percent, consumption goes down 0.68 percent. Eggs are the highest-quality protein there is. Eggs have all the nutrients you need. They are literally the world’s most perfect food. And people won’t buy them if the price increases. Why? Because there’s nothing in an egg that has hedonic properties. Tryptophan (the precursor of serotonin) sure, but can it drive dopamine? Conversely, the most price inelastic consumable is fast food, at 0.81. This means if the price of fast food goes up 1 percent, consumption only goes down 0.19 percent. And the second most? Soft drinks, at 0.79. These two food items exert the most hedonic effects (due to sugar and caffeine) and happen to be the ones that people will consume no matter what. And of course they are the most addictive. So how can society turn an addicted, depressed, drug-addled, corpulent, and metabolically ill populace around? ~ Robert H Lustig, #NFDB
776:ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND Lewis Carroll THE MILLENNIUM FULCRUM EDITION 3.0 CHAPTER I Down the Rabbit-Hole Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, 'and what is the use of a book,' thought Alice 'without pictures or conversation?' So she was considering in her own mind (as well as she could, for the hot day made her feel very sleepy and stupid), whether the pleasure of making a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up and picking the daisies, when suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran close by her. There was nothing so very remarkable in that; nor did Alice think it so very much out of the way to hear the Rabbit say to itself, 'Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be late!' (when she thought it over afterwards, it occurred to her that she ought to have wondered at this, but at the ~ Lewis Carroll, #NFDB
777:Planning a novel's ending is like planning the weather months ahead of time. Let the characters take you to the end of the story.
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Planning a novel's ending is like planning the weather months ahead of time. Let the characters take you to the end of the story.
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Planning a novel's ending is like planning the weather months ahead of time. I let the characters take me to the end of the story. ~ Mark Rubinstein,#NFDB
778:Wine-maker there by Yellow Fountains,
Eternal Spring thats still your vintage.
Without Li Po on Nights Terrace
Who can there be to bring you custom?
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Long Yearning
Long yearning,
To be in Chang'an.
The grasshoppers weave their autumn song by the golden railing of the well;
Frost coalesces on my bamboo mat, changing its colour with cold.
My lonely lamp is not bright, Id like to end these thoughts;
I roll back the hanging, gaze at the moon, and long sigh in vain.
The beautiful person's like a flower beyond the edge of the clouds.
Above is the black night of heaven's height;
Below is the green water billowing on.
The sky is long, the road is far, bitter flies my spirit;
The spirit I dream can't get through, the mountain pass is hard.
Long yearning,
Breaks my heart.
by owner. provided at no charge for educational purposes
~ Li Bai, Lament for Mr Tai
,#NFDB
779:The potential for manipulation here is enormous. Here’s one example. During the 2012 election, Facebook users had the opportunity to post an “I Voted” icon, much like the real stickers many of us get at polling places after voting. There is a documented bandwagon effect with respect to voting; you are more likely to vote if you believe your friends are voting, too. This manipulation had the effect of increasing voter turnout 0.4% nationwide. So far, so good. But now imagine if Facebook manipulated the visibility of the “I Voted” icon on the basis of either party affiliation or some decent proxy of it: ZIP code of residence, blogs linked to, URLs liked, and so on. It didn’t, but if it had, it would have had the effect of increasing voter turnout in one direction. It would be hard to detect, and it wouldn’t even be illegal. Facebook could easily tilt a close election by selectively manipulating what posts its users see. Google might do something similar with its search results. ~ Bruce Schneier, #NFDB
780:Thus, it is taking more American churches to field one missionary than churches in other parts of the world. For example, whereas there is one crosscultural missionary supported by every 0.7 evangelical churches in Singapore, by 2.1 churches in Hong Kong, 2.4 in Albania, 2.5 in Sri Lanka, 2.6 in Mongolia, 4.2 in South Korea, 4.9 in Myanmar, and 5.3 in Senegal, in the United States the ratio is 7.6 churches to one missionary.[6] The proper conclusion from this flurry of numbers would seem to be that, while the United States contains a whole lot of evangelical churches, those churches are not now as proportionately active in crosscultural missionary activity as many churches in the non-Western world. Evangelical dynamism in these other churches has replaced, or is replacing, the evangelical dynamism of American churches as the leading edge of world Christian expansion. That expansion seems to be tracking the earlier pattern of American adjustments to Christianity-after-Christendom. ~ Mark A Noll, #NFDB
781:Antioxidant-Rich Breakfast Bars SERVES 6 INGREDIENTS 1 cup cooked or canned black beans, low-sodium or no-salt-added 1 medium ripe banana 1 cup old-fashioned oats 1 cup frozen blueberries, thawed ¼ cup raisins ⅛ cup pomegranate juice 2 tablespoons finely chopped dates 1 tablespoon chopped walnuts 2 tablespoons goji berries 2 tablespoons raw sunflower seeds 2 tablespoons ground flax seeds DIRECTIONS Preheat the oven to 275°F. Puree beans in a food processor or high-powered blender. Mash banana in a large bowl. Add pureed beans and remaining ingredients and mix thoroughly. Lightly wipe an 8-inch square baking pan with a small amount of olive oil. Spread mixture into the pan. Bake for 75 minutes. Cool on a wire rack and cut into bars. Refrigerate any leftover bars. PER SERVING: CALORIES 188; PROTEIN 6g; CARBOHYDRATES 35g; TOTAL FAT 3.9g; SATURATED FAT 0.4g; SODIUM 11mg; FIBER 6g; BETA-CAROTENE 13ug; VITAMIN C 10mg; CALCIUM 24mg; IRON 2.1mg; FOLATE 61ug; MAGNESIUM 83mg; ZINC 1mg; SELENIUM 6.8ug ~ Joel Fuhrman, #NFDB
782:Kissing Time
'T is when the lark goes soaring
And the bee is at the bud,
When lightly dancing zephyrs
Sing over field and flood;
When all sweet things in nature
Seem joyfully achime 'T is then I wake my darling,
For it is kissing time!
Go, pretty lark, a-soaring,
And suck your sweets, 0 bee;
Sing, 0 ye winds of summer,
Your songs to mine and me;
For with your song and rapture
Cometh the moment when
It's half-past kissing time
And time to kiss again!
So - so the days go fleeting
Like golden fancies free,
And every day that cometh
Is full of sweets for me;
And sweetest are those moments
My darling comes to climb
Into my lap to mind me
That it is kissing time.
Sometimes, maybe, he wanders
A heedless, aimless way Sometimes, maybe, he loiters
In pretty, prattling play;
But presently bethinks him
And hastens to me then,
For it's half-past kissing time
And time to kiss again!
~ Eugene Field,#NFDB
783:Something like missionary reductionism has happened to the internet with the rise of web 2.0. The strangeness is being leached away by the mush-making process. Individual web pages as they first appeared in the early 1990S had the flavor of personhood. MySpace preserved some of that flavor, though a process of regularized formatting had begun. Facebook went further, organizing people into multiple-choice identities, while Wikipedia seeks to erase point of view entirely.
If a church or government were doing these things, it would feel authoritarian, but when technologists are the culprits, we seem hip, fresh, and inventive. People will accept ideas presented in technological form that would be abhorrent in any other form. It is utterly strange to hear my many old friends in the world of digital culture claim to be the true sons of the Renaissance without realizing that using computers to reduce individual expression is a primitive, retrograde activity, no matter how sophisticated your tools are. ~ Jaron Lanier,#NFDB
784:The biggest stumbling block that has traditionally plagued all the unification endeavors has been the simple fact that on the face of it, general relativity and quantum mechanics really appear to be incomprehensible. Recall that the key concept of quantum theory is the uncertainty principle. When you try to probe positions with an ever-increasing magnification power, the momenta (or speeds) start oscillating violently. Below a certain minuscule length known as the Planck length, the entire tenet of a smooth spacetime is lost. This length (equal to 0.000...4 of an inch, where the 4 is at the thirty-fourth decimal place) determines the scale at which gravity has to be treated quantum mechanically. For smaller scales, space turns into an ever-fluctuating "quantum foam." But the very basic premise of general relativity has been the existence of a gently curved spacetime. In other words, the central ideas of general relativity and quantum mechanics clash irreconcilably when it comes to extremely small scales. ~ Mario Livio, #NFDB
785:God's World
Thin as hair are the shadows of sunset
When they follow drawn-out every tree.
On the road through the forest the post-girl
Hands a parcel and letters to me.
By the trail of the cats and the foxes,
By the foxes' and by the cats' trail,
I return with a bundle of letters
To the house where my joy will prevail.
Countries, continents, isthmuses, frontiers,
Lakes and mountains, discussions and news,
Children, grown-ups, old folk, adolescents,
Appreciations, reports and reviews.
0 respected and masculine letters!
All of you, none excepted, have brought
A display of intelligent logic
Underneath a dry statement of thought.
Precious, treasured epistles of women!
Why, I also fell down from a cloud.
And eternally now and for ever
To be yours I have solemnly vowed.
Well and you, stamp-collectors, if even
Only one fleeting moment you had
Among us, what a marvellous present
You would find in my sorrowful stead!
~ Boris Pasternak,#NFDB
786:The Dead Babe
Last night, as my dear babe lay dead,
In agony I knelt and said:
"0 God! what have I done,
Or in what wise offended Thee,
That Thou should'st take away from me
My little son?
"Upon the thousand useless lives,
Upon the guilt that vaunting thrives,
Thy wrath were better spent!
Why should'st Thou take my little son Why should'st Thou vent Thy wrath upon
This innocent?"
Last night, as my dear babe lay dead,
Before mine eyes the vision spread
Of things that might have been:
Licentious riot, cruel strife,
Forgotten prayers, a wasted life
Dark red with sin!
Then, with sweet music in the air,
I saw another vision there:
A Shepherd in whose keep
A little lamb - my little child!
Of worldly wisdom undefiled,
Lay fast asleep!
Last night, as my dear babe lay dead,
In those two messages I read
A wisdom manifest;
And though my arms be childless now,
I am content - to Him I bow
Who knoweth best.
~ Eugene Field,#NFDB
787:In 2004 the British government’s official advisers, the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, proposed that 30 per cent of the United Kingdom’s waters should become reserves in which no fishing or any other kind of extraction happened.58 In 2009 an environmental coalition launched a petition for the same measure – strict protection for 30 per cent of UK seas – which gathered 500,000 signatures.59 Yet, while some nations, including several that are much poorer than the United Kingdom, have started shutting fishing boats out of large parts of their seas, at the time of writing we have managed to protect a spectacular 0.01 per cent of our territorial waters: five of our 48,000 square kilometres. This takes the form of three pocket handkerchiefs: around Lundy Island in the Bristol Channel, Lamlash Bay on the Isle of Arran and Flamborough Head in Yorkshire. There are plenty of other nominally protected areas but they are no better defended from industrial fishing than our national parks are defended from farming. ~ George Monbiot, #NFDB
788:Now He Knows All There Is To Know. Now He Is
Acquainted With The Day And Night
(Robert Frost, 1875-1963)
Whose wood this is I think I know:
He made it sacred long ago:
He will expect me, far or near
To watch that wood immense with snow.
That famous horse must feel great fear
Now that his noble rider's no longer here:
He gives his harness bells to rhyme
--Perhaps he will be back, in time?
All woulds were promises he kept
Throughout the night when others slept:
Now that he knows all that he did not know,
His wood is holy, and full of snow,
and all the beauty he made holy long long ago
In Boston, London, Washington,
And once by the Pacific and once in Moscow:
and now, and now
upon the fabulous blue river ever
or singing from a great white bough
And wherever America is, now as before,
and now as long, long ago
He sleeps and wakes forever more!
"0 what a metaphysical victory
The first day and night of death must be!"
~ Delmore Schwartz,#NFDB
789:The description given earlier of the relationship between integrating a 2-form over the surface of a sphere and integrating its derivative over the solid sphere can be thought of as a generalization of the fundamental theorem of calculus, and can itself be generalized considerably: Stokes’s theorem is the assertion that for any oriented manifold S and form ω, where ∂ S is the oriented boundary of S (which we will not define here). Indeed one can view this theorem as a definition of the derivative operation ω → dω; thus, differentiation is the adjoint of the boundary operation. (For instance, the identity (11) is dual to the geometric observation that the boundary ∂s of an oriented manifold itself has no boundary: ∂(∂S) = ∅.) As a particular case of Stokes’s theorem, we see that ∫s dω = 0 whenever S is a closed manifold, i.e., one with no boundary. This observation lets one extend the notions of closed and exact forms to general differential forms, which (together with (11)) allows one to fully set up de Rham cohomology. ~ Timothy Gowers, #NFDB
790:Squaring the Circle was devised upon disbelief in Adam's heritage (which were granted to him by God) by the ancients to replace his tradition with that of the "Christ" whom was proclaimed anew in each age. The Egyptian Royal Cubit (according to Michell) equals to 1.728 feet; it was used in Squaring the Circle of the New Jerusalem which was based on the Great Pyramid's model. The Great Pyramid's base diagonal equals to one complete circular rotation of a Royal Cubit pace (622/360=1.728), and its structure is raised in an angle into the skies to project the Moon's rotation (622=51.85*12). We can link the meter as a unit of measurement to ancient Egypt -even though it was only recently devised- because it harmonizes with its decanic calendar which is still in use today by the Judeo-Christian heirs of Pharaoh's religion. The Royal Cubit angularly articulates the Primal Creation on yearly, monthly (0.5236*180/pi) and weekly (pi/6) basis and that is exactly why it was utilized; it served as a good tool for Squaring the Circle. ~ Ibrahim Ibrahim, #NFDB
791:So we’re left with two paths to assembling phenomenal talent. You can find a way to hire the very best, or you can hire average performers and try to turn them into the best. Put bluntly, which of the following situations would you rather be in? We hire 90th percentile performers, who start doing great work right away. We hire average performers, and through our training programs hope eventually to turn them into 90th percentile performers. Doesn’t seem like a hard choice when it’s put that way, especially once you realize there’s probably enough money in your budget to get these exceptional people—it’s just being spent in the wrong places. Companies continue to invest substantially more in training than in hiring, according to the Corporate Executive Board.74 Per employee Training spend: $606.36 Hiring spend: $456.44 % of total HR expense Training spend: 18.3% Hiring spend: 13.6% % of revenue Training spend: 0.18% Hiring spend: 0.15% Companies spent more on training current employees than on hiring new employees. Data from 2012. ~ Laszlo Bock, #NFDB
792:Everything is upside down. All scientific evidence points to a model of the most efficient human learning as being completely individual. Humans, from infants to the elderly, learn in their own style, in their own time, driven by curiosity. February tenth is not the day that every third-grader in the country is ready to learn their four times table, but that’s how it’s been taught for a hundred years. Without teachers’ unions, it was easy to replace teachers with teacher-technicians. They only know scripts; they don’t know anything about how children learn. They have a few layers of how to keep everyone on the same page; that’s all. If that doesn’t work, then they fail the children, hold them back to go through the same fruitless exercises. So one key move is to take education out of the hands of business and put it into the hands of kids and of educators, in that order. ~ Kathleen Ann Goonan, Girl in Wave : Wave in Girl, in Ed Finn & Kathryn Cramer (eds.) Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future (2014), ISBN 978-0-06-220469-1, p. 49, #NFDB
793:The dangers that we face are part of the process, now well underway, of the unification of the planet--in language, culture, science, and commerce. They are both driven by the identical technological advances--this critical and delicate time coincides with the widespread availability of nuclear weapons. At the present rate of change, it seems likely that in the period between now and 2061, the turning point for the human species will have been reached.
If we survive until then, our passage to the next apparition of Halley's Comet should be comparatively easy. That perihelion passage will be in March 2134, when the comet will make an unusually close encounter with the Earth. It will come as close as 0.09AU or 14 million kilometers, less than half the distance of the 1910 encounter. It will then be brighter than the brightest star. If there are those to do the commemorating, the years 2061 and 2134 should be celebrated for the courage, intelligence, and common purpose of a species forced by urgent necessity to come to its senses. ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
794:The Stork
Last night the Stork came stalking,
And, Stork, beneath your wing
Lay, lapped in dreamless slumber,
The tiniest little thing!
From Babyland, out yonder
Beside a silver sea,
You brought a priceless treasure
As gift to mine and me!
Last night my dear one listened And, wife, you knew the cry The dear old Stork has sought our home
A many times gone by!
And in your gentle bosom
I found the pretty thing
That from the realm out yonder
Our friend the Stork did bring.
Last night a babe awakened,
And, babe, how strange and new
Must seem the home and people
The Stork has brought you to;
And yet methinks you like them You neither stare nor weep,
But closer to my dear one
You cuddle, and you sleep!
Last night my heart grew fonder 0 happy heart of mine,
Sing of the inspirations
That round my pathway shine!
And sing your sweetest love-song
To this dear nestling wee
The Stork from 'Way-Out-Yonder
Hath brought to mine and me!
~ Eugene Field,#NFDB
795:One day over breakfast, a medical resident asked how Dr. Apgar would make a systematic assessment of a newborn. “That’s easy,” she replied. “You would do it like this.” Apgar jotted down five variables (heart rate, respiration, reflex, muscle tone, and color) and three scores (0, 1, or 2, depending on the robustness of each sign). Realizing that she might have made a breakthrough that any delivery room could implement, Apgar began rating infants by this rule one minute after they were born. A baby with a total score of 8 or above was likely to be pink, squirming, crying, grimacing, with a pulse of 100 or more—in good shape. A baby with a score of 4 or below was probably bluish, flaccid, passive, with a slow or weak pulse—in need of immediate intervention. Applying Apgar’s score, the staff in delivery rooms finally had consistent standards for determining which babies were in trouble, and the formula is credited for an important contribution to reducing infant mortality. The Apgar test is still used every day in every delivery room. ~ Daniel Kahneman, #NFDB
796:By water's edge, quiet willows stand,
And from the steep bank, high noon flings
White fleecy clouds into the pond
As if they were a fisher's seines.
The firmament sinks like a net,
A crowd of sunburnt bathers dive
With yells into the pond, and head
For this elusive netlike sky.
Some women from the water rise
Under the scanty willows' lee,
And stepping on the sand, wring dry
Their bathing costumes hurriedly.
The coils of fabric twist and slide
Like water-snakes, and nimbly roll,
As if the dripping garments hide
Beguiling serpents in their folds.
0 woman, neither looks nor shape
Will nonplus me or make me gloat.
You, all of you, are like a lump
In my excitement-stricken throat.
You look as if hewn in the roughA stray verse line dashed off ad lib.
You make me think it is the truthThat you were made out of my rib.
And instantly you broke away
From my embrace, and moved apart,
All fear, confusion, disarrayAnd missing beats of a man's heart.
~ Boris Pasternak,#NFDB
797:Our clever friend Feynman demonstrated how to write down the Equation of the Universe in a single line. Here it is:
U = 0
U is a definite mathematical function, the total unworldliness. It's the sum of contributions from all the piddling partial laws of physics. To be precise, U = Unewton + Ueinstein +.... Here, for instance, the Newtonian mechanical unworldiness Unewton is defined by Unewton = (F - ma)^2; the Einstein mass-energy Unworldliness is definedby Ueinstein = (E - mc^2) ^2; and so forth. Because every contribution is positive or zero, the only way that the total U can vanish is for every contribution to vanish, so U = 0 implies F=ma, E=mc^2, and any other past or future law you care to include!
Thus we can capture all the laws of physics we know, and accommodate all the laws yet to be discovered, in one unified equation. The Theory of Everything!!! But it's a complete cheat, of course, because there is no way to use (or even define) U, other than to deconstruct it into its separate pieces and then use those. ~ Frank Wilczek,#NFDB
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799:From whose home secretly flies the sound of a jade flute?
It's lost amid the spring wind which fills Luoyang city.
In the middle of this nocturne I remember the snapped willow,
What person would not start to think of home!
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Laolao Ting Pavilion
What place under heaven most hurts the heart?
Laolao Ting, for seeing visitors off.
The spring wind knows how bitter it is to part,
The willow twig will never again be green.
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Sent To Du Fu Below Shaqiu City
What is it that I've come to now?
High before me: Shaqiu city.
Beside the city, ancient trees;
The sunset joins the autumn sounds.
The Lu wine cannot make me drunk,
Despite Qi's songs, my feelings return.
My thoughts of you are like the Wen's waters,
Mightily sent on their southern journey.
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~ Li Bai, Hearing A Flute On A Spring Night In Luoyang
,#NFDB
800:At two hundred fifty feet in length with a surfaced displacement of 2,200 tons, the Samisho was not a small boat. Built to the 0+2+ (1) Yuushio-class standards at Kawasaki’s shipyards in Kobe, she’d begun service in 1992, and last year she’d been brought back to the yards for a retrofit.
Now she was state of the art, an engineering and electronics marvel even by U.S. naval standards. She was a diesel boat, but she was fast, capable of a top speed submerged of more than twenty-five knots and a published diving depth in excess of one thousand feet.
Her electronic detection systems and countermeasures by Hitachi were better than anything currently in use by any navy in the world, and her new Fuji electric motors and tunnel drive were as quiet as any nuclear submarine’s propulsion system, and much simpler to operate. The Samisho could be safely operated, even on war footing, with fifty men and ten officers—less than half the crew needed to run the Los Angeles-class boats, and one-fourth the crew needed for a sub-hunting surface vessel ~ David Hagberg,#NFDB
801:Previously, the most popular philosophy of science was probably Karl Popper’s falsificationism—this is the old philosophy that the Bayesian revolution is currently dethroning. Karl Popper’s idea that theories can be definitely falsified, but never definitely confirmed, is yet another special case of the Bayesian rules; if P(X|A) ≈ 1—if the theory makes a definite prediction—then observing ¬X very strongly falsifies A. On the other hand, if P(X|A) ≈ 1, and we observe X, this doesn’t definitely confirm the theory; there might be some other condition B such that P(X|B) ≈ 1, in which case observing X doesn’t favor A over B. For observing X to definitely confirm A, we would have to know, not that P(X|A) ≈ 1, but that P(X|¬A) ≈ 0, which is something that we can’t know because we can’t range over all possible alternative explanations. For example, when Einstein’s theory of General Relativity toppled Newton’s incredibly well-confirmed theory of gravity, it turned out that all of Newton’s predictions were just a special case of Einstein’s predictions. ~ Eliezer Yudkowsky, #NFDB
802:nothing may travel faster than the speed of light. Because of the equivalence of energy and mass, the energy which an object has due to its motion will add to its mass. In other words, it will make it harder to increase its speed. This effect is only really significant for objects moving at speeds close to the speed of light. For example, at 10 percent of the speed of light an object’s mass is only 0.5 percent more than normal, while at 90 percent of the speed of light it would be more than twice its normal mass. As an object approaches the speed of light, its mass rises ever more quickly, so it takes more and more energy to speed it up further. It can in fact never reach the speed of light, because by then its mass would have become infinite, and by the equivalence of mass and energy, it would have taken an infinite amount of energy to get it there. For this reason, any normal object is forever confined by relativity to move at speeds slower than the speed of light. Only light, or other waves that have no intrinsic mass, can move at the speed of light. ~ Stephen Hawking, #NFDB
803:Over The Hills And Far Away
Over the hills and far away,
A little boy steals from his morning play
And under the blossoming apple-tree
He lies and he dreams of the things to be:
Of battles fought and of victories won,
Of wrongs o'erthrown and of great deeds done Of the valor that he shall prove some day,
Over the hills and far away Over the hills, and far away!
Over the hills and far away
It's, oh, for the toil the livelong day!
But it mattereth not to the soul aflame
With a love for riches and power and fame!
On, 0 man! while the sun is high On to the certain joys that lie
Yonder where blazeth the noon of day,
Over the hills and far away Over the hills, and far away!
Over the hills and far away,
An old man lingers at close of day;
Now that his journey is almost done,
His battles fought and his victories won The old-time honesty and truth,
The trustfulness and the friends of youth,
Home and mother-where are they?
Over the hills and far away Over the years, and far away!
~ Eugene Field,#NFDB
804:Facing my wine, I did not see the dusk,
Falling blossoms have filled the folds of my clothes.
Drunk, I rise and approach the moon in the stream,
Birds are far off, people too are few.
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Down from the Mountain
As down Mount Emerald at eve I came,
The mountain moon went all the way with me.
Backward I looked, to see the heights aflame
With a pale light that glimmered eerily.
A little lad undid the rustic latch
As hand in hand your cottage we did gain,
Where green limp tendrils at our cloaks did catch,
And dim bamboos o'erhung a shadowy lane.
Gaily I cried, "Here may we rest our fill!"
Then choicest wines we quaffed; and cheerily
"The Wind among the Pines" we sang, until
A few faint stars hung in the Galaxy.
Merry were you, my friend: and drunk was I,
Blissfully letting all the world go by.
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~ Li Bai, Amusing Myself
,#NFDB
805:warming has been bringing about climate disruption of various types: It can make hurricanes and tornadoes more intense; it can cause, or at least intensify, drought; it can make summers hotter; it can bring about downpours, or at least make them heavier; it can make snowstorms heavier. In an article asking, “Does Record Snowfall Disprove Global Warming?” Skeptical Science answers: Warming causes more moisture in the air which leads to more extreme precipitation events. This includes more heavy snowstorms in regions where snowfall conditions are favorable. Far from contradicting global warming, record snowfall is predicted by climate models.…As climate warms, evaporation from the ocean increases. This results in more water vapor in the air.…The extra moisture in the air is expected to produce more precipitation, including more extreme precipitation events.…Snowstorms can occur if temperatures are in the range of -10°C to 0°C.…In northern, colder regions, temperatures are often too cold for very heavy snow so warming can bring more favorable snowstorm conditions. ~ David Ray Griffin, #NFDB
806:Have mercy upon me, 0 God, According to Your lovingkindness; According to the multitude of Your tender mercies, Blot out my transgressions. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, And cleanse me from my sin.
For I acknowledge my transgressions, And my sin is always before me. Against You, You only, have I sinned, And done this evil in Your sight-
That You may be found just when You speak, And blameless when You judge.... Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. Make me hear joy and gladness, That the bones You have broken may rejoice. Hide Your face from my sins, And blot out all my iniquities.
Create in me a clean heart, 0 God, And renew a steadfast spirit within me. Do not cast me away from Your presence, And do not take Your Holy Spirit from me.
Restore to me the joy of Your salvation, And uphold me by Your generous Spirit....
Deliver me from the guilt of bloodshed, 0 God, The God of my salvation, And my tongue shall sing aloud of Your righteousness. 0 Lord, open my lips, And my mouth shall show forth Your praise.
For ~ R C Sproul,#NFDB
807:There are two moments in the course of education where a lot of kids fall off the math train. The first comes in the elementary grades, when fractions are introduced. Until that moment, a number is a natural number, one of the figures 0, 1, 2, 3 . . . It is the answer to a question of the form “how many.”* To go from this notion, so primitive that many animals are said to understand it, to the radically broader idea that a number can mean “what portion of,” is a drastic philosophical shift. (“God made the natural numbers,” the nineteenth-century algebraist Leopold Kronecker famously said, “and all the rest is the work of man.”) The second dangerous twist in the track is algebra. Why is it so hard? Because, until algebra shows up, you’re doing numerical computations in a straightforwardly algorithmic way. You dump some numbers into the addition box, or the multiplication box, or even, in traditionally minded schools, the long-division box, you turn the crank, and you report what comes out the other side. Algebra is different. It’s computation backward. When you’re asked to solve ~ Jordan Ellenberg, #NFDB
808:But, as I indicated in the historical overview, many of these same physicists quickly realized that the story for nature's remaining force, gravity, was far subtler. Whenever the equations of general relativity commingled with those of quantum theory, the mathematics balked. Use the combined equations to calculate the quantum probability of some physical process- such as the chance of two electrons ricocheting off each other, given both their electromagnetic repulsion and their gravitational attraction-and you'd typically get the answer infinity. While some things in the universe can be infinite, such as the extent of space and the quantity of matter that may fill it, probabilities are not among them. By definition, the value of a probability must be between 0 and 1 (or, in terms of percentages, between 0 and 100). An infinite probability does not mean that something is very likely to happen, or is certain to happen; rather, it's meaningless, like speaking of the thirteenth egg in an even dozen. An infinite probability sends a clear mathematical message: the combined equations are nonsense. ~ Brian Greene, #NFDB
809:Of Love and Other Demons (Vintage International) - Gabriel GarcÍA MÁRquez (Highlight: 5; Note: 0)
-------------
"Crazy people are not crazy if one accepts their reasoning."
(Chapter:Chapter Two)
"What is essential, therefore, is not that you no longer believe, but that God continues to believe in you. And regarding that there can be no doubt, for it is He in His infinite diligence who has enlightened us so that we may offer you this consolation.”"
(Chapter:Chapter Two)
"Disbelief is more resistant than faith because it is sustained by the senses"
(Chapter:Chapter Two)
"Take care,” said Delaura. “Sometimes we attribute certain things we do not understand to the demon, not thinking they may be things of God that we do not understand.”"
(Chapter:Chapter Three)
". He confessed that every moment was filled with thoughts of her, that everything he ate and drank tasted of her, that she was his life, always and everywhere, as only God had the right and power to be, and that the supreme joy of his heart would be to die with her. "
(Chapter:Chapter Five) ~ Gabriel Garc a M rquez,#NFDB
810:To understand what that means in commonsense terms, consider a person who plans to live off the income from $1 million invested in T-bills. Suppose he retires in a given year and converts his investments into an inflation-protected annuity with a return of 4% to 5%. He will receive an annual income of $40,000 to $50,000. But now suppose he retires a few years later, when the return on the annuity has dropped to 0.5%. His annual income will now be only $5,000. Yes, the $1 million principal amount was fully insured and protected, but you can see that he cannot possibly live on the amount he will now receive. T-bills preserve principal at all times, but the income received on them can vary enormously as return on the annuity goes up or down. Had the retiree bought instead a long-maturity U.S. Treasury bond with his $1 million, his spendable income would be secure for the life of the bond, even though the price of that bond would fluctuate substantially from day to day. The same holds true for annuities: Although their market value varies from day to day, the income from an annuity is secure throughout the retiree’s life. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
811:So, you start to ponder. What actually is information, and what does it do? Your response is simple and direct. Information answers questions. Years of research by mathematicians, physicists, and computer scientists have made this precise. Their investigations have established that the most useful measure of information content is the number of distinct yes-no questions the information can answer. The coins' information answers 1,000 such questions: Is the first dollar heads? Yes. Is the second dollar heads? Yes. Is the third dollar heads? No. Is the fourth dollar heads? No. And so on. A datum that can answer a single yes-no question is called a bit-a familiar computer-age term that is short for binary digit, meaning a 0 or a 1, which you can think of as a numerical representation of yes or no. The heads-tails arrangement of the 1,000 coins thus contains 1,000 bits' worth of information. Equivalently, if you take Oscar's macroscopic perspective and focus only on the coins' overall haphazard appearance while eschewing the "microscopic" details of the heads-tails arrangement, the coins' "hidden" information is 1,000 bits. ~ Brian Greene, #NFDB
812:Round the cape of a sudden came the sea,
And the sun looked over the mountain's rim:
And straight was a path of gold for him,
And the need of a world of men for me.
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Home-Thoughts, From Abroad
I.
Oh, to be in England
Now that April's there,
And whoever wakes in England
Sees, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England-now!!
II.
And after April, when May follows,
And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows!
Hark, where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge
Leans to the field and scatters on the clover
Blossoms and dewdrops-at the bent spray's edge-
That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,
Lest you should think he never could recapture
The first fine careless rapture!
And though the fields look rough with hoary dew,
All will be gay when noontide wakes anew
The buttercups, the little children's dower
-Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!
~ Robert Browning, Parting At Morning
,#NFDB
813:Façamos um pequeno cálculo. Como integrante da espécie humana, tenho uma identidade genética específica. Existem cerca de trina mil genes ativos no genoma humano. Cada um tem pelo menos duas variantes, ou "alelos", de modo que o número de identidades geneticamente distintas que o genoma pode codificar é de pelo menos dois elevado à trigésima milésima potência - o que equivale mais ou menos ao número um seguido de dez mil zeros. É o número de pessoas possíveis permitido pela estrutura do nosso DNA.
E quantas dessas pessoas possíveis chegaram realmente a existir? Estima-se que cerca de quarenta bilhões de seres humanos nasceram desde o surgimento de nossa espécie. Vamos arredondar para cem bilhões, só para ficar numa estimativa moderada. Isso significa que a fração de seres humanos geneticamente possíveis que nasceram é menor que 0,00000... 000001 (acrescente cerca de 9.979 zeros a mais no intervalo). A esmagador a maioria desses seres humanos geneticamente possíveis é de fantasmas que não nasceram. Foi essa a fantástica loteria que eu - e você - tivemos de ganhar para aparecer no cenário".
Jim Holt - Por Que o Mundo Existe? ~ Jim Holt,#NFDB
814:One semester later I did, indeed, graduate with a 4.0. I had done it. And after that, my GPA did . . . Nothing. I never planned on going to graduate school. I wasn’t applying for jobs that used grades as a measurement. I didn’t need that GPA for any single reason other than to SAY I had it and impress people. I could turn this into an argument for “Let’s reward a high GPA after college in LIFE! Can we get priority seating on Southwest? A free monthly refill at Starbucks? SOMETHING to make four years of my life chasing this arbitrary number WORTH it?!” (Great idea. Never gonna happen.) Or I could argue that if I’d been easier on myself and gotten 10 percent worse grades I could have had 50 percent more friendships and fun. If someone’s takeaway from this story is “Felicia Day said don’t study!,” I’ll punch you in the face. But I AM saying don’t chase perfection for perfection’s sake, or for anyone else’s sake at all. If you strive for something, make sure it’s for the right reasons. And if you fail, that will be a better lesson for you than any success you’ll ever have. Because you learn a lot from screwing up. Being perfect . . . not so much. ~ Felicia Day, #NFDB
815:Gallnut
Bite me not and beat me not, 0 hurt me not so hard,
I'll gulp this gallnut of yours, 0 mummy,
I'll gulp this gallnut of yours.
I won't say it's bitter, I won't say it's sour,
I'll gulp this gallnut, dear mummy,
I'll hold this lit~~ phial for you.
When the kitchen is silent, and the bedroom quiet,
Then, you hag, your gallnut brew
Becomes a stain on my tongue,
A mole on my nose
A curse in my mouth.
My hands have grown long, my feet are swollen
My ears shrivelled, my eyes dimmed, my cheeks blown.
Beat me not and hit me not, 0 kick me not in the crotch.
I'll gulp this gall nut, and when all the other ones The green gall nut,
The white gall nut,
The red gall nut
Form a brew that goes down my throat, 0 mummy,
Bite me not and beat me not, 0 hurt me not so hard,
I'll gulp this gallnut of yours.
But when at last I'm filled with this gall,
I'll put a little noose around your neck, 0 mummy dear,
And when you are floored, piggy you, and look
this way and that,
Don't you ever come outdoors at all, Or then I'll snatch away your rings and your bells.
~ Ayyappa Paniker,#NFDB
816:The encyclopedia wand’s a theoretical puzzle, like Zeno’s paradox. The idea is t’engrave the entire encyclopedia onto a single toothpick. Know how you do it?” “You tell me.” “You take your information, your encyclopedia text, and you transpose it into numerics. You assign everything a two-digit number, periods and commas included. 00 is a blank, A is 01, B is 02, and so on. Then after you’ve lined them all up, you put a decimal point before the whole lot. So now you’ve got a very long sub-decimal fraction. 0.173000631 … Next, you engrave a mark at exactly that point along the toothpick. If 0.50000’s your exact middle on the toothpick, then 0.3333’s got t’be a third of the way from the tip. You follow?” “Sure.” “That’s how you can fit data of any length in a single point on a toothpick. Only theoretically, of course. No existin’ technology can actually engrave so fine a point. But this should give you a perspective on what tautologies are like. Say time’s the length of your toothpick. The amount of information you can pack into it doesn’t have anything t’do with the length. Make the fraction as long as you want. It’ll be finite, but pretty near eternal. ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
817:This process can be conveniently summarized under the acronym ELSA: Embrace, Let go, Stop, Act. One embraces dukkha, that is, whatever situation life presents, lets go of the grasping that arises in reaction to it, and stops reacting so that one can act unconditioned by reactivity. This procedure is a template that can be applied across the entire spectrum of human experience, from one’s ethical vision of what constitutes a “good life” to one’s day-to-day interactions with colleagues at work. Buddhism 2.0 has no interest in whether or not such a way of life leads to a final goal called nirvana. What matters is an ever-deepening, ever-broadening engagement with a process of practice in which each element of ELSA is a necessary and intrinsic part. “Ceasing” is no longer seen as the goal of the path but as those moments when reactivity stops (or is suspended) in order that the possibility of a path can reveal itself and be “brought into being.” Just as dukkha gives rise to craving (rather than the other way round), so the ceasing of craving gives rise to the eightfold path (rather than the other way round). Thus Buddhism 2.0 turns Buddhism 1.0 on its head. ~ Stephen Batchelor, #NFDB
818:You ask me, `Why dwell among green mountains?'
I laugh in silence; my soul is quiet.
Peach blossom follows the moving water;
Here is a heaven and earth, beyond the world of men.
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Sitting Alone On Jingting Shan Hill
A flock of birds is flying high in the distance,
A lonely cloud drifts idly on its own.
We gaze at each other, neither growing tired,
There is only Jingting Shan.
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Joshua Belisle: Skipped adult post 8448119
Long Yearning (Sent Far)
When the beautiful woman was here, the hall was filled with flowers,
Now the beautiful woman's gone, the bed is lying empty.
On the bed, the embroidered quilt is rolled up: no-one sleeps,
Though three years have now gone by, I think I smell that scent.
The scent is finished but not destroyed,
The woman's gone and does not come.
Yearning yellows the falling leaf,
White dew beads the green moss.
by owner. provided at no charge for educational purposes
~ Li Bai, Talk in the Mountains [Question & Answer on the Mountain]
,#NFDB
819:As an example, let us choose base six. To write the quantities from zero to five we would use the symbols 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, as in base ten. The first essential difference comes up when we wish to denote six objects. Since six is to be the base we indicate this larger quantity by the symbols 10, the 1 denoting one times the base, just as in base ten the 1 in 10 denotes one times the base, or the quantity ten. Thus, the symbols 10 can mean different quantities, depending upon the base being employed. To write seven in base six we would write 11, because in base six these symbols mean 1.6+ 1, just as 11 in base ten means 1. 10 + 1. Similarly, to denote twenty in base six we write 32 because these symbols now mean 3 · 6 + 2. To indicate the quantity forty in base six we write 104, because these symbols mean 1 . 62 + 0 . 6 + 4, just as in base ten 104 means 1 · 102 + 0 · 10 + 4 or one hundred and four. It is clear that we can express quantity in base six. Moreover, we can perform the usual arithmetic operations in this base. We would, however, have to learn new addition and multiplication tables. For example, in base ten 4 + 5 = 9, but in base six 9 would be written 13. ~ Morris Kline, #NFDB
820:What would I do if I could go back in time and be in a position to change the way some automobile was made? I mean, we all sit here and b*tch about how GM should have done this or that with the Vega , or that AMC should have done this or that with the Pacer , assuming that with a few changes this or that model would have been AWESOME. So here is your challenge, Car Lust readers: If you could go back in time and inhabit some auto executive's or designer's or engineer's body for some length of time and change the course of history for one model, what would it be? And how would you go about it? No need to be super detailed ("Yeah, I'd lengthen the trailing arms on the front by 6.8 mm, and then bore the cylinder out another 0.5 mm. . . .") but give enough detail that we get an idea how it would change things. This might be a big thing, like, say, to give an example of something really dumb that would never happen in any sane universe, decide not to assemble cars in a separate country by flying them back and forth across the globe on 747s , or maybe something more modest, such as changing the suspension somewhat and avoiding the resulting bad press (misguided though it was). ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
821:In his brief dialogue between the King and the Queen - two of the chess piece sovereigns of the Looking Glass House - Lewis Carroll captured the complementary sides of the coin we term memory The King, having experienced a "horrifying" event (being set on a table by Alice, a relative giant whom the King could neither see nor hear), expresses absolute faith in the durability of memory. The Queen, in contrast, presents a less flattering view of the capacity: that without some intervention (a memorandum), even a salient event will be forgotten. In a rare instance, the reality experienced by the King and Queen on their side of the looking glass is reflected on the drawing room side as well. Memory is at times seemingly and at other times frustratingly fallible. What is at times seemingly indelible and at other times frustratingly fallible. What is more, in true looking glass fashion, the same past experience can at one moment impinge on consciousness unbidden and at another elude deliberate attempts to recollect it. ~ Bauer, Patricia J. (2007). Remembering the times of our lives: memory in infancy and beyond. Hillsdale, N.J: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. ISBN 0-8058-5733-8. OCLC 62089961., p. 3., #NFDB
822:Robert The Bruce (To Douglas In Dying)
'MY life is done, yet all remains,
The breath has gone, the image not,
The furious shapes once forged in heat
Live on though now no longer hot.
'Steadily the shining swords
In order rise, in order fall,
In order on the beaten field
The faithful trumpets call.
'The women weeping for the dead
Are not sad now but dutiful,
The dead men stiffening in their place
Proclaim the ancient rule.
'Great Wallace's body hewn in four,
So altered, stays as it must be.
0 Douglas do not leave me now,
For past your head I see
'My dagger sheathed in Comyn's heart
And nothing there to praise or blame,
Nothing but order which must be
Itself and still the same.
'But that Christ hung upon the Cross,
Comyn would rot until time's end
And bury my sin in boundless dust,
For there is no amend.
'In order; yet in order run
All things by unreturning ways,
If Christ live not, nothing is there
For sorrow or for praise.'
So the king spoke to Douglas once
A little while before his death,
Having outfaced three English kings
And kept a people's faith.
~ Edwin Muir,#NFDB
823:Brocq's disease was incurable until 1951 when a sixteen-year-old boy with an advanced case of the affliction was referred as a last resort to a hypnotherapist named A. A. Mason at the Queen Victoria Hospital in London. Mason discovered that the boy was a good hypnotic subject and could easily be put into a deep state of trance. While the boy was in trance, Mason told him that his Brocq's disease was healing and would soon be gone. Five days later the scaly layer covering the boy's left arm fell off, revealing soft, healthy flesh beneath. By the end of ten days the arm was completely normal. Mason and the boy continued to work on different body areas until all of the scaly skin was gone. The boy remained symptom-free for at least five years, at which point Mason lost touch with him.6 0 This is extraordinary because Brocq's disease is a genetic condition, and getting rid of it involves more than just controlling autonomic processes such as blood flow patterns and various cells of the immune system. It means tapping into the masterplan, our DNA programming itself. So, it would appear that when we access the right strata of our beliefs, our minds can override even our genetic makeup. ~ Michael Talbot, #NFDB
824:For example, say you're an average web developer. You're familiar with a dozen programming languages, tons of helpful libraries, standards, protocols, what have you. You still have to learn more at the rate of about one a week, and remember to check the hundreds of things you know to see if they've been updated or broken and make sure they all still work together and that nobody fixed the bug in one of them that you exploited to do something you thought was really clever one weekend when you were drunk. You're all up to date, so that's cool, then everything breaks. "Double you tee eff?" you say, and start hunting for the problem. You discover that one day, some idiot decided that since another idiot decided that 1/0 should equal infinity, they could just use that as a shorthand for "Infinity" when simplifying their code. Then a non-idiot rightly decided that this was idiotic, which is what the original idiot should have decided, but since he didn't, the non-idiot decided to be a dick and make this a failing error in his new compiler. Then he decided he wasn't going to tell anyone that this was an error, because he's a dick, and now all your snowflakes are urine and you can't even find the cat. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
825:want to be someone who really celebrates the gift of the people God has given me to love. Here are a few simple ways to celebrate friends.
Hold a special tea for your friends and their mothers. Celebrate with a tea for graduates, Mother's Day, or the first day of spring. Put on a birthday tea with special attention on the "big 0" ones. The anniversary of a special event or even a cup of tea to celebrate the end of a bad week or month are also good reasons to commune together.
oday why not do a spontaneous act of kindness? Write a note to someone who would never expect it. Put a rose in your hubby's briefcase. Return a shopping cart for someone. Let someone merge into traffic and give him or her a big wave and smile. A thank you note out of the blue to someone who's said something nice about you will bless his or her day. Give another driver your parking spot. Leave a gift of money for someone anonymously. Call your mom or dad for no special reason. Send a letter to a teacher and thank him or her for all they do. Ask an older person to tell you his or her life story. Hebrews 13:2 reminds us to "entertain strangers, for by so doing some people have entertained angels without knowing it. ~ Emilie Barnes,#NFDB
826:> In the 21st century, intellectual capital is what will matter in the job market and will help a country grow its economy. Investments in biosciences, computers and electronics, engineering, and other growing high-tech industries have been the major differentiator in recent decades. More careers than ever now require technical skills so in order to be competitive in those fields, a nation must invest in STEM studies. Economic growth has slowed and unemployment rates have spiked, making employers much pickier about qualifications to hire. There is now an overabundance of liberal arts majors. A study from Georgetown University lists the five college majors with the highest unemployment rates (crossed against popularity): clinical psychology, 19.5 percent; miscellaneous fine arts, 16.2 percent; U.S. history, 15.1 percent; library science, 15 percent; and (tied for No. 5) military technologies and educational psychology, 10.9 percent each. Unemployment rates for STEM subjects hovered around 0 to 3 percent: astrophysics/astronomy, around 0 percent; geological and geophysics engineering, 0 percent; physical science, 2.5 percent; geosciences, 3.2 percent; and math/computer science, 3.5 percent. ~ Philip G Zimbardo, #NFDB
827:Wicked Quotes
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Wicked (A Wicked Saga, #1)Wicked by Jennifer L. Armentrout
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Wicked Quotes (showing 31-60 of 33)
“Tink flew over, hovering next to me. "How was your day, honey?"
I smiled faintly as I dropped the bag into the seat then zipped it open. "Not the greatest."
He cocked his head to the side. "You want to tell Dr. Tink all about it?"
"Thought you didn't like to be called Tink."
"Don't question my inconsistencies."
I laughed again. "I don't really want to talk about it." I pulled out the box of candies. "But I have pralines.”
― Jennifer L. Armentrout, Wicked
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“Oh my God, I . . . I almost got run over by a moped," I said, turning my bewildered stare back on Ren. "That would've been so embarrassing to be taken out by one of them”
― Jennifer L. Armentrout, Wicked
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“You got shot? Where? How? By who?" He zipped up in the air, darting left to right, right to left. "Did you cry? I would've cried. A lot. Like a river of motherfucking tears. ~ Jennifer L Armentrout,#NFDB
828:The inner history of the Magian religion ends with Justinian’s time, as truly as that of the Faustian ends with Charles V and the Council of Trent. Any book on religious history shows “the”Christian religion as having had two ages of grand thought movements — 0-500 in the East and 1000-1500 in the West.61 But these are two springtimes of two Cultures, and in them are comprised also the non-Christian forms which belong to each religious development. The closing of the University of Athens by Justinian in 529 was not, as is always stated, the end of Classical philosophy — there had been no Classical philosophy for centuries. What he did, forty years before the birth of Mohammed, was to end the theology of the Pagan Church by closing this school and — as the historians forget to add — to end the Christian theology also by closing those of Antioch and Alexandria. Dogma was complete, finished — just as it was in the West with the Council of Trent (1564) and the Confession of Augsburg (1540), for with the city and intellectualism religious creative force comes to an end. So also in Jewry and in Persia, the Talmud was concluded about 500, and when Chosroes Nushirvan in 529 bloodily suppressed the Reformation of Mazdak. ~ Oswald Spengler, #NFDB
829:ORANGE, HONEY, AND THYME BISCUITS Hands-on: 23 min. Total: 36 min. Bake biscuits up to a day ahead, and keep in a sealed zip-top plastic bag. 2 ⁄ 3 cup nonfat buttermilk 2 tablespoons clover honey 2 teaspoons chopped fresh thyme 2 teaspoons grated orange rind 10 ounces spelt four (about 2 cups) 5 teaspoons baking powder 1 ⁄ 4 teaspoon kosher salt 1 5 1 ⁄ 2 tablespoons chilled butter, cut into small pieces cooking spray 1. Preheat oven to 425°. 2. Combine the frst 4 ingredients in a small bowl, stirring with a whisk. 3. Weigh or lightly spoon four into dry measuring cups; level with a knife. Combine four, baking powder, and salt in a medium bowl, stirring with a whisk. Cut in butter with a pastry blender or 2 knives until mixture resembles coarse meal. Add buttermilk mixture to four mixture, stirring just until moist. Turn dough out onto a lightly foured surface; pat into a 7 1 ⁄ 2-inch square; cut into 12 rectangles. Place dough on a foil-lined baking sheet coated with cooking spray. Bake at 425° for 13 minutes or until lightly browned on edges and bottom. SErVES 12 (serving size: 1 biscuit) CalOriES 162; FaT 6.1g (sat 3.3g, mono 1.4g, poly 0.2g); prOTEiN 4g; CarB 22g; FiBEr 3g; CHOl 14mg; irON 1mg; SODiUM 330mg; CalC 61mg ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
830:p.cm. Includes indexes.ISBN-13: 978-0-7360-6278-7 (soft cover) ISBN-10: 0-7360-6278-5 (soft cover) 1. Hatha yoga.2. Human anatomy.I.Title.RA781.7. K356 2007 613.7’046--dc22 2007010050 ISBN-10: 0-7360-6278-5 (print) ISBN-13: 978-0-7360-6278-7 (print) ISBN-10: 0-7360-8218-2 (Adobe PDF) ISBN-13: 978-0-7360-8218-1 (Adobe PDF) Copyright © 2007 by The Breathe Trust All rights reserved. Except for use in a review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying, and recording, and in any information storage and retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher. Acquisitions Editor: Martin Barnard Developmental Editor: Leigh Keylock Assistant Editor: Christine Horger Copyeditor: Patsy Fortney Proofreader: Kathy Bennett Graphic Designer: Fred Starbird Graphic Artist: Tara Welsch Original Cover Designer: Lydia Mann Cover Revisions: Keith Blomberg Art Manager: Kelly Hendren Project Photographer: Lydia Mann Illustrator (cover and interior): Sharon Ellis Printer: United Graphics Human Kinetics books are available at special discounts for bulk purchase. Special editions or book excerpts ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
831:Turing attended Wittgenstein's lectures on the philosophy of mathematics in Cambridge in 1939 and disagreed strongly with a line of argument that Wittgenstein was pursuing which wanted to allow contradictions to exist in mathematical systems. Wittgenstein argues that he can see why people don't like contradictions outside of mathematics but cannot see what harm they do inside mathematics. Turing is exasperated and points out that such contradictions inside mathematics will lead to disasters outside mathematics: bridges will fall down. Only if there are no applications will the consequences of contradictions be innocuous. Turing eventually gave up attending these lectures. His despair is understandable. The inclusion of just one contradiction (like 0 = 1) in an axiomatic system allows any statement about the objects in the system to be proved true (and also proved false). When Bertrand Russel pointed this out in a lecture he was once challenged by a heckler demanding that he show how the questioner could be proved to be the Pope if 2 + 2 = 5. Russel replied immediately that 'if twice 2 is 5, then 4 is 5, subtract 3; then 1 = 2. But you and the Pope are 2; therefore you and the Pope are 1'! A contradictory statement is the ultimate Trojan horse. ~ John D Barrow, #NFDB
832:Chimpanzees are our nearest living relatives, and offer hints as to how our distant ancestors may have behaved. Chimps live in bands within territories, and show a ferocious in-group out-group consciousness. It has long been known that males drive off intruders from other bands and kill their young if they can. Psychologists watching chimps in Uganda found that even females are murderously territorial. On three occasions they saw females drive off invaders and kill their babies.
People often behave according to genetic similarity theory, and the scholar who has probably written most extensively in this field is J. Philippe Rushton of the University of Western Ontario. “Genetically similar people tend to seek one another out and to provide mutually supportive environments such as marriage, friendship, and social groups,” he has written. For example, spouses tend to resemble each other, not just in age, ethnicity, and education (r = 0.6) but in opinions and attitudes (r = 0.5), intelligence (r = 0.4), and even in such things as personality and physical traits (r = 0.2). They are even like each other in undesirable traits such as aggressiveness, criminality, alcoholism, and mental disease. It is possible to predict how happy a couple is by know. ~ Jared Taylor,#NFDB
833:In 1980, the compensation of the average chief executive officer was forty-two times that of the average worker; by the year 2004, the ratio had soared to 280 times that of the average worker (down from an astonishing 531 times at the peak in 2000). Over the past quarter-century, CEO compensation measured in current dollars rose nearly sixteen times over , while the compensation of the average worker slightly more than doubled. Measured in real(1980) dollars, however, the compensation of the average worker rose just 0.3 percent per year, barely enough to maintain his or her standard of living. Yet CEO compensation rose at a rate of 8.5 percent annually, increasing by more than seven times in real terms during the period. The rationale was that these executives had "created wealth" for their shareholders. But were CEOs actually creating value commensurate with this huge increase in compenstion? Certainly the average CEO was not. In real terms, aggregate corporate profits grew at an annual rate of just 2.9 percent, compared to 3.1 percent for our nation's economy, as represented by the Gross Domestic Product. How that somewhat dispiriting lag can drive average CEO compensation to a cool 9.8 million in 2004 is one of the great anomalies of the age. ~ John C Bogle, #NFDB
834:One of the most revealing studies of the problem concerns a bird, the blue tit. The females of this species show all of the behaviour we have just described for women. Those lucky ones paired to genetically superior males with the best territories are totally faithful. Neighbouring females, paired to genetically inferior males, take every opportunity to seek infidelity with the superior males. They sneak into the better males' territories, solicit intercourse, then return unobserved to the partner they have just cheated. On average, about a third of young birds in a nest have not been sired by their mother's partner. Actual levels range from 0 per cent in the nests of the most favoured males to about 80 per cent in the nests of the least favoured ones.
A surprisingly similar pattern is found in humans. On average, about 10 per cent of children are not sired by their supposed father. Some men, however, have a higher chance of being deceived in this way than others — and it is those of low wealth and status who fare worst. Actual figures range from 1 per cent in high-status areas of Switzerland and the USA, through 5-6 per cent for moderate-status males in Britain and the USA, to 10-30 per cent for lower-status males in Britain, France and the USA. ~ Robin Baker,#NFDB
835:Zero and infinity are eternally locked in a struggle to engulf all the numbers. Like a Manichaean nightmare, the two sit on opposite poles of the number sphere, sucking numbers in like tiny black holes. Take any number on the plane. For the sake of argument, we'll choose i/2. Square it. Cube it. Raise it to the fourth power. The fifth. The sixth. The seventh. Keep multiplying. It slowly spirals toward zero like water down a drain. What happens to 2i? The exact opposite. Square it. Cube it. Raise it to the fourth power. It spirals outward. But on the number sphere, the two curves are duplicates of each other; they are mirror images. All numbers in the complex plane suffer this fate. They are drawn inexorably toward 0 or toward infinity. The only numbers that escape are the ones that are equally distant from the two rivals-the numbers on the equator, like 1, -1, and i. These numbers, pulled by the tug of both zero and infinity, spiral around on the equator forever and ever, never able to escape the grasp of either. (You can see this on your calculator. Enter a number- any number. Square it. Square it again. Do it again and again; the number will quickly zoom toward infinity or toward zero, except if you entered 1 or -1 to begin with. There is no escape.) ~ Charles Seife, #NFDB
836:What A Carefree Game He Plays!
He said, 'Let there be,' and it happened.
He made the latent turn into the manifest,
Out of the formless He created the form.
What a wondrous game He played!
What a carefree game He plays!
When He disclosed the hidden secret,
He lifted the veil from over His face.
Why does He now hide from me?
The Real permeates everyone.
What a carefree game He plays!
He said, 'We have honored mankind;
None has been created like you;
You are the crown of all creation.'
What a proclamation with the beat of drum!
What a carefree game He plays!
He himself indulges in these carefree acts;
He himself feels frightened of himself;
He has taken abode in every house;
And the people keep wandering in delusion.
What a carefree game He plays!
He himself aroused longing to become mad in love.
He himself became Laila to steal Majnun's heart.
Himself He wept, himself consoled himself.
0, what a game of love He plays!
What a carefree game He plays!
Himself the lover, He himself is the Beloved.
Here logic and reason have no part to play.
Bullah rejoices in his union with the Beloved.
Why does He create separation now?
What a carefree game He plays!
~ Bulleh Shah,#NFDB
837:My name is Hazel. Augustus Waters was the great star-crossed love of my life. Ours was an epic love story, and I won’t be able to get more than a sentence into it without disappearing into a puddle of tears. Gus knew. Gus knows. I will not tell you our love story, because—like all real love stories—it will die with us, as it should. I’d hoped that he’d be eulogizing me, because there’s no one I’d rather have…” I started crying. “Okay, how not to cry. How am I—okay. Okay.” I took a few breaths and went back to the page. “I can’t talk about our love story, so I will talk about math. I am not a mathematician, but I know this: There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1. There’s .1 and .12 and .112 and an infinite collection of others. Of course, there is a bigger infinite set of numbers between 0 and 2, or between 0 and a million. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities. A writer we used to like taught us that. There are days, many of them, when I resent the size of my unbounded set. I want more numbers than I’m likely to get, and God, I want more numbers for Augustus Waters than he got. But, Gus, my love, I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity. I wouldn’t trade it for the world. You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I’m grateful. ~ John Green, #NFDB
838:My name is Hazel. Augustus Waters was the great sat-crossed love of my life. Ours was an epic love story, and I won't be able to get more than a sentence into it without disappearing into a puddle of tears. Gus knew. Gus knows. I will not tell you our love story, because-like all real love stories-it will die with us, as it should. I'd hoped that he'd be eulogizing me, because there's no one I'd rather have..." I started crying. "Okay, how not to cry. How am I-okay. Okay."
I took a few deep breaths and went back to the page. "I can't talk about our love story, so I will talk about math. I am not a mathematician, but I know this: There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1. There's .1 and .12 and .112 and infinite collection of others. Of course, there is a Bigger infinite set of numbers between 0 and 2, or between 0 and a million. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities. A writer we used to like taught us that. There are days, many of them, when I resent the size of my unbounded set. I want more numbers than I'm likely to get, and God, I want more numbers for Augustus Waters than he got. But, Gus, my love, I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity. I wouldn't trade it for the world. You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I'm grateful. ~ John Green,#NFDB
839:My name is Hazel. Augustus Waters was the great star-crossed love of my life. Ours was an epic love story, and I won't be able to get more than a sentence into it without disappearing into a puddle of tears. Gus knew. Gus knows. I will not tell you our love story, because-like all real love stories-it will die with us, as it should. I'd hoped that he'd be eulogizing me, because there's no one I'd rather have..." I started crying. "Okay, how not to cry. How am I-okay. Okay."
I took a few deep breaths and went back to the page. "I can't talk about our love story, so I will talk about math. I am not a mathematician, but I know this: There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1. There's .1 and .12 and .112 and infinite collection of others. Of course, there is a Bigger infinite set of numbers between 0 and 2, or between 0 and a million. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities. A writer we used to like taught us that. There are days, many of them, when I resent the size of my unbounded set. I want more numbers than I'm likely to get, and God, I want more numbers for Augustus Waters than he got. But, Gus, my love, I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity. I wouldn't trade it for the world. You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I'm grateful. ~ John Green,#NFDB
840:He said, "Let there be," and it happened. He made the latent turn into the manifest, Out of the formless He created the form. What a wondrous game He played! What a carefree game He plays! When He disclosed the hidden secret, He lifted the veil from over His face. Why does He now hide from me? The Real permeates everyone. What a carefree game He plays! He said, "We have honored mankind; None has been created like you; You are the crown of all creation." What a proclamation with the beat of drum! What a carefree game He plays! He himself indulges in these carefree acts; He himself feels frightened of himself; He has taken abode in every house; And the people keep wandering in delusion. What a carefree game He plays! He himself aroused longing to become mad in love. He himself became Laila to steal Majnun's heart. Himself He wept, himself consoled himself. 0, what a game of love He plays! What a carefree game He plays! Himself the lover, He himself is the Beloved. Here logic and reason have no part to play. Bullah rejoices in his union with the Beloved. Why does He create separation now? What a carefree game He plays! [bk1sm.gif] -- from Bulleh Shah: The Love-Intoxicated Iconoclast (Mystics of the East series), by J. R. Puri / Tilaka Raja Puri
~ Bulleh Shah, What a carefree game He plays!
,#NFDB
841:Another common recommendation is to turn lights off when you leave a room, but lighting accounts for only 3% of household energy use, so even if you used no lighting at all in your house you would save only a fraction of a metric ton of carbon emissions. Plastic bags have also been a major focus of concern, but even on very generous estimates, if you stopped using plastic bags entirely you'd cut out 10kg CO2eq per year, which is only 0.4% of your total emissions. Similarly, the focus on buying locally produced goods is overhyped: only 10% of the carbon footprint of food comes from transportation whereas 80% comes from production, so what type of food you buy is much more important than whether that food is produced locally or internationally. Cutting out red meat and dairy for one day a week achieves a greater reduction in your carbon footprint than buying entirely locally produced food. In fact, exactly the same food can sometimes have higher carbon footprint if it's locally grown than if it's imported: one study found that the carbon footprint from locally grown tomatoes in northern Europe was five times as great as the carbon footprint from tomatoes grown in Spain because the emissions generated by heating and lighting greenhouses dwarfed the emissions generated by transportation. ~ William MacAskill, #NFDB
842:The “food system,” according to Professor Shaw, now uses 16.5 percent of all energy used in the United States. This 16.5 percent is used in the following ways: On-farm production 3.0% Manufacturing 4.9% Wholesale marketing 0.5% Retail marketing 0.8% Food preparation (in home) 4.4% Food preparation (commercial) 2.9% Apologists for industrial agriculture frequently stop with that first figure—showing that agriculture uses only a small amount of energy, relatively speaking, and that people hunting a cause of the “energy crisis” should therefore point their fingers elsewhere. The other figures, amounting to 13.5 percent of national energy consumption, are more interesting, for they suggest the way the food system has been expanded to make room for industrial enterprise. Between farm and home, producer and consumer, we have interposed manufacturers, a complex marketing structure, and food preparation. I am not sure how this last category differs from “manufacturing.” And I would like to know what percentage of the energy budget goes for transportation, and whether or not Professor Shaw figured in the miles that people now drive to shop. The gist is nevertheless plain enough: The industrial economy grows and thrives by lengthening and complicating the essential connection between producer and consumer. In ~ Wendell Berry, #NFDB
843:When thinking about risk from transport, you can think directly in terms of minutes of life lost per hour of travel. Each time you travel, you face a slight risk of getting into a fatal accident, but the chance of getting into a fatal accident varies dramatically depending on the mode of transport. For example, the risk of a fatal car crash while driving for an hour is about one in ten million (so 0.1 micromorts). For a twenty-year-old, that’s a one-in-ten-million chance of losing sixty years. The expected life lost from driving for one hour is therefore three minutes. Looking at expected minutes lost shows just how great a discrepancy there is between risks from different sorts of transport. Whereas an hour on a train costs you only twenty expected seconds of life, an hour on a motorbike costs you an expected three hours and forty-five minutes. In addition to giving us a way to compare the risks of different activities, the concept of expected value helps us choose which risks are worth taking. Would you be willing to spend an hour on a motorbike if it was perfectly safe but caused you to be unconscious later for three hours and forty-five minutes? If your answer is no, but you’re otherwise happy to ride motorbikes in your day-to-day life, you’re probably not fully appreciating the risk of death. ~ William MacAskill, #NFDB
844:This ability of Life 2.0 to design its software enables it to be much smarter than Life 1.0. High intelligence requires both lots of hardware (made of atoms) and lots of software (made of bits). The fact that most of our human hardware is added after birth (through growth) is useful, since our ultimate size isn’t limited by the width of our mom’s birth canal. In the same way, the fact that most of our human software is added after birth (through learning) is useful, since our ultimate intelligence isn’t limited by how much information can be transmitted to us at conception via our DNA, 1.0-style. I weigh about twenty-five times more than when I was born, and the synaptic connections that link the neurons in my brain can store about a hundred thousand times more information than the DNA that I was born with. Your synapses store all your knowledge and skills as roughly 100 terabytes’ worth of information, while your DNA stores merely about a gigabyte, barely enough to store a single movie download. So it’s physically impossible for an infant to be born speaking perfect English and ready to ace her college entrance exams: there’s no way the information could have been preloaded into her brain, since the main information module she got from her parents (her DNA) lacks sufficient information-storage capacity. ~ Max Tegmark, #NFDB
845:tend to think in terms of words and not letters, so it is molecules they count, and these are numerous to say the least. At sea level, at a temperature of 0 degrees Celsius, one cubic centimetre of air (that is, a space about the size of a sugar cube) will contain 45 billion billion molecules. And they are in every single cubic centimetre you see around you. Think how many cubic centimetres there are in the world outside your window—how many sugar cubes it would take to fill that view. Then think how many it would take to build a universe. Atoms, in short, are very abundant. They are also fantastically durable. Because they are so long-lived, atoms really get around. Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you. We are each so atomically numerous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms—up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested—probably once belonged to Shakespeare. A billion more each came from Buddha and Genghis Khan and Beethoven, and any other historical figure you care to name. (The personages have to be historical, apparently, as it takes the atoms some decades to become thoroughly redistributed; however much you may wish it, you are not yet one with Elvis Presley.) ~ Bill Bryson, #NFDB
846:Deerfield, Massachusetts
February 29, 1704
Temperature 0 degrees
It was an hour before the Indians paused again, and then they stopped so abruptly that prisoners were tripping over each other.
It frightened Eben. What was going to happen?
What dread plan might the Indians have for their white prisoners now?
No Indian lifted a weapon. They stood motionless, looking west.
Eben watched for several moments before he was able to pick out distant figures coming toward them. It was not rescue. If those were English, the Indians would long ago have surrounded and attacked them.
Slowly, the shapes turned into men; men carrying burdens; men bent double under the weight, yet not staggering as Eben had. They looked as if they had killed and were carrying entire cows.
They were very close before Eben realized he was seeing warriors carrying their wounded. Each hurt man was rolled up into a package, swaddled like a baby in blankets and strapped to a warrior’s back. These men were carrying, by their foreheads and on their spines, a weight equal to their own.
Eben was awestruck.
Dropping his own pack on the snow, Eben’s Indian knelt beside one of the wounded men, unwrapping bandages to examine the wound. His profile against the snow was beautiful as an eagle or a hawk is beautiful. ~ Caroline B Cooney,#NFDB
847:The STAR WARS Novels Timeline OLD REPUBLIC 5000–33 YEARS BEFORE STAR WARS: A New Hope Lost Tribe of the Sith* Precipice Skyborn Paragon Savior Purgatory Sentinel 3650 YEARS BEFORE STAR WARS: A New Hope The Old Republic: Deceived Lost Tribe of the Sith* Pantheon Secrets Red Harvest The Old Republic: Fatal Alliance 1032 YEARS BEFORE STAR WARS: A New Hope Knight Errant Darth Bane: Path of Destruction Darth Bane: Rule of Two Darth Bane: Dynasty of Evil RISE OF THE EMPIRE 33–0 YEARS BEFORE STAR WARS: A New Hope Darth Maul: Saboteur* Cloak of Deception Darth Maul: Shadow Hunter 32 YEARS BEFORE STAR WARS: A New Hope STAR WARS: EPISODE I: The Phantom Menace Rogue Planet Outbound Flight The Approaching Storm 22 YEARS BEFORE STAR WARS: A New Hope STAR WARS: EPISODE II: Attack of the Clones 22–19 YEARS BEFORE STAR WARS: A New Hope The Clone Wars The Clone Wars: Wild Space The Clone Wars: No Prisoners Clone Wars Gambit Stealth Siege Republic Commando Hard Contact Triple Zero True Colors Order 66 Shatterpoint The Cestus Deception The Hive* MedStar I: Battle Surgeons MedStar II: Jedi Healer Jedi Trial Yoda: Dark Rendezvous Labyrinth of Evil 19 YEARS BEFORE STAR WARS: A New Hope STAR WARS: EPISODE III: Revenge of the Sith Dark Lord: The Rise of Darth Vader Imperial Commando 501st Coruscant Nights Jedi Twilight Street of Shadows Patterns of Force The ~ George Lucas, #NFDB
848:Specifically, the awareness that I claim is demonstrably non-computational is our understanding of the properties of natural numbers 0,1,2,3,4,....(One might even say that our concept of a natural number is, in a sense, a form of non-geometric 'visualization'.) We shall see in 2.5, by a readily accessible form of Godel's theorem (cf. response to query Q16), that this understanding is something that cannot be simulated computationally. From time to time one hears that some computer system has been 'trained' so as to 'understand' the concept of natural numbers. However, this cannot be true, as we shall see. It is our awareness of what a 'number' can actually mean that enables us to latch on to the correct concept. When we have this correct concept, we can-at least in principle-provide the correct answers to families of questions about numbers that are put to us, when no finite set of rules can do this. With only rules and no direct awareness, a computer-controlled robot (like Deep Thought) would be necessarily limited in ways in which we are not limited ourselves-although if we give the robot clever enough rules for its behaviour it may perform prodigious feats, some of which lie far beyond unaided human capabilities in specific narrowly enough defined areas, and it might be able to fool us, for some while, into thinking that it also possesses awareness. ~ Roger Penrose, #NFDB
849:But the facts give a different picture: 1. Equal risks. If women shared equal risks, Panama would not have resulted in the deaths of 23 men and 0 women (also 0 women injured)11; and the Persian Gulf practice operations and war would not have led to the deaths of 375 men versus 15 women.12 For both wars combined, 27 men died for each woman13; but since there are only 9 men in the armed services for each woman, then any given man’s risk of dying was three times greater than any given woman’s. If men accounted for less than 4 percent of the total deaths and any given man had only one fourth the risk of dying, would Congresswoman Schroeder have said men equally shared the risks? Equality is not making women vulnerable by chance when men are made vulnerable by design. Were women being denied combat positions in order to deny them equal opportunity as officers? Or to deny them equal pay? 2. Equal opportunity as officers. Women constitute 14.5 percent of the total military, but 16.6 percent of the officers as of 2011.14 3. Equal pay. Both sexes in the Persian Gulf received $110 per month extra combat pay.15 The sexes received equal pay despite unequal risks. In brief, men get fewer promotions and, therefore, less pay for longer periods of service and a threefold greater risk of death, yet we read about discrimination against women, not discrimination against men. ~ Warren Farrell, #NFDB
850:My own story is instructive. More than twenty years ago I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. The conventional treatment made my condition worse, so I approached this health challenge from my perspective as an inventor. I immersed myself in the scientific literature and came up with a unique program that successfully reversed my diabetes. In 1993 I wrote a health book (The 10% Solution for a Healthy Life) about this experience, and I continue today to be free of any indication or complication of this disease.13 In addition, when I was twenty-two, my father died of heart disease at the age of fifty-eight, and I have inherited his genes predisposing me to this illness. Twenty years ago, despite following the public guidelines of the American Heart Association, my cholesterol was in the high 200s (it should be well below 180), my HDL (high-density lipoprotein, the “good” cholesterol) below 30 (it should be above 50), and my homocysteine (a measure of the health of a biochemical process called methylation) was an unhealthy 11 (it should be below 7.5). By following a longevity program that Grossman and I developed, my current cholesterol level is 130, my HDL is 55, my homocysteine is 6.2, my C-reactive protein (a measure of inflammation in the body) is a very healthy 0.01, and all of my other indexes (for heart disease, diabetes, and other conditions) are at ideal levels.14 ~ Ray Kurzweil, #NFDB
851:In that seminar I attended at eighteen, the speaker asked, “What percentage of shared responsibility do you have in making a relationship work?” I was a teenager, so wise in the ways of true love. Of course I had all the answers. “Fifty/fifty!” I blurted out. It was so obvious; both people must be willing to share the responsibility evenly or someone’s getting ripped off. “Fifty-one/forty-nine,” yelled someone else, arguing that you’d have to be willing to do more than the other person. Aren’t relationships built on self-sacrifice and generosity? “Eighty/twenty,” yelled another. The instructor turned to the easel and wrote 100/0 on the paper in big black letters. “You have to be willing to give 100 percent with zero expectation of receiving anything in return,” he said. “Only when you’re willing to take 100 percent responsibility for making the relationship work will it work. Otherwise, a relationship left to chance will always be vulnerable to disaster.” Whoa. This wasn’t what I was expecting! But I quickly understood how this concept could transform every area of my life. If I always took 100 percent responsibility for everything I experienced—completely owning all of my choices and all the ways I responded to whatever happened to me—I held the power. Everything was up to me. I was responsible for everything I did, didn’t do, or how I responded to what was done to me. ~ Darren Hardy, #NFDB
852:The properties that define a group are:
1. Closure. The offspring of any two members combined by the operation must itself be a member. In the group of integers, the sum of any two integers is also an integer (e.g., 3 + 5 = 8).
2. Associativity. The operation must be associative-when combining (by the operation) three ordered members, you may combine any two of them first, and the result is the same, unaffected by the way they are bracketed. Addition, for instance, is associative: (5 + 7) + 13 = 25 and 5 + (7 + 13) = 25, where the parentheses, the "punctuation marks" of mathematics, indicate which pair you add first.
3. Identity element. The group has to contain an identity element such that when combined with any member, it leaves the member unchanged. In the group of integers, the identity element is the number zero. For example, 0 + 3 = 3 + 0 = 3.
4. Inverse. For every member in the group there must exist an inverse. When a member is combined with its inverse, it gives the identity element. For the integers, the inverse of any number is the number of the same absolute value, but with the opposite sign: e.g., the inverse of 4 is -4 and the inverse of -4 is 4; 4 + (-4) = 0 and (-4) + 4 = 0.
The fact that this simple definition can lead to a theory that embraces and unifies all the symmetries of our world continues to amaze even mathematicians. ~ Mario Livio,#NFDB
853:At the heart of his explorations in probability was a preoccupation with Hume’s question. For example, how do we know the sun will rise tomorrow? It has done so every day until today, but that’s no guarantee it will continue. Laplace’s answer had two parts. The first is what we now call the principle of indifference, or principle of insufficient reason. We wake up one day—at the beginning of time, let’s say, which for Laplace was five thousand years or so ago—and after a beautiful afternoon, we see the sun go down. Will it come back? We’ve never seen the sun rise, and there is no particular reason to believe it will or won’t. Therefore we should consider the two scenarios equally likely and say that the sun will rise again with a probability of one-half. But, Laplace went on, if the past is any guide to the future, every day that the sun rises should increase our confidence that it will continue to do so. After five thousand years, the probability that the sun will rise yet again tomorrow should be very close to one, but not quite there, since we can never be completely certain. From this thought experiment, Laplace derived his so-called rule of succession, which estimates the probability that the sun will rise again after having risen n times as (n + 1) / (n + 2). When n = 0, this is just ½; and as n increases, so does the probability, approaching 1 when n approaches infinity. ~ Pedro Domingos, #NFDB
854:Just as I am watching a tongue of blue flame rising in the fire, and my lamp is burning low, the horrible contraction will begin in my chest. I shall only have time to reach the bell, and pull it violently, before the sense of suffocation will come. No one will answer my bell. I know why. My two servants are lovers, and will have quarrelled. My housekeeper will have rushed out of the house in a fury, two hours before, hoping that Perry will believe she has gone to drown herself. Perry is alarmed at last, and is gone out after her. The little scullery-maid is asleep on a bench: she never answers the bell; it does not wake her. The sense of suffocation increases: my lamp goes out with a horrible stench: I make a great effort, and snatch at the bell again. I long for life, and there is no help. I thirsted for the unknown: the thirst is gone. 0 God, let me stay with the known, and be weary of it. I am content. Agony of pain and suffocation - and all the while the earth, the fields, the pebbly brook at the bottom of the rookery, the fresh scent after the rain, the light of the morning through my chamber window, the warmth of the hearth after the frosty air - will darkness close over them for ever?
Darkness-darkness-no pain-nothing but darkness: but I am passing on and on through the darkness: my thought stays in the darkness, but always with a sense of moving onward ... ("The Lifted Veil") ~ George Eliot,#NFDB
855:In exchange for some wide-ranging modifications demanded by the socialist government to the church’s 1929 concordat, Italy agreed to underwrite the remainder of the $406 million settlement.53 The changes to the concordat would have once been unthinkable. The church dropped its insistence that Roman Catholicism be the state religion. Moving forward, the state had to confirm church-annulled marriages. Parents were given the right to opt their children out of formerly mandatory religious education classes. And Rome was no longer considered a “sacred city,” a classification that had allowed the Vatican to keep out strip clubs and the porn industry. Italy even managed to get the church to relinquish control of the Jewish catacombs. “The new concordat is another example of the diminishing hold of the Roman Catholic church in civil life in Italy,” noted The New York Times.54 In return, Italy instituted an“eight-per-thousand” tax, in which 0.8 percent of the income tax paid by ordinary Italians was distributed to one of twelve religious organizations recognized by the state. During its early years, nearly 90 percent of the tax went to the Catholic Church (by 2010, the church received less than 50 percent as the tax was more equitably distributed). Not only did the tax relieve Italy of its responsibility for the $135 million annual subsidy it paid for the country’s 35,000 priests, it meant the church had a steady and reliable source of much needed income.55 ~ Gerald Posner, #NFDB
856:But now 'tis the modern ole Coast Division S.P. and begins at those dead end blocks and at 4:30 the frantic Market Street and Sansome Street commuters as I say come hysterically running for ther 112 to get home on time for the 5:30 televisions Howdy Doody of their gun toting Neal Cassady'd Hopalong childrens. 1.9 miles to 23rd Street, another 1.2 Newcomb, another 1.0 to Paul Avenue and etcetera these being the little piss stops on that 5 miles short run thru 4 tunnels to mighty Bayshore, Bayshore at milepost 5.2 shows you as I say that gigantic valley wall sloping in with sometimes in extinct winter dusks the huge fogs milking furling meerolling in without a sound but as if you could hear the radar hum, the oldfashioned dullmasks mouth of Potato Patch Jack London old scrollwaves crawling in across the gray bleak North Pacific with a wild fleck, a fish, the wall of a cabin, the old arranged wallworks of a sunken ship, the fish swimming in the pelvic bones of old lovers lay tangled ath the bottom of the sea like slugs no longer discernible bone by bone but melted into one squid of time that fog, that terrible and bleak Seattlish fog that potatopatch wise comes bringing messages from Alaska and from the Aleutian mongol, and from the seal, and from the wave, and from the smiling porpoise, that fog at Bayshore you can see waving in and filling in rills and rolling down and making milk on hillsides and you think, "It's hypocricy of men makes these hills grim. ~ Jack Kerouac, #NFDB
857:At the other extreme, the consumption tax rate should be very, very high for any products that impose massive negative externalities. Consider handgun ammunition. Currently, one can buy five hundred rounds of 9 mm ammunition for about $110 from online U.S. retailers—about twenty-two cents each. But each round of ammunition has a slight chance of falling into the wrong hands and killing someone. How slight? About 10 billion rounds are sold per year in the United States. There are about thirty thousand gun-related deaths in the United States per year (including suicides, homicides, and accidents). Assuming the typical gun death involves one round of ammo, the chance that any given round will end up killing someone is about thirty thousand divided by 10 billion, or three per million. Now, a person’s life is generally reckoned to be worth about $3 million, according to the usual cost-benefit-risk analyses by highway engineers, airlines, and hospitals. If each bullet has a three per million chance of negating a $3 million life, then that bullet imposes an expected average cost on society of $9. That’s about forty times its conventional retail cost of $0.22, so, by my reasoning, it should be subject to a consumption tax rate of 4,000 percent. This is obviously a rough calculation; it ignores the injury costs of nonlethal shootings (which would increase the tax) and the crime-deterrence effects, if any, of citizens having ammo (which would decrease the tax). ~ Geoffrey Miller, #NFDB
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860:Eleven people have been killed as a result of violence targeted at abortion providers: four doctors, two clinic employees, a security guard, a police officer, a clinic escort, and two others. Anti-abortion extremists are considered a domestic terrorist threat by the U.S. Department of Justice. Yet violence is not the only threat to abortion clinics. In the past five years, politicians have passed more than 280 laws restricting access to abortion. In 2016, the Supreme Court struck down a Texas law that would have required every abortion clinic to have a surgical suite, and doctors to have admitting privileges at a local hospital in case of complications. For many clinics, these requirements were cost prohibitive and would have forced them to close. Also, since many abortion doctors fly in to do their work, they aren’t able to get admitting privileges at local hospitals. It is worth noting that less than 0.3 percent of women who have an abortion require hospitalization due to complications. In fact colonoscopies, liposuction, vasectomies…and childbirth—all of which are performed outside of surgical suites—have higher risks of death. In Indiana in 2016, Mike Pence signed a law to ban abortion based on fetal disability and required providers to give information about perinatal hospice—keeping the fetus in utero until it dies of natural causes. This same law required aborted fetuses to be cremated or given a formal burial even if the mother did not wish this to happen. ~ Jodi Picoult, #NFDB
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Enjoy! :) ~ Various,#NFDB
862:0 Order - All developmental theories consider the infant to be "undifferentiated," the essence of which is the absence of any self-other boundary (interpersonally) or any subject-object boundary (intrapsychically), hence, stage 0 rather than stage 1. The infant is believed to consider all of the phenomena it experiences as extensions of itself. The infant is "all self" or "all subject" and "no object or other." Whether one speaks of infantile narcissism," "orality," being under the sway completely of "the pleasure principle" with no countervailing "reality principle," or being "all assimilative" with no countervailing "accommodation," all descriptions amount to the same picture of an objectless, incorporative embeddedness. Such an underlying psychologic gives rise not only to a specific kind of cognition (prerepresentational) but to a specific kind of emotion in which the emotional world lacks any distinction between inner and outer sources of pleasure and discomfort. To describe a state of complete undifferentiation, psychologists have had to rely on metaphors: Our language itself depends on the transcendence of this prerepresentational stage. The objects, symbols, signs, and referents of language organize the experienced world and presuppose the very categories that are not yet articulated at stage 0. Thus, Freud has described this period as the "oceanic stage," the self undifferentiated from the swelling sea. Jung suggested "uroboros," the snake that swallows its tail. ~ Robert Kegan, #NFDB
863: Two of us once met
Where the streams of life and death had stopped
Where time stood still.
Today it is so far and away
Now I am sailing alone
My boat is rocking in the storm
I now remember again
How once we met
At the end of the world
Where had descended the heaven.
Forgetting all
We sat there side by side
That day I realized
What sways the blades of grass
Throughout the world
In what delight everything shivers;
In the dark how shine stars;
In what great urge
The breaths of life rush
That day I realized
When we woke up and looked at each others face.
Taking your hand in my hand
I kept looking at the sky
We had no words
And didnt know how our time passed
That day I had realized in my heart of hearts
Where end the meanings of our words
How music rises from the core of the universe
How the pining woods blossom into flowers
These we realized when both of us wept
In endless pleasure.
Then we came to know in what fire
Silently burn the winds of spring
Why the morning sun
Yearns to get lost in everything
Why day and night the river runs
To meet the sea
Why the lightning is hurt by its own light
What game the night plays with dawn
Accepting defeat
All these we realized
When with each other we played
Staking our everything.
This is a new transcreation of Tagore's poem Milon from the collection Purabi by
Kumud Biswas.
0
~ Rabindranath Tagore, Our Meeting
,#NFDB
864:And it shall come to pass, that when t John 19. 37.— u 2 Par. 35. 22. Ver. 11. Adadremmon. A place near Mageddon, where the good king Josias was slain, and much lamented by his people. any man shall prophesy any more, his father and his mother that brought him into the world, shall say to him: Thou shalt not live: because thou hast spoken a lie in the name of the Lord. And his father, and his mother, his parents, shall thrust him through, when he shall pro phesy. 4 And it shall come to pass in that day, that the prophets shall be confounded, every one by his own vision, when he shall prophesy, neither shall they be clad with a garment of sackcloth, to deceive: 5 But he shall say: I am no prophet, I am a husbandman: for Adam is my ex ample from my youth. 6 And they shall say to him: What are these wounds in the midst of thy hands? And he shall say: With these I was wounded in the house of them that loved me. 7 Awake, 0 sword, against my shepherd, and against the man that cleaveth tu me, saith the Lord of hosts: w strike the shepherd, and the sheep shall be scat tered: and I will turn my hand to the little ones. 8 And there shall be in all the earth, saith the Lord, two parts in it shall be scattered, and shall perish: but the third part shall be left therein. 9 And I will bring the third part through the fire, and will refine them as silver is refined: and I will try them as gold is tried. They shall call on my name, and I will hear them. I will say: Thou art my people: and they shall say: The Lord is my God. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
865:The earth and all life upon it endured and was devastated by what can only be described as a globally distributed firestorm at the onset of the Younger Dryas around 12,800 years ago. In this planetary debacle, 10 million square kilometers of trees and other plant matter burned.
To put that in perspective, the United Kingdom was in a state of traumatic shock in late June and early July 2018 after 4,942 acres of Lancashire moorland were consumed by wildfires. That's an area of just 20 square kilometers, but firefighters and emergency services from seven counties were utterly overwhelmed by the blaze and the military had to be brought in to assist.
Meanwhile, a report in the Sacramento Bee dated July 2, 2018, opined that California's wildfire season had started early, with two 'major fires' already fought at huge expense and requiring evacuation of local residents. These two fires were estimated to have consumed 85,000 acres, which sounds an awful lot but in fact converts to just 344 square kilometers.
The previous years, 2017, was California's most destructive wildfire season then on record, with a total of 1.25 million acres burned. The cost of dealing with the disaster, including fire suppression, insurance, and recovery expenditures, was estimated at US$180 billion. Yet 1.38 million acres converts to just 5,585 square kilometers--an insignificant fraction (around 0.05 percent--that is, a twentieth of 1 percent) of the 10 million square kilometers destroyed in the Younger Dryas wildfires. ~ Graham Hancock,#NFDB
866:Deerfield, Massachusetts
February 29, 1704
Temperature 0 degrees
We will freeze to death, thought Mercy. Why go to the trouble of carrying a hundred pairs of moccasins when they won’t make a fire?
Her Indian knelt and, with his bare hands, scooped out a hole in a snowbank. She expected him to store his plunder in the cavity. He had to make a lot of hand motions before she understood that this was her shelter for the night.
Not a house, nor a bed, nor even a stable. A hole in the snow.
Mercy wanted to raise her head to the skies and howl like a dog. But she wanted to survive. There must be no more bodies along this terrible trail. “First, may I look for my brothers?” She held up four fingers.
“No,” said the Indian, and motioned her into the cave, tucking Daniel in after her.
Mercy would have felt much better if she could have rested her eyes on Tommy and John and Sam and Benny.
From her hole she watched the others settle in for the night.
Eben’s Indian collected the older boys: Eben, the oldest Kellogg boy, the two Sheldon boys and Joe Alexander, who was in his twenties but looked very young. They were pinioned to the ground a dozen yards from where Mercy was curled.
For Eben, however, his Indian made a cradle of spruce boughs. He wrapped a leather rope around Eben’s wrists and linked the cord to his own. If Eben moved, his captor would know it.
The rest were made to lie on open snow. There was nothing between them and the weather. No walls, no roof, no parent. ~ Caroline B Cooney,#NFDB
867:Today’s overwhelming volume and variety of information makes it possible—by selecting and connecting data points carefully—to paint practically any picture of the world and make it seem accurate. So the pictures we paint are often more a reflection of our deepest personal orientation, especially of our basic optimism or pessimism, than of empirical evidence.28 All the same, amidst the welter of information that sometimes seems to point in every direction, certain facts about long-term trends around the world ultimately shift the balance of evidence, in my mind, against the economic optimists. These facts indicate that there are chronic and widening ingenuity gaps in a number of domains of human activity. Significant problems, some of them fundamentally new in their character and scope, remain unsolved or are getting worse, in part because we haven’t generated and delivered enough ingenuity to address them. For instance, although average incomes and quality of life around the world are improving, these statistics—which are, again, highly aggregated—hide extreme and growing differences in wealth. Income per person, averaged globally, currently rises by about 0.8 percent per year, but in more than one hundred countries in the last fifteen years income has actually dropped. Some 1.3 billion people—about 30 percent of the population of the developing world—remain in absolute poverty, living on less than a dollar a day.29 And the gulf between the poorest and wealthiest people on the planet is widening very fast. ~ Thomas Homer Dixon, #NFDB
868:She is near to my heart as the meadow-flower to the earth; she is
sweet to me as sleep is to tired limbs. My love for her is my life
flowing in its fullness, like a river in autumn flood, running with
serene abandonment. My songs are one with my love, like the murmur
of a stream, that sings with all its waves and current.
Like (1) 0
Stray Birds 91 - 99
91
THE great earth makes herself hospitable
with the help of the grass.
92
THE birth and death of the leaves
are the rapid whirls of the eddy
whose wider circles
move slowly among stars.
93
POWER said to the world, "You are mine.
The world kept it prisoner on her throne.
Love said to the world, "I am thine."
The world gave it the freedom of her house.
94
THE mist is like the earth's desire.
It hides the sun for whom she cries.
95
BE still,
my heart,
these great trees are prayers.
96
THE noise of the moment
scoffs at the music of the Eternal.
97
I THINK of other ages
that floated upon the stream of life
and love and death and are forgotten,
and I feel the freedom of passing away.
98
THE sadness of my soul is her bride's veil.
It waits to be lifted in the night.
99
DEATH'S stamp gives value to the coin of life;
making it possible to buy with life what is truly precious.
~ Rabindranath Tagore, Lovers Gifts IV - She Is Near To My Heart
,#NFDB
869:tablespoons, if you’d care to indulge). Will the body composition outcomes be the same? Of course not. Rule #2: The hormonal responses to carbohydrates (CHO), protein, and fat are different. There is no shortage of clinical studies to prove that beef calories7 do not equal bourbon calories. One such study, conducted by Kekwick and Pawan, compared three groups put on calorically equal (isocaloric) semistarvation diets of 90% fat, 90% protein, or 90% carbohydrate. Though ensuring compliance was a challenge, the outcomes were clearly not at all the same:
1,000 cals. at 90% fat = weight loss of 0.9 lbs. per day 1,000 cals. at 90% protein = weight loss of 0.6 lbs. per day 1,000 cals. at 90% carbohydrate = weight gain of 0.24 lbs. per day
Different sources of calories = different results. Things that affect calorie allocation—and that can be modified for fat-loss and muscle gain—include digestion, the ratio of protein-to-carbohydrates-to-fat, and timing. We’ll address all three. Marilyn Monroe building her world-famous sex appeal. More than 50% of the examples in this book are of women. Marketers have conditioned women to believe that they need specific programs and diets “for women.” This is an example of capitalism at its worst: creating false need and confusion. Does this mean I’m going to recommend that a woman do exactly the same thing as a 250-pound meathead who wants 20-inch arms? Of course not. The two have different goals. But 99% of the time both genders want exactly the same thing: less fat and a bit more muscle in the right places. Guess what? In these ~ Timothy Ferriss,#NFDB
870:Non-teenagers might find his appeal difficult to understand, as he isn’t especially handsome, or big, or even funny; his features are striking only in their regularity, the overall effect being one of solidity, steadiness, the quiet self-assurance one might associate with, for instance, a long-established and successful bank. But that, in fact, is the whole point. One look at Titch, in his regulation Dubarrys, Ireland jersey and freshly topped-up salon tan, and you can see his whole future stretched out before him: you can tell that he will, when he leaves this place, go on to get a good job (banking/insurance/consultancy), marry a nice girl (probably from the Dublin 18 area), settle down in a decent neighbourhood (see above) and about fifteen years from now produce a Titch Version 2.0 who will think his old man is a bit of a knob sometimes but basically all right. The danger of him ever drastically changing – like some day joining a cult, or having a nervous breakdown, or developing out of nowhere a sudden burning need to express himself and taking up some ruinously expensive and embarrassing-to-all-that-know-him discipline, like modern dance, or interpreting the songs of Joni Mitchell in a voice that, after all these years, is revealed to be disquietingly feminine – is negligible. Titch, in short, is so remarkably unremarkable that he has become a kind of embodiment of his socioeconomic class; a friendship/sexual liaison with Titch has therefore come to be seen as a kind of self-endorsement, a badge of Normality, which at this point in life is a highly prized commodity. ~ Paul Murray, #NFDB
871:CONSORTING WITH ANGELS
I was tired of being a woman,
tired of the spoons and the pots,
tired of my mouth and my breasts,
tired of the cosmetics and the silks.
There were still men who sat at my table,
circled around the bowl I offered up.
The bowl was filled with purple grapes
and the flies hovered in for the scent
and even my father came with his white bone.
But I was tired of the gender of things.
Last night I had a dream
and I said to it . . .
"You are the answer.
You will outlive my husband and my father."
In that dream there was a city made of chains
where Joan was put to death in man's clothes
and the nature of the angels went unexplained,
no two made in the same species,
one with a nose, one with an ear in its hand,
one chewing a star and recording its orbit,
each one like a poem obeying itself,
performing God's functions,
a people apart.
"You are the answer,"
I said, and entered,
lying down on the gates of the city.
Then the chains were fastened around me
and I lost my common gender and my final aspect.
Adam was on the left of me
and Eve was on the right of me,
both thoroughly inconsistent with the world of reason.
We wove our arms together
and rode under the sun.
I was not a woman anymore,
not one thing or the other.
0 daughters of Jerusalem,
the king has brought me into his chamber.
I am black and I am beautiful.
I've been opened and undressed.
I have no arms or legs.
I'm all one skin like a fish.
I'm no more a woman
than Christ was a man. ~ Anne Sexton,#NFDB
872:Why should people in one part of the globe have developed collectivist cultures, while others went individualist? The United States is the individualism poster child for at least two reasons. First there's immigration. Currently, 12 percent of Americans are immigrants, another 12 percent are children of immigrants, and everyone else except for the 0.9 percent pure Native Americans descend from people who emigrated within the last five hundred years. And who were the immigrants? Those in the settled world who were cranks, malcontents, restless, heretical, black sheep, hyperactive, hypomanic, misanthropic, itchy, unconventional, yearning to be rich, yearning to be out of their damn boring repressive little hamlet, yearning. Couple that with the second reason - for the majority of its colonial and independent history, America has had a moving frontier luring those whose extreme prickly optimism made merely booking passage to the New World insufficiently novel - and you've got America the individualistic.
Why has East Asia provided textbook examples of collectivism? The key is how culture is shaped by the way people traditionally made a living, which in turn is shaped by ecology. And in East Asia it's all about rice. Rice, which was domesticated there roughly ten thousand years ago, requires massive amounts of communal work. Not just backbreaking planting and harvesting, which are done in rotation because the entire village is needed to harvest each family's rice. The United States was not without labor-intensive agriculture historically. But rather than solving that with collectivism, it solved it withe slavery. ~ Robert M Sapolsky,#NFDB
873:In other words, the subjective perception of a copy of you in a typical parallel universe is a seemingly random sequence of wins and losses, behaving as if generated through a random process with probabilities of 50% for each outcome. This experiment can be made more rigorous if you take notes on a piece of pater, writing "1" every time you win and "0" every time you lose, and place a decimal point in front of it all. For example, if you lose, lose, win, lose, win,win,win, lose,lose and win, you'd write ".0010111001." But this is just what real numbers between zero and one look like when written out in binary, the way computers usually write them on the hard drive! If you imagine repeating the Quantum Cards experiment infinitely many times, your piece of paper would have infinitely many digits written on it, so you can match each parallel universe with a number between zero and one. Now what Borel's theorem proves is that almost all of these numbers have 50% of their decimals equal to 0 and 50% equal to 1, so this means that almost all of the parallel universes have you winning 50% of the time and losing 50% of the time.
It's not just that the percentages come out right. The number ".010101010101..." has 50% of its digits equal to 0 but clearly isn't random, since it has a simple pattern. Borel's theorem can be generalized to show that almost all numbers have random-looking digits with no patterns whatsoever. This means that in almost all Level III parallel universes, your sequence of wins and losses will also be totally random, without any pattern, so that all that can be predicted is that you'll win 50% of the time. ~ Max Tegmark,#NFDB
874:Subject of Thought Number of Times Thought Occurred per Year (in descending order)
L. 580.0
Family 400.0
Brushing tongue 150.0
Earplugs 100.0
Bill-paying 52.0
Panasonic three-wheeled vacuum cleaner, greatness of 45.0
Sunlight makes you cheerful 40.0
Traffic frustration 38.0
Penguin books, all 35.0
Job, should I quit? 34.0
Friends, don't have any 33.0
Marriage, a possibility? 32.0
Vending machines 31.0
Straws don't unsheath well 28.0
Shine on moving objects 25.0
McCartney more talented than Lennon? 23.0
Friends smarter, more capable than I am 19.0
Paper-towel dispensers 19.0
"What oft was thought, but ne'er" etc. 18.0
People are very dissimilar 16.0
Trees, beauty of 15.0
Sidewalks 15.0
Friends are unworthy of me 15.0
Indentical twins separated at birth, studies of traits 14.0
Intelligence, going fast 14.0
Wheelchair ramps, their insane danger 14.0
Urge to kill 13.0
Escalator invention 12.0
People are very similar 12.0
"Not in my backyard" 11.0
Straws float now 10.0
DJ, would I be happy as one? 9.0
"If you can't get out of it, get into it" 9.0
Pen, felt-tip 9.0
Gasoline, nice smell of 8.0
Pen, ballpoint 8.0
Stereo systems 8.0
Fear of getting mugged again 7.0
Staplers 7.0
"Roaches check in, but they don't check out" 6.0
Dinner roll, image of 6.0
Shoes 6.0
Bags 5.0
Butz, Earl 4.0
Sweeping, brooms 4.0
Whistling, yodel trick 4.0
"You can taste it with your eyes" 4.0
Dry-cleaning fluid, smell of 3.0
Zip-lock tops 2.0
Popcorn 1.0
Birds regurgitate food and feed young with it 0.5
Kant, Immanuel 0.5 ~ Nicholson Baker,#NFDB
875:In phase space the complete state of knowledge about a dynamical system at a single instant in time collapses to a point. That point is the dynamical system-at that instant. At the next instant, though, the system will have changed, ever so slightly and so the point moves. The history of the system time can be charted by the moving point, tracing its orbit through phase space with the passage of time.
How can all the information about a complicated system be stored in a point? If the system has only two variables, the answer is simple. It is straight from the Cartesian geometry taught in high school-one variable on the horizontal axis, the other on the vertical. If the system is a swinging, frictionless pendulum, one variable is position and the other velocity, and they change continuously, making a line of points that traces a loop, repeating itself forever, around and around. The same system with a higher energy level-swinging faster and farther-forms a loop in phase space similar to the first, but larger.
A little realism, in the form of friction, changes the picture. We do not need the equations of motion to know the density of a pendulum subject to friction. Every orbit must eventually end up at the same place, the center: position 0, velocity 0. This central fixed point "attracts" the orbits. Instead of looping around forever, they spiral inward. The friction dissipates the system's energy, and in phase space the dissipation shows itself as a pull toward the center, from the outer regions of high energy to the inner regions of low energy. The attractor-the simplest kind possible-is like a pinpoint magnet embedded in a rubber sheet. ~ James Gleick,#NFDB
876:Disobedience
James James
Morrison Morrison
Weatherby George Dupree
Took great
Care of his Mother,
Though he was only three.
James James Said to his Mother,
"Mother," he said, said he;
"You must never go down
to the end of the town,
if you don't go down with me."
James James
Morrison's Mother
Put on a golden gown.
James James Morrison's Mother
Drove to the end of the town.
James James Morrison's Mother
Said to herself, said she:
"I can get right down
to the end of the town
and be back in time for tea."
King John
Put up a notice,
"LOST or STOLEN or STRAYED!
JAMES JAMES MORRISON'S MOTHER
SEEMS TO HAVE BEEN MISLAID.
LAST SEEN
WANDERING VAGUELY:
QUITE OF HER OWN ACCORD,
SHE TRIED TO GET DOWN
TO THE END OF THE TOWN FORTY SHILLINGS REWARD!"
James James
Morrison Morrison
(Commonly known as Jim)
Told his
12
Other relations
Not to go blaming him.
James James
Said to his Mother,
"Mother," he said, said he:
"You must never go down to the end of the town
without consulting me."
James James
Morrison's mother
Hasn't been heard of since.
King John said he was sorry,
So did the Queen and Prince.
King John
(Somebody told me)
Said to a man he knew:
If people go down to the end of the town, well,
what can anyone do?"
(Now then, very softly)
J.J.
M.M.
P.
Took great
C/0 his M*****
Though he was only 3.
J.J. said to his M*****
"M*****," he said, said he:
"You-must-never-go-down-to-the-end-of-the-townif-you-don't-go-down-with-ME!"
~ Alan Alexander Milne,#NFDB
877:Yet this unlearning is precisely what needs to be done if we are to make the shift from a belief-based Buddhism (version 1.0) to a praxis-based Buddhism (version 2.0). We have to train ourselves to the point where on hearing or reading a text from the canon our initial response is no longer “Is that true?” but “Does this work?” At the same time, we also need to undertake a critical analysis of the texts themselves in order to uncover, as best we can at this distance in time, the core terms and narrative strategies that inform a particular passage or discourse. If we subtract the words “noble truth” from the phrase “four noble truths,” we are simply left with “four.” And the most economic formulation of the Four, to be found throughout Buddhist traditions, is this: Suffering (dukkha) Arising (samudaya) Ceasing (nirodha) Path (magga) Once deprived of the epithet “noble truth” and no longer phrased in propositional language, we arrive at the four keystones on which both Buddhism 1.0 and Buddhism 2.0 are erected. Just as there are four nucleobases (cytosine, guanine, adenine, and thymine) that make up DNA, the nucleic acid that contains the genetic instructions for all living organisms, one might say that suffering, arising, ceasing, and path are the four nucleobases that make up the dharma, the body of instructive ideas, values, and practices that give rise to all forms of Buddhism. ( 9 ) Craving is repetitive, it wallows in attachment and greed, obsessively indulging in this and that: the craving of sensory desire, craving for being, craving for non-being. —THE FIRST DISCOURSE Following Carol S. Anderson (1999), I translate samudaya as “arising” rather than the more familiar “origiṇ” I also ~ Stephen Batchelor, #NFDB
878:Dear patient (first name, last name)! You are presently located in our experimental state hospital. The measures taken to save your life were drastic, extremely drastic (circle one). Our finest surgeons, availing themselves of the very latest achievements of modern medicine, performed one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten operations (circle one) on you. They were forced, acting wholly in your interest to replace certain parts of your organism with parts obtained from other persons, in strict accordance with Federal Law (Rev. Stat. Comm. 1-989/0-001/89/1). The notice you are now reading was thoughtfully prepared in order to help you make the best possible adjustment to these new if somewhat unexpected circumstances in your life, which, we hasten to remind you, we have saved. Although it was found necessary to remove your arms, legs, spine, skill, lungs, stomach, kidneys, liver, other (circle one or more), rest assured that these mortal remains were disposed of in a manner fully in keeping with the dictates of your religion; they were, with the proper ritual, interred, embalmed, mummified, buried at sea, cremated with the ashes scattered in the wind—preserved in an urn—thrown in the garbage (circle one). The new form in which you will henceforth lead a happy and healthy existence may possibly occasion you some surprise, but we promise that in time you will become, as indeed all our dear patients do, quite accustomed to it We have supplemented your organism with the very best, the best, perfectly functional, adequate, the only available (circle one) organs at our disposal, and they are fully guaranteed to last a year, six months, three months, three weeks, six days (circle one). ~ Stanis aw Lem, #NFDB
879:ALL day the waves assailed the rock,
I heard no church-bell chime;
The sea-beat scorns the minster clock
And breaks the glass of Time.
by owner. provided at no charge for educational purposes
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Ode
O tenderly the haughty day
Fills his blue urn with fire;
One morn is in the mighty heaven,
And one in our desire.
The cannon booms from town to town,
Our pulses are not less,
The joy-bells chime their tidings down,
Which children's voices bless.
For He that flung the broad blue fold
O'er-mantling land and sea,
One third part of the sky unrolled
For the banner of the free.
The men are ripe of Saxon kind
To build an equal state,--
To take the statute from the mind,
And make of duty fate.
United States! the ages plead,--
Present and Past in under-song,--
Go put your creed into your deed,
Nor speak with double tongue.
For sea and land don't understand,
Nor skies without a frown
See rights for which the one hand fights
By the other cloven down.
Be just at home; then write your scroll
Of honour o'er the sea,
And bid the broad Atlantic roll,
A ferry of the free.
And, henceforth, there shall be no chain,
Save underneath the sea
The wires shall murmur through the main
Sweet songs of LIBERTY.
The conscious stars accord above,
The waters wild below,
And under, through the cable wove,
Her fiery errands go.
For He that worketh high and wise,
Nor pauses in his plan,
Will take the sun out of the skies
Ere freedom out of man.
Ode Sung In The Town Hall 1857 by owner. provided at no charge for educational purposes
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, Waves
,#NFDB
880:Beginning thein
Book 1
0.
1. In thee beginning, creation Godded the Heavens ere thee.
2. And thou wert without form and void, knowing neither darkness nor light, having no I by which to divine them. And the spilling of your Father moved amidst the waters that came to make you come.
3. And Dad said, Let there be my firmament in the midst of Her waters, and let it divide Her waters as a sword should its sheath. And 20,000 legions of sireofhim were thrust unto the breach by the bidding of their master.
4. And in the Heavens of their heads, in the limbic marchlands of their intimacy, angels roared and dragons sang, and hippogriffs commissurated across fields of blood-filled furrows.
5. ”.are parents our Myths“
6. Not knowing that they do sow, they sing thee into being.
7. Blind light blazes - a lamp in an empty grave - an O-void shrine. Its name until you came was No, or Un, and there was naught else: no person, place, or thing. And yet - it was as though a thousand million tiny fingers beaconed you out of the dark.
8. Brightnest of paraspectral radiance, unrememeasurable, ununderstandable, that a snake-shaped You came swimming to. So many of you came, writhing, flagellating, so that this shrine became like a shining sun, and one - only one - was chosen to enter the Codesh of Codes. It brought creative agony, the pain of Somethingness, the sudden searing mystortury of Being, since when we have called it Limited.
9. But how could you not have helped but see the tiny hidden singing Unlimited Light, your Own Sopht Aura? Sire of sirens and sunrise and serapheim?
10. This is what you aur - a sarcophagus of secreted light!
11. Thistory is You. ~ Avalon Brantley,#NFDB
881:Remember to write continuously the entire twenty minutes. And never forget that this writing is for you and you alone. At the conclusion of your twenty minutes of writing, read the section “Post-writing thoughts” and complete the post-writing questionnaire. Post-Writing Thoughts Following the Day One Writing Session Congratulations! You have completed the first day of writing. After each writing exercise, it can be helpful to make objective assessments about how the writing felt. In this way, you can go back and determine which writing methods are most effective for you. For this and for all future writing exercises, respond to each of the five following questions either at the end of your writing or in a separate place. Put a number between 0 and 10 by each question. 0 — Not at all 1 2 3 4 5— Somewhat 6 7 8 9 10— A great deal A. To what degree did you express your deepest thoughts and feelings? B. To what degree do you currently feel sad or upset? C. To what degree do you currently feel happy? D. To what degree was today’s writing valuable and meaningful for you? E. Briefly describe how your writing went today so you may refer to this later. For many people, the first day of writing is the most difficult. This kind of writing can bring up emotions and thoughts that you may not have known that you had. It may also have flowed much more easily than you expected — especially if you wrote about something that you have been keeping to yourself for a long time. If you don’t want anyone to see your writing, keep the pages in a secure place or destroy them. If keeping them is not a problem, you can go back and analyze the pages at the end of the four days of writing. Now, take some time for yourself. Until tomorrow. ~ James W Pennebaker, #NFDB
882:I know, 0 Caesar, that thou art awaiting my arrival with impatience, that thy true heart of a friend is yearning day and night for me. I know that thou art ready to cover me with gifts, make me prefect of the pretorian guards, and command Tigellinus to be that which the gods made him, a mule-driver in those lands which thou didst inherit after poisoning Domitius. Pardon me, however, for I swear to thee by Hades, and by the shades of thy mother, thy wife, thy brother, and Seneca, that I cannot go to thee. Life is a great treasure. I have taken the most precious jewels from that treasure, but in life there are many things which I cannot endure any longer. Do not suppose, I pray, that I am offended because thou didst kill thy mother, thy wife, and thy brother; that thou didst burn Eome and send to Erebus all the honest men in thy dominions. No, grandson of Chronos. Death is the inheritance of man; from thee other deeds could not have been expected. But to destroy one's ear for whole years with thy poetry, to see thy belly of a Domitius on slim legs whirled about in a Pyrrhic dance; to hear thy music, thy declamation, thy doggerel verses, wretched poet of the suburbs, — is a thing surpassing my power, and it has roused in me the wish to die. Eome stuffs its ears when it hears thee; the world reviles thee. I can blush for thee no longer, and I have no wish to do so. The howls of Cerberus, though resembling thy music, will be less offensive to me, for I have never been the friend of Cerberus, and I need not be ashamed of his howling. Farewell, but make no music; commit murder, but write no verses; poison people, but dance not; be an incendiary, but play not on a cithara. This is the wish and the last friendly counsel sent thee by the — Arbiter Elegantiae. ~ Henryk Sienkiewicz, #NFDB
883:Milan Kundera'nın söylediği gibi: Cervantes Don Kişot'u mitlerden, maskelerden, basmakalıplardan, önyargılardan ve önyorumlardan örülü perdeyi yırtmak için gönderdi, içinde bulunduğumuz ve anlamaya çabaladığımız dünyayı sıkı sıkı örten perdelerden... Ancak perde kalkmadıkça ya da yırtılmadıkça boşuna uğraşıyoruz. Don Kişot bir fatih değildi, 0 fethedilmişti. Ancak, yenilgisi ile, bize gösterdiği, “hayat denen kaçınılmaz yenilginin karşısında yapabileceğimiz tek şey durup onu anlamaya çalışmaktır” oldu. Bu Miguel de Cervantes'in büyük, çığır açan keşfiydi; bir kere bulundu mu bir daha unutulamazdı. Beşeri bilimlerle uğraşan bizler önümüzde serili duran bu keşfin izlerini takip ediyoruz. Cervantes sayesinde buralardayız.
Perdeyi yırtmak, hayatı anlamak... Bunun anlamı ne? Biz, insanlar, iyinin ve kötünün, güzelin ve çirkinin, gerçeğin ve yalanın birbirlerinden kesin bir şekilde ayrıldığı ve asla bir diğerine karışmadığı, böylece şeylerin nasıl olduğundan, nereye gidebileceğimizden ve nasıl ilerleyebileceğimizden emin olduğumuz sıradan, temiz ve saydam bir dünyayı tercih ediyoruz; çaba gerektiren bir anlayış olmadan hükümlere ulaşmayı ve kararlar almayı hayal ediyoruz. İşte bizim bu hayalimizden ideolojiler doğdu. Görüşümüzü kapatan o kalın perdeler. . . Bizim bu etkisizleştirici eğilimimize Etienne de la Boétie "gönüllü kölelik” adını verdi. Cervantes bizim bu tür bir
kölelikten çıkmamızı istiyordu; dünyanın tümüyle çıplak, rahatsız, ancak özgürleştirici gerçekliğini sunarak;
anlam çokluğu gerçekliğini ve onarılamaz mutlak gerçekler açığını. Bu tür bir dünyada, kesin olan tek şeyin hiçbir şeyin kesin olmaması olduğu bir dünyada, tekrar tekrar ve sonuç almaksızın kendimizi ve birbirimizi anlamaya, iletişim kurmaya ve birbirimiz için yaşamaya çalışacağız. ~ Zygmunt Bauman,#NFDB
884:To understand my doctor’s error, let’s employ Bayes’s method. The first step is to define the sample space. We could include everyone who has ever taken an HIV test, but we’ll get a more accurate result if we employ a bit of additional relevant information about me and consider only heterosexual non-IV-drug-abusing white male Americans who have taken the test. (We’ll see later what kind of difference this makes.) Now that we know whom to include in the sample space, let’s classify the members of the space. Instead of boy and girl, here the relevant classes are those who tested positive and are HIV-positive (true positives), those who tested positive but are not positive (false positives), those who tested negative and are HIV-negative (true negatives), and those who tested negative but are HIV-positive (false negatives). Finally, we ask, how many people are there in each of these classes? Suppose we consider an initial population of 10,000. We can estimate, employing statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that in 1989 about 1 in those 10,000 heterosexual non-IV-drug-abusing white male Americans who got tested were infected with HIV.6 Assuming that the false-negative rate is near 0, that means that about 1 person out of every 10,000 will test positive due to the presence of the infection. In addition, since the rate of false positives is, as my doctor had quoted, 1 in 1,000, there will be about 10 others who are not infected with HIV but will test positive anyway. The other 9,989 of the 10,000 men in the sample space will test negative. Now let’s prune the sample space to include only those who tested positive. We end up with 10 people who are false positives and 1 true positive. In other words, only 1 in 11 people who test positive are really infected with HIV. ~ Leonard Mlodinow, #NFDB
885:A Midsummer Noon In The Australian Forest
A MIDSUMMER NOON IN THE AUSTRALIAN FOREST
Not a bird disturbs the air!
There is quiet everywhere;
Over plains and over woods
What a mighty stillness broods.
Even the grasshoppers keep
[All the birds and insects keep]
Where the coolest shadows sleep;
Even the busy ants are found
Resting in their pebbled mound;
Even the locust clingeth now
In silence to the barky bough:
And over hills and over plains
Quiet, vast and slumbrous, reigns.
Only there's a drowsy humming
From yon warm lagoon slow coming:
'Tis the dragon-hornet - see!
All bedaubed resplendently
With yellow on a tawny ground Each rich spot nor square nor round,
But rudely heart-shaped, as it were
The blurred and hasty impress there,
Of vermeil-crusted seal
Dusted o'er with golden meal:
Only there's a droning where
Yon bright beetle gleams the air Gleams it in its droning flight
[Tracks it in its gleaming flight]
With a slanting track of light,
Till rising in the sunshine higher,
[Rising in the sunshine higher,]
Its shards flame out like gems on fire.
[Till its shards flame out like fire.]
Every other thing is still,
Save the ever wakeful rill,
19
Whose cool murmur only throws
A cooler comfort round Repose;
Or some ripple in the sea
Of leafy boughs, where, lazily,
Tired Summer, in her forest bower
Turning with the noontide hour,
Heaves a slumbrous breath, ere she
Once more slumbers peacefully.
0 'tis easeful here to lie
Hidden from Noon's scorching eye,
In this grassy cool recess
Musing thus of Quietness.
two versions of this poem have been located. The relevant changes are included
in the text in square brackets, i.e. "[...]".
~ Charles Harpur,#NFDB
886:Stop Buying the Protein Myth A common myth that persists and persists is that it’s difficult to get enough protein from a vegan diet. Let’s just put that myth to rest. The fact is, people on the standard American diet (SAD) eat nearly twice the recommended daily amount of protein—which can actually be unhealthy. According to the U.S. Food and Nutrition Board, recommended protein intake should be calculated according to your weight and age; it recommends 0.8 grams of protein per kilo of body weight, meaning that the average woman requires approximately 50 grams of protein per day, 56 grams for the average man. These guidelines also indicate that the preferred form of protein is from nonanimal sources, such as beans, legumes, nuts, and seeds. These protein sources are also naturally lower in fat, too, again supporting your weight loss efforts. Most of the fats they do contain are unsaturated and they’re always cholesterol free. To put it more simply, your average daily protein intake should be about 15 to 20 percent of your total daily calories (other sources say it can be even less—more like 10.7 percent)—a number easy to get to on a plant-based diet. There is protein in just about everything. So as long as you are eating a varied diet of whole grains, beans, and legumes, vegetables, fruits, and meat and dairy alternatives, you will be just fine. No, there is absolutely no need to consume animal foods to get enough protein. In fact the American Dietetic Association holds that vegan diets provide more than enough protein, even without any special food combinations. Nutritionists used to think you needed to eat “complementary proteins”— beans and rice, for example—in one sitting to get all the nutrients we needed. We now know that’s not true. As long as you are eating a bit of everything throughout the day, all is well. ~ Kathy Freston, #NFDB
887:This curve, which looks like an elongated S, is variously known as the logistic, sigmoid, or S curve. Peruse it closely, because it’s the most important curve in the world. At first the output increases slowly with the input, so slowly it seems constant. Then it starts to change faster, then very fast, then slower and slower until it becomes almost constant again. The transfer curve of a transistor, which relates its input and output voltages, is also an S curve. So both computers and the brain are filled with S curves. But it doesn’t end there. The S curve is the shape of phase transitions of all kinds: the probability of an electron flipping its spin as a function of the applied field, the magnetization of iron, the writing of a bit of memory to a hard disk, an ion channel opening in a cell, ice melting, water evaporating, the inflationary expansion of the early universe, punctuated equilibria in evolution, paradigm shifts in science, the spread of new technologies, white flight from multiethnic neighborhoods, rumors, epidemics, revolutions, the fall of empires, and much more. The Tipping Point could equally well (if less appealingly) be entitled The S Curve. An earthquake is a phase transition in the relative position of two adjacent tectonic plates. A bump in the night is just the sound of the microscopic tectonic plates in your house’s walls shifting, so don’t be scared. Joseph Schumpeter said that the economy evolves by cracks and leaps: S curves are the shape of creative destruction. The effect of financial gains and losses on your happiness follows an S curve, so don’t sweat the big stuff. The probability that a random logical formula is satisfiable—the quintessential NP-complete problem—undergoes a phase transition from almost 1 to almost 0 as the formula’s length increases. Statistical physicists spend their lives studying phase transitions. ~ Pedro Domingos, #NFDB
888:He said, "Who is at my door?"
I said, "Your humble servant."
He said, "What business do you have?"
I said, "To greet you, 0 Lord."
He said, "How long will you journey on?"
I said, "Until you stop me."
He said, "How long will you boil in the fire?"
I said, "Until I am pure.
"This is my oath of love.
For the sake of love
I gave up wealth and position."
He said, "You have pleaded your case
but you have no witness."
I said, "My tears are my witness;
the pallor of my face is my proof.'
He said, "Your witness has no credibility;
your eyes are too wet to see."
I said, "By the splendor of your justice
my eyes are clear and faultless."
He said, "What do you seek?"
I said, "To have you as my constant friend."
He said, "What do you want from me?"
I said, "Your abundant grace."
He said, "Who was your companion on the journey?
I said, "The thought of you, 0 King."
He said, "What called you here?"
I said, "The fragrance of your wine."
He said, "What brings you the most fulfillment?"
I said, "The company of the Emperor."
He said, "What do you find there?"
I said, "A hundred miracles."
He said, "Why is the palace deserted?"
I said, "They all fear the thief."
He said, "Who is the thief?"
I said, "The one who keeps me from -you.
He said, "Where is there safety?"
I said, "In service and renunciation."
He said, "What is there to renounce?"
I said, "The hope of salvation."
He said, "Where is there calamity?"
I said, "In the presence of your love."
He said, "How do you benefit from this life?"
I said, "By keeping true to myself
Now it is time for silence.
If I told you about His true essence
You would fly from your self and be gone,
and neither door nor roof could hold you back!
~ Jalaluddin Rumi, Who Is At My Door?
,#NFDB
889:5.4 The question of accumulation. If life is a wager, what form does it take? At the racetrack, an accumulator is a bet which rolls on profits from the success of one of the horse to engross the stake on the next one.
5.5 So a) To what extent might human relationships be expressed in a mathematical or logical formula? And b) If so, what signs might be placed between the integers?Plus and minus, self-evidently; sometimes multiplication, and yes, division. But these sings are limited. Thus an entirely failed relationship might be expressed in terms of both loss/minus and division/ reduction, showing a total of zero; whereas an entirely successful one can be represented by both addition and multiplication. But what of most relationships? Do they not require to be expressed in notations which are logically improbable and mathematically insoluble?
5.6 Thus how might you express an accumulation containing the integers b, b, a (to the first), a (to the second), s, v?
B = s - v (*/+) a (to the first)
Or
a (to the second) + v + a (to the first) x s = b
5.7 Or is that the wrong way to put the question and express the accumulation? Is the application of logic to the human condition in and of itself self-defeating? What becomes of a chain of argument when the links are made of different metals, each with a separate frangibility?
5.8 Or is "link" a false metaphor?
5.9 But allowing that is not, if a link breaks, wherein lies the responsibility for such breaking? On the links immediately on the other side, or on the whole chain? But what do you mean by "the whole chain"? How far do the limits of responsibility extend?
6.0 Or we might try to draw the responsibility more narrowly and apportion it more exactly. And not use equations and integers but instead express matters in the traditional narrative terminology. So, for instance, if...." - Adrian Finn ~ Julian Barnes,#NFDB
890:More often, he listened to the voice of Eros. Sometimes he watched the video feeds too, but usually, he just listened. Over the hours and days, he began to hear, if not patterns, at least common structures. Some of the voices spooling out of the dying station were consistent-broadcasters and entertainers who were overrepresented in the audio files archives, he guessed. There seemed to be some specific tendencies in, for want of a better term, the music of it too. Hours of random, fluting static and snatched bits of phrases would give way, and Eros would latch on to some word or phrase, fixating on it with greater and greater intensity until it broke apart and the randomness poured back in.
"... are, are, are, ARE, ARE, ARE... "
Aren't, Miller thought, and the ship suddenly shoved itself up, leaving Miller's stomach about half a foot from where it had been. A series of loud clanks followed, and then the brief wail of a Klaxon. "Dieu! Dieu!" someone shouted. "Bombs son vamen roja! Going to fry it! Fry us toda!"
There was the usual polite chuckle that the same joke had occasioned over the course of the trip, and the boy who'd made it-a pimply Belter no more than fifteen years old-grinned with pleasure at his own wit. If he didn't stop that shit, someone was going to beat him with a crowbar before they got back to Tycho. But Miller figured that someone wasn't him.
A massive jolt forward pushed him hard into the couch, and then gravity was back, the familiar 0.3 g. Maybe a little more. Except that with the airlocks pointing toward ship's down, the pilot had to grapple the spinning skin of Eros' belly first. The spin gravity made what had been the ceiling the new floor; the lowest rank of couches was now the top; and while they rigged the fusion bombs to the docks, they were all going to have to climb up onto a cold, dark rock that was trying to fling them off into the vacuum.
Such were the joys of sabotage. ~ James S A Corey, Leviathan Wakes,#NFDB
891:Studies show that people who read at or above the college level all read at about the same speed when they read for pleasure. Within the contentious world of reading theory, there is unanimity on this point. When you factor out the amount of time spent thinking through complex and unfamiliar concepts—a rarity when people read for pleasure—reading is an appallingly mechanical process. You look at a word or several words. This is called a “fixation,” and it takes about .25 seconds on average. You move your eye to the next word or group of words. This is called a “saccade,” and it takes up to about .1 seconds on average. After this is repeated once or twice, you pause to comprehend the phrase you just looked at. That takes roughly 0.3 to 0.5 seconds on average. Add all these fixations and saccades and comprehension pauses together and you end up with about 95 percent of all college-level readers reading between 200 and 400 words per minute, according to Keith Rayner, a psycholinguist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The majority of these college-level readers reads about 300 words per minute. What about the far end of the bell curve? Isn’t it possible there are a handful of super-smart Aloysiuses out there who can read much faster than everybody else? John F. Kennedy was said to read 1,200 words per minute. The speed-reading huckster Evelyn Wood claimed that a professor boasted of consuming more than 2,500 words per minute “with outstanding recall and comprehension.” A 1963 study purported to find one person who read 17,040 words per minute. The last two examples are gleaned from a 1985 study in Reading Research Quarterly, by Ronald Carver, a professor of education research and psychology at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Carver thinks all three of these examples are bunk. JFK, he says, probably read 500-600 words a minute—that’s very fast—and perhaps could skim 1,000 words per minute. ~ Timothy Noah, “The 1,000-Word Dash”, Slate, (02/2000)., #NFDB
892:in Solution Most chemical reactions that occur on the earth’s surface, whether in living organisms or among inorganic substances, take place in aqueous solution. Chemical reactions carried out between substances in solution obey the requirements of stoichiometry discussed in Chapter 2, in the sense that the conservation laws embodied in balanced chemical equations are always in force. But here we must apply these requirements in a slightly different way. Instead of a conversion between masses and number of moles, using the molar mass as a conversion factor, the conversion is now between solution volumes and number of moles, with the concentration as the conversion factor. For instance, consider the reaction that is used commercially to prepare elemental bromine from its salts in solution: 2 Br (aq) Cl2(aq) 02 Cl (aq) Br2(aq) Suppose there is 50.0 mL of a 0.0600 M solution of NaBr. What volume of a 0.0500 M solution of Cl2 is needed to react completely with the Br ? To answer this, find the number of moles of bromide ion present: 0.0500 L (0.0600 mol L 1 ) 3.00 10 3 mol Br Next, use the chemical conversion factor 1 mol of Cl2 per 2 mol of Br to find moles Cl2 reacting 3.00 10 3 mol Br a 1 mol Cl2 2 mol Br b 1.50 10 3 mol Cl2 Finally, find the necessary volume of aqueous chlorine: 1.50 10 3 mol 3.00 10 2 L solution 0.0500 mol L 1 The reaction requires 3.00 10 2 L, or 30.0 mL, of the Cl2 solution.(In practice, an excess of Cl2 solution would be used to ensure more nearly complete conversion of the bromide ion to bromine. ) The chloride ion concentration after completion of the reaction might also be of interest. Because each mole of bromide ion that reacts gives 1 mol of chloride ion in the products, the number of moles of Cl produced is 3.00 10 3 mol. The final volume of the solution is 0.0800 L, so the final concentration of Cl is [Cl ] 3.00 10 3 mol 0.0800 L 0.0375 M Square brackets around a chemical symbol signify the molarity of that species. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
893:The problem with academia is that it is about being good at remembering things like chemical formulae and theories, because that is what you have to regurgitate. But children are not allowed to learn through experimenting and experience. This is a great pity. You need both.” One of the most powerful aspects of the Dyson story is that it evokes a point that was made in chapter 7; namely, that technological change is often driven by the synergy between practical and theoretical knowledge. One of the first things Dyson did when he had the insight for a cyclone cleaner was to buy two books on the mathematical theory of how cyclones work. He also went to visit the author of one of those books, an academic named R. G. Dorman.22 This was hugely helpful to Dyson. It allowed him to understand cyclone dynamics more fully. It played a role in directing his research and gave him a powerful background on the mathematics of separation efficiency. But it was by no means sufficient. The theory was too abstract to lead him directly to the precise dimensions that would deliver a functional vacuum cleaner. Moreover, as Dyson iterated his device, he discovered that the theory had flaws. Dorman’s equation predicted that cyclones would only be able to remove fine dust down to a lower limit of 20 microns. But Dyson quickly broke through this theoretical limit. By the end, his cyclone could separate dust smaller than 0.3 micron (this is approximately the size of the particles in cigarette smoke). Dyson’s practical engagement with the problem had forced a change in the theory. And this is invariably how progress happens. It is an interplay between the practical and the theoretical, between top-down and bottom-up, between creativity and discipline, between the small picture and the big picture. The crucial point—and the one that is most dramatically overlooked in our culture—is that in all these things, failure is a blessing, not a curse. It is the jolt that inspires creativity and the selection test that drives evolution. ~ Matthew Syed, #NFDB
894:In Hospital
They stood, almost blocking the pavement,
As though at a window display;
The stretcher was pushed in position,
The ambulance started away.
Past porches and pavements and people
It plunged with its powerful light
Through streets in nocturnal confusion
Deep into the blackness of night.
The headlights picked out single faces,
Militiamen, stretches of street.
The nurse with a smelling-salts phial
Was rocked to and fro on her seat.
A drain gurgled drearily. Cold rain
Was falling. The hospital-clerk
Took out a fresh form of admission
And filled it in, mark upon mark.
They gave him a bed by the entrance;
No room in the ward could be found.
Strong iodine vapour pervaded
The draught from the windows around.
His window framed part of the garden,
And with it a bit of the sky.
The newcomer studied the floorboards,
The ward and the objects nearby,
When, watching the nurse's expression
Of doubt, in her questioning drive,
He suddenly knew this adventure
Would hardly release him alive.
Then, grateful, he turned to the window
Behind which the wall, further down,
Was breathing like smouldering tinder,
Lit up by the glare of the town.
76
There, far off the city was glowing
All crimson-aflame; in its swell
A maple-branch, ragged, was bowing
To bid him a silent farewell.
'0 Lord,' he was thinking, 'how perfect
Thy works are, how perfect and right;
The walls and the beds and the people,
This death-night, the city at night!
'I drink up a sedative potion,
And weeping, my handkerchief trace.
0 Father, the tears of emotion
Prevent me from seeing Thy face.
'Dim light scarcely touches my bedstead.
It gives me such comfort to drift
And feel that my life and my lot are
Thy priceless and wonderful gift.
'While dying in fading surroundings
I feel how Thy hands are ablaze,
The hands that have made me and hold me
And hide like a ring in a case.'
~ Boris Pasternak,#NFDB
895:Let us assume that the reader shared my opinion, that the market over the next week had a 70% probability of going up and 30% probability of going down. However, let us say that it would go up by 1% on average, while it could go down by an average of 10%. What would the reader do? Is the reader bullish or bearish? Table 6.2 Event Probability Outcome Expectation Market goes up 70% Up 1% 0.7 Market goes down 30% Down 10% -3.00 Total -2.3 Accordingly, bullish or bearish are terms used by people who do not engage in practicing uncertainty, like the television commentators, or those who have no experience in handling risk. Alas, investors and businesses are not paid in probabilities; they are paid in dollars. Accordingly, it is not how likely an event is to happen that matters, it is how much is made when it happens that should be the consideration. How frequent the profit is irrelevant; it is the magnitude of the outcome that counts. It is a pure accounting fact that, aside from the commentators, very few people take home a check linked to how often they are right or wrong. What they get is a profit or loss. As to the commentators, their success is linked to how often they are right or wrong. This category includes the “chief strategists” of major investment banks the public can see on TV, who are nothing better than entertainers. They are famous, seem reasoned in their speech, plow you with numbers, but, functionally, they are there to entertain—for their predictions to have any validity they would need a statistical testing framework. Their frame is not the result of some elaborate test but rather the result of their presentation skills. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
896:Chartrand respiró hondo. —No entiendo lo de benévolo y omnipotente. El camarlengo sonrió. —Ha estado leyendo las Escrituras. —Lo intento. —Está confuso porque la Biblia describe a Dios como una deidad benévola y omnipotente. —Exacto. —Benévolo y omnipotente significa simplemente que Dios es todopoderoso y bienintencionado. —Entiendo el concepto. Es que… parece que hay una contradicción. —Sí. La contradicción es el dolor. Guerras, enfermedades, hambre… —¡Exacto! —Chartrand sabía que el camarlengo le comprendería—. Ocurren cosas terribles en este mundo. La tragedia humana parece la prueba de que Dios no puede ser todopoderoso y bienintencionado al mismo tiempo. Si nos ama y cuenta con el poder de cambiar nuestra situación, podría ahorrarnos el dolor, ¿verdad? El camarlengo frunció el ceño. —¿Qué quiere decir? Chartrand se sintió inquieto. ¿Había sobrepasado sus límites? ¿Era uno de esos temas religiosos que no se debían sacar a colación? —Bien… Si Dios nos ama, y puede protegernos, debería hacerlo. 0 es omnipotente e indiferente, o benévolo e incapaz de ayudarnos. —¿Tiene hijos, teniente? Chartrand se ruborizó. —No, signore. —Imagine que tuviera un hijo de ocho años… ¿Le querría? —Por supuesto. —¿Haría todo cuanto estuviera en su poder por evitarle el dolor durante toda su vida? —Por supuesto. —¿Le dejaría utilizar un monopatín? Chartrand reaccionó un poco tarde. El camarlengo siempre parecía estar «al día», algo poco usual en un sacerdote. —Supongo que sí —dijo Chartrand—. Claro, le dejaría utilizar el monopatín, pero le diría que fuera con cuidado. —Como padre de ese niño, ¿le daría un buen consejo básico, para luego dejarle marchar y cometer sus propios errores? —No correría tras él y le mimaría, si se refiere a eso. —Pero ¿y si se cayera y se pelara la rodilla? —Aprendería a ser más prudente. El camarlengo sonrió. —Por lo tanto, aunque poseyera el poder de intervenir e impedir el dolor de su hijo, preferiría demostrarle su amor dejando que aprendiera por sí mismo, ¿verdad? —Por supuesto. El dolor es algo inherente a la madurez. Así aprendemos. El camarlengo asintió. —Exacto. ========== ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
897:Neanche l’1% delle proposte degli onorevoli diventa legge Carlo Bertini | 344 parole Non dovrebbe essere solo il premier a spingere perché gli onorevoli lavorino cinque giorni a settimana, visto che ancora servono in media tre giri di valzer nei due rami del Parlamento per veder approvata una legge. A spulciare qualche numero delle statistiche elaborate dal sito Openpolis emerge che forse dovrebbero essere gli stessi parlamentari a preoccuparsi di trovare il modo per riuscire a portare a casa qualcosa della sterminata mole di proposte che avanzano ogni mese. Quelle di iniziativa parlamentare che vanno a buon fine sono una percentuale infinitesimale. Neanche l’un per cento dei disegni di legge presentati dagli onorevoli eletti nel 2013 è diventato legge. Cioè dei 4000 disegni di legge presentati in questa legislatura solo 26 hanno visto la luce, pari allo 0,66%. Ben maggior successo hanno riscosso le proposte governative, pari al 20% come riporta l’analisi dettagliata di Openpolis. E anche nei tempi di approvazione il governo surclassa i parlamentari: 77 giorni in media per veder varata una sua legge, contro i 245 che mediamente impiegano quelle dei parlamentari. Curiosità: tra i partiti vince Sel di Vendola. Ne ha presentate 89 e viste approvate 4 con il 4,46%. Il Pd invece ne ha presentate 1400 con la solita bulimia e ne ha viste approvate solo lo 0,77%, battuto perfino dall’1,11% di Forza Italia. Missing Italicum La commissione affari costituzionali del Senato si sta occupando della riforma della pubblica amministrazione, una riforma complessa che potrebbe da sola impegnare i lavori nelle prossime settimane. Peccato che anche la legge elettorale dovrebbe essere discussa e approvata dalla stessa commissione. Il renziano Roberto Giachetti da giorni chiede conto e ragione di quella che definisce una «melina». Indignandosi che la legge elettorale sia sparita dai radar, «missing». E avvertendo che di questo passo non si riuscirà a varare l’Italicum entro l’anno come promesso. Ma nulla si sbloccherà fino a quando Pd e Forza Italia non troveranno un’intesa sul ballottaggio tra coalizioni o tra liste... ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
898:CICLU SEPTENAR (PRIMUL PĂTRAT DE 4 x 7): Un destin uman evoluează în cicluri de şapte ani. Fiecare ciclu se termină cu o criză care face trecerea la etapa superioară.
De la 0 la 7 ani. Legătură puternică cu mama. Teamă orizontală de lume. Construirea simţurilor. Mirosul mamei, laptele mamei, vocea mamei, căldura mamei, sărutările mamei sunt primele referinţe. Perioada se termină în general prin crăparea coconului protector al iubirii materne şi descoperirea mai mult sau mai puţin temătoare a restului lumii.
De la 7 la 14 ani. Legătură puternică cu tatăl. Teamă verticală de lume. Construirea personalităţii. Tatăl devine noul partener privilegiat, aliatul pentru descoperirea lumii din afara coconului familial. Tatăl măreşte coconul familial protector. Tatăl se impune ca referinţă. Mama era iubită, tatăl va trebui să fie admirat.
De la 14 la 21 de ani. Revoltă împotriva societăţii. Teamă de materie. Construirea intelectului. E criza adolescentului. Vrei să schimbi lumea şi să distrugi structurile prezente. Tînărul atacă coconul familial, apoi societatea în general. Adolescentul este sedus de tot ce este „rebel”: muzică violentă, atitudine romantică, dorinţă de independenţă, fugă de acasă, legătură cu bande de tineri care trăiesc la marginea societăţii, adeziune la valorile anarhiste, negarea sistematică a vechilor valori. Perioada se termină cu o ieşire din coconul familial.
De la 21 la 28 de ani. Adeziune la societate. Stabilizare după revoltă. Pentru că nu ai reuşit să distrugi lumea, te integrezi în ea, avînd la început dorinţa de a face mai bine decît generaţia precedentă. Căutarea unei meserii mai interesante decît cea a părinţilor. Căutarea unui loc de viaţă mai interesant decît cel al părinţilor. Tentativa de a realiza un cuplu mai fericit decît cel al părinţilor. Alegi un (o) partener(ă) şi întemeiezi un cămin. Construieşti propriul cocon. Perioada se termină în general cu o căsătorie.
Acum omul şi-a îndeplinit misiunea şi a terminat cu primul său cocon protector.
SFÎRŞITUL PRIMULUI PĂTRAT DE 4 x 7 ANI.
Edmond Wells,
Enciclopedia cunoaşterii relative şi absolute, volumul IV ~ Bernard Werber,#NFDB
899:Deerfield, Massachusetts
February 29, 1704
Temperature 0 degrees
Joanna Kellogg, one of Joseph’s sisters, was stumbling.
For Joanna, the world was blurred. Her eyes didn’t focus the way other people’s did. Leaves on trees were green blots against a blue sky. She couldn’t recognize people until they were within a dozen paces. When an Indian brave took Joanna’s hand, she had not seen her mother die and did not know this was the killer.
She was only ten, but her pack was nearly as large as the ones grown men carried. Joanna did not complain or call out. She just walked more and more slowly.
Ruth Catlin lost her temper. She flung the pack she had been given into the snow. She grabbed Joanna by the shoulders and ripped off Joanna’s pack, flinging that into the snow too. She hurled an iron frying pan across the snow and then a whole leg of lamb. Indian and captive alike were mesmerized.
“You savages!” Ruth screamed. “Don’t you even think about hurting Joanna. She’s too little! You are vicious and mean! I hate you!”
She dragged Joanna forward as if the two of them meant to reach Canada first, by God. “Go ahead and kill me!” she yelled, holding out her hair to be scalped. “I dare you!” She made a fist around her own hair, yanked it tight and waved the bristles in Indian faces. Nobody tomahawked Ruth.
She stomped past Indian after Indian, calling them names.
Ruth stormed right up to the front of the line, where the lead Indians were trampling out the path. She could go no farther. The Indians politely stepped back and gestured north, making it clear that Ruth was welcome to lead the way.
Ruth kicked wildly at one of the braves, but he stepped back and Ruth’s burst of energy vanished.
She wanted to lie down on her own soft bed, bury her face in her pillow and weep for the family that had died around her. Even more, she wanted to kill an Indian. Or ten of them. But she had no weapon and as for softness, even the snow was not soft today.
Well, at least she would not give those Indians the satisfaction of seeing her cry.
Glaring, dragging poor Joanna, she marched on. ~ Caroline B Cooney,#NFDB
900:To measure market needs, I would watch carefully what customers do, not simply listen to what they say. Watching how customers actually use a product provides much more reliable information than can be gleaned from a verbal interview or a focus group. Thus, observations indicate that auto users today require a minimum cruising range (that is, the distance that can be driven without refueling) of about 125 to 150 miles; most electric vehicles only offer a minimum cruising range of 50 to 80 miles. Similarly, drivers seem to require cars that accelerate from 0 to 60 miles per hour in less than 10 seconds (necessary primarily to merge safely into highspeed traffic from freeway entrance ramps); most electric vehicles take nearly 20 seconds to get there.
And, finally, buyers in the mainstream market demand a wide array of options, but it would be impossible for electric vehicle manufacturers to offer a similar variety within the small initial unit volumes that will characterize that business. According to almost any definition of functionality used for the vertical axis of our proposed chart, the electric vehicle will be deficient compared to a gasolinepowered car.
This information is not sufficient to characterize electric vehicles as disruptive, however. They will only be disruptive if we find that they are also on a trajectory of improvement that might someday make them competitive in parts of the mainstream market.
The trajectories of performance improvement demanded in the market—whether measured in terms of required acceleration, cruising range, or top cruising speed—are relatively flat. This is because traffic laws impose a limit on the usefulness of ever-more-powerful cars, and demographic, economic, and geographic considerations limit the increase in commuting miles for the average driver to less than 1 percent per year.
At the same time, the performance of electric vehicles is improving at a faster rate—between 2 and 4 percent per year—suggesting that sustaining technological advances might indeed carry electric vehicles from their position today, where they cannot compete in mainstream markets, to a position in the future where they might. ~ Clayton M Christensen,#NFDB
901:- The Azan story -
The five daily ritual prayers were regularly performed in congregation, and when the time for each prayer came the people would assemble at the site where the Mosque was being built. Everyone judged of the time by the position of the sun in the sky, or by the first signs of its light on the eastern horizon or by the dimming of its glow in the west after sunset; but opinions could differ, and the Prophet felt the need for a means of summoning the people to prayer when the right time had come. At first he thought of appointing a man to blow a horn like that of the Jews, but later he decided on a wooden clapper, ndqiis, such as the Oriental Christians used at that time, and two pieces of wood were fashioned together for that purpose. But they were never destined to be used; for one night a man of Khazraj, 'Abd Allah ibn Zayd, who had been at the Second 'Aqabah, had a dream whieh the next day he recounted to the Prophet: "There passed by me a man wearing two green garments and he carried in his hand a ndqiis, so I said unto him: "0 slave of God, wilt thou sell me that naqusi" "What wilt thou do with it?" he said. "We will summon the people to prayer with it," I answered. "Shall I not show thee a better way?" he said. "What way is that?" I asked, and he answered: "That thou shouldst say: God is most Great, Alldhu Akbar." The man in green repeated this magnification four times, then each of the following twice: I testify that there is no god but God; I testify that Muhammad is the messenger of God; come unto the prayer; come unto salvation; God is most Great; and then once again there is no god but God.
The Prophet said that this was a true vision, and he told him to go to Bilal, who had an excellent voice, and teach him the words exactly as he had heard them in his sleep. The highest house in the neighbourhood of the Mosque belonged to a woman of the clan of Najjar, and Bilal would come there before every dawn and would sit on the roof waiting for the daybreak. When he saw the first faint light in the east he would stretch out his arms and say in supplication: "0 God I praise Thee, and I ask Thy Help for Quraysh, that they may accept Thy religion." Then he would stand and utter the call to prayer. ~ Martin Lings,#NFDB
902:May I be far removed from contending creeds and dogmas.
Ever since my Lords grace entered my mind,
My mind has never strayed to seek such distractions.
Accustomed long to contemplating love and compassion,
I have forgotten all difference between myself and others.
Accustomed long to meditating on my Guru as enhaloed over my head,
I have forgotten all those who rule by power and prestige.
Accustomed long to meditating on my guardian deities as inseparable from myself,
I have forgotten the lowly fleshly form.
Accustomed long to meditating on the secret whispered truths,
I have forgotten all that is said in written or printed books.
Accustomed, as I have been, to the study of the eternal Truth,
Ive lost all knowledge of ignorance.
Accustomed, as Ive been, to contemplating both nirvana and samsara as inherent in myself,
I have forgotten to think of hope and fear.
Accustomed, as Ive been, to meditating on this life and the next as one,
I have forgotten the dread of birth and death.
Accustomed long to studying, by myself, my own experiences,
I have forgotten the need to seek the opinions of friends and brethren.
Accustomed long to applying each new experience to my own spiritual growth,
I have forgotten all creeds and dogmas.
Accustomed long to meditating on the Unborn, the Indestructible, the Unchanging,
I have forgotten all definitions of this or that particular goal.
Accustomed long to meditating on all visible phenomena as the Dharmakaya,
I have forgotten all meditations on what is produced by the mind.
Accustomed long to keeping my mind in the uncreated state of freedom,
I have forgotten all conventions and artificialities.
Accustomed long to humbleness, of body and mind,
I have forgotten the pride and haughty manner of the mighty.
Accustomed long to regarding my fleshly body as my hermitage,
I have forgotten the ease and comfort of retreats and monasteries.
Accustomed long to knowing the meaning of the Wordless,
I have forgotten the way to trace the roots of verbs, and the
sources of words and phrases.
You, 0 learned one, may trace out these things in your books
Milarepa
~ Jetsun Milarepa, I Have forgotten
,#NFDB
903:To appreciate the asymmetry between the possibility effect and the certainty effect, imagine first that you have a 1% chance to win $1 million. You will know the outcome tomorrow. Now, imagine that you are almost certain to win $1 million, but there is a 1% chance that you will not. Again, you will learn the outcome tomorrow. The anxiety of the second situation appears to be more salient than the hope in the first. The certainty effect is also more striking than the possibility effect if the outcome is a surgical disaster rather than a financial gain. Compare the intensity with which you focus on the faint sliver of hope in an operation that is almost certain to be fatal, compared to the fear of a 1% risk. The combination of the certainty effect and possibility effects at the two ends of the probability scale is inevitably accompanied by inadequate sensitivity to intermediate probabilities. You can see that the range of probabilities between 5% and 95% is associated with a much smaller range of decision weights (from 13.2 to 79.3), about two-thirds as much as rationally expected. Neuroscientists have confirmed these observations, finding regions of the brain that respond to changes in the probability of winning a prize. The brain’s response to variations of probabilities is strikingly similar to the decision weights estimated from choices. Probabilities that are extremely low or high (below 1% or above 99%) are a special case. It is difficult to assign a unique decision weight to very rare events, because they are sometimes ignored altogether, effectively assigned a decision weight of zero. On the other hand, when you do not ignore the very rare events, you will certainly overweight them. Most of us spend very little time worrying about nuclear meltdowns or fantasizing about large inheritances from unknown relatives. However, when an unlikely event becomes the focus of attention, we will assign it much more weight than its probability deserves. Furthermore, people are almost completely insensitive to variations of risk among small probabilities. A cancer risk of 0.001% is not easily distinguished from a risk of 0.00001%, although the former would translate to 3,000 cancers for the population of the United States, and the latter to 30. ~ Daniel Kahneman, #NFDB
904:I'M Growing Old
I’M growing old — ‘t is surely so;
And yet how short it seems
Since I was but a sportive child,
Enjoying childish dreams!
I cannot see the change that comes
With such an even pace;
I mark not when the wrinkles fall
Upon my fading face.
I know I’m old; and yet my heart
Is just as young and gay
As e’er it was before my locks
Of bright brown turned to gray.
I know these eyes to other eyes
Look not so bright and glad
As once they looked; and yet ‘tis nor
Because my heart’s more sad.
I never watched with purer joy
The floating clouds and glowing skies,
While glistening tears of rapture fill
These old and fading eyes.
And when I mark the cheek, wkere once
The bright rose used to glow,
It grieves me not to see instead
The almond crown my brow.
I’ve seen the flower grow old and pale,
And withered more than I;
I’ve seen it lose its every charm,
Then droop away and die.
And then I’ve seen it rise again,
Bright as the beaming sky,
And young and pure and beautiful—
And felt that so shall I.
175
Then what if I am growing old?
My heart is changeless still,
And God has given me enough
This loving heart to fill.
I love to see the sun go down,
And lengthening shadows throw
Along the ground, while o’er my head
The clouds in crimson glow.
I see, beyond those gorgeous clouds,
A country bright and fair,
Which needs no sun: God and the Lamb
Its light and beauty are.
I seem to hear the wondrous song
Redeemed sinners sing;
And my heart leaps to join the throng
To praise the Heavenly King.
I seem to see three cherub boys,
As hand in hand they go,
With golden curls and snowy wings,
Whose eyes with rapture glow.
When I was young I called them mine —
Now Heaven’s sweet ones are they;
But I shall claim my own again,
When I am called away.
Perhaps, when heaven’s bright gate I’ve passed,
They’ll know from every other
The one who gave them back to God,
And haste to call me mother.
0! 1 am glad I’m growing old!
For every day I spend
Shall bring me one day nearer that
Bright day that has no end.
176
~ Anonymous Americas,#NFDB
905:there were many contacts during the campaign and the transition between Trump associates and Russians—in person, on the phone, and via text and email. Many of these interactions were with Ambassador Kislyak, who was thought to help oversee Russian intelligence operations in the United States, but they included other Russian officials and agents as well. For example, Roger Stone, the longtime Trump political advisor who claimed that he was in touch with Julian Assange, suggested in August 2016 that information about John Podesta was going to come out. In October, Stone hinted Assange and WikiLeaks were going to release material that would be damaging to my campaign, and later admitted to also exchanging direct messages over Twitter with Guccifer 2.0, the front for Russian intelligence, after some of those messages were published by the website The Smoking Gun. We also know now that in December 2016, Trump’s son-in-law and senior advisor, Jared Kushner, met with Sergey Gorkov, the head of a Kremlin-controlled bank that is under U.S. sanctions and tied closely to Russian intelligence. The Washington Post caused a sensation with its report that Russian officials were discussing a proposal by Kushner to use Russian diplomatic facilities in America to communicate secretly with Moscow. The New York Times reported that Russian intelligence attempted to recruit Carter Page, the Trump foreign policy advisor, as a spy back in 2013 (according to the report, the FBI believed Page did not know that the man who approached him was a spy). And according to Yahoo News, U.S. officials received intelligence reports that Carter Page met with a top Putin aide involved with intelligence. Some Trump advisors failed to disclose or lied about their contacts with the Russians, including on applications for security clearances, which could be a federal crime. Attorney General Jeff Sessions lied to Congress about his contacts and later recused himself from the investigation. Michael Flynn lied about being in contact with Kislyak and then changed his story about whether they discussed dropping U.S. sanctions. Reporting since the election has made clear that Trump and his top advisors have little or no interest in learning about the Russian covert operation against American democracy. ~ Hillary Rodham Clinton, #NFDB
906:Unlike classically spinning bodies, such as tops, however, where the spin rate can assume any value fast or slow, electrons always have only one fixed spin. In the units in which this spin is measured quantum mechanically (called Planck's constant) the electrons have half a unit, or they are "spin-1/2" particles. In fact, all the matter particles in the standard model-electrons, quarks, neutrinos, and two other types called muons and taus-all have "spin 1/2." Particles with half-integer spin are known collectively as fermions (after the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi). On the other hand, the force carriers-the photon, W, Z, and gluons-all have one unit of spin, or they are "spin-1" particles in the physics lingo. The carrier of gravity-the graviton-has "spin 2," and this was precisely the identifying property that one of the vibrating strings was found to possess. All the particles with integer units of spin are called bosons (after the Indian physicist Satyendra Bose). Just as ordinary spacetime is associated with a supersymmetry that is based on spin. The predictions of supersymmetry, if it is truly obeyed, are far-reaching. In a universe based on supersymmetry, every known particle in the universe must have an as-yet undiscovered partner (or "superparrtner"). The matter particles with spin 1/2, such as electrons and quarks, should have spin 0 superpartners. the photon and gluons (that are spin 1) should have spin-1/2 superpartners called photinos and gluinos respectively. Most importantly, however, already in the 1970s physicists realized that the only way for string theory to include fermionic patterns of vibration at all (and therefore to be able to explain the constituents of matter) is for the theory to be supersymmetric. In the supersymmetric version of the theory, the bosonic and fermionic vibrational patters come inevitably in pairs. Moreover, supersymmetric string theory managed to avoid another major headache that had been associated with the original (nonsupersymmetric) formulation-particles with imaginary mass. Recall that the square roots of negative numbers are called imaginary numbers. Before supersymmetry, string theory produced a strange vibration pattern (called a tachyon) whose mass was imaginary. Physicists heaved a sigh of relief when supersymmetry eliminated these undesirable beasts. ~ Mario Livio, #NFDB
907:And by the early 1970s our little parable of Sam and Sweetie is exactly what happened to the North American Golden Retriever. One field-trial dog, Holway Barty, and two show dogs, Misty Morn’s Sunset and Cummings’ Gold-Rush Charlie, won dozens of blue ribbons between them. They were not only gorgeous champions; they had wonderful personalities. Consequently, hundreds of people wanted these dogs’ genes to come into their lines, and over many matings during the 1970s the genes of these three dogs were flung far and wide throughout the North American Golden Retriever population, until by 2010 Misty Morn’s Sunset alone had 95,539 registered descendants, his number of unregistered ones unknown. Today hundreds of thousands of North American Golden Retrievers are descended from these three champions and have received both their sweet dispositions and their hidden time bombs. Unfortunately for these Golden Retrievers, and for the people who love them, one of these time bombs happens to be cancer. To be fair, a so-called cancer gene cannot be traced directly to a few famous sires, but using these sires so often increases the chance of recessive genes meeting—for good and for ill. Today, in the United States, 61.4 percent of Golden Retrievers die of cancer, according to a survey conducted by the Golden Retriever Club of America and the Purdue School of Veterinary Medicine. In Great Britain, a Kennel Club survey found almost exactly the same result, if we consider that those British dogs—loosely diagnosed as dying of “old age” and “cardiac conditions” and never having been autopsied—might really be dying of a variety of cancers, including hemangiosarcoma, a cancer of the lining of the blood vessels and the spleen. This sad history of the Golden Retriever’s narrowing gene pool has played out across dozens of other breeds and is one of the reasons that so many of our dogs spend a lot more time in veterinarians’ offices than they should and die sooner than they might. In genetic terms, it comes down to the ever-increasing chance that both copies of any given gene are derived from the same ancestor, a probability expressed by a number called the coefficient of inbreeding. Discovered in 1922 by the American geneticist Sewall Wright, the coefficient of inbreeding ranges from 0 to 100 percent and rises as animals become more inbred. ~ Ted Kerasote, #NFDB
908:God created man out of dust from the ground. At a basic level, the Creator picked up some dirt and threw Adam together. The Hebrew word for God forming man is yatsar,[11] which means “to form, as a potter.” A pot usually has but one function. Yet when God made a woman, He “made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man” (Genesis 2:22). He created her with His own hands. He took His time crafting and molding her into multifaceted brilliance. The Hebrew word used for making woman is banah, meaning to “build, as a house, a temple, a city, an altar.”[12] The complexity implied by the term banah is worth noting. God has given women a diverse makeup that enables them to carry out multiple functions well. Adam may be considered Human Prototype 1.0, while Eve was Human Prototype 2.0. Of high importance, though, is that Eve was fashioned laterally with Adam’s rib. It was not a top-down formation of dominance or a bottom-up formation of subservience. Rather, Eve was an equally esteemed member of the human race. After all, God spoke of the decision for their creation as one decision before we were ever even introduced to the process of their creation. The very first time we read about both Eve and Adam is when we read of the mandate of rulership given to both of them equally. We are introduced to both genders together, simultaneously. This comes in the first chapter of the Bible: Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. (Genesis 1:26–27) Both men and women have been created equally in the image of God. While within that equality lie distinct and different roles (we will look at that in chapter 10), there is no difference in equality of being, value, or dignity between the genders. Both bear the responsibility of honoring the image in which they have been made. A woman made in the image of God should never settle for being treated as anything less than an image-bearer of the one true King. As Abraham Lincoln said, “Nothing stamped with the Divine image and likeness was sent in the world to be trodden on.”[13] Just as men, women were created to rule. ~ Tony Evans, #NFDB
909:It goes something like this: I am one person among 6.5 billion people on Earth at the moment. That's one person among 6,500,000,000 people. That'a lot of Wembley Stadiums full of people, and even more double-decker buses (apparently the standard British measurements for size). And we live on an Earth that is spinning at 67,000 miles an hour through space around a sun that is the centre of our solar system (and our solar system is spinning around the centre of the Milky Way at 530,000 mph). Just our solar system (which is a tiny speck within the entire universe) is very big indeed. If Earth was a peppercorn and Jupiter was a chestnut (the standard American measurements), you'd have to place them 100 metres apart to get a sense of the real distance between us.
And this universe is only one of many. In fact, the chances are that there are many, many more populated Earths - just like ours - in other universes.
And that's just space.
Have a look at time, too. If you're in for a good run, you may spend 85 years on this Earth. Man has been around for 100,000 years, so you're going to spend just 0.00085 percent of man's history living on this Earth. And Man's stay on Earth has been very short in the context of the life of the Earth (which is 4.5 billion years old): if the Earth had been around for the equivalent of a day (with the Big Bang kicking it all off at midnight), humans didn't turn up until 11.59.58 p.m. That means we've only been around for the last two seconds.
A lifetime is gone in a flash. There are relatively few people on this Earth that were here 100 years ago. Just as you'll be gone (relatively) soon.
So, with just the briefest look at the spatial and temporal context of our lives, we are utterly insignificant. As the Perspective Machine lifts up so far above the woods that we forget what the word means, we see just one moving light. It is beautiful. A small, gently glowing light. It is a firefly lost somewhere in the cosmos. And a firefly - on Earth - lives for just one night. It glows beautifully, then goes out.
And up there so high in our Perspective Machine we realize that our lives are really just like that of the firefly. Except the air is full of 6.5 billion fireflies. They're glowing beautifully for one night. Then they are gone.
So, Fuck It, you might as well REALLY glow. ~ John C Parkin,#NFDB
910:Something Like That
PARRA LAUGHS like he’s condemned to hell
but when haven’t poets laughed?
at least he declares that he’s laughing
they pass the years pass
the years
at least they seem to be passing
hypothesis non fingo
everything goes on as if they were passing
now he starts to cry
forgetting that he’s an antipoet
0
STOP RACKING YOUR BRAINS
nobody reads poetry nowadays
it doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad
0
FOUR DEFECTS that my Ophelia won’t forgive me for:
old
lowlife
communist
and National Literature Prize
<for the first three
but never for the last>>
0
MY CORPSE and I
understand each other marvellously
my corpse asks me: do you believe in God?
and I respond with a hearty NO
my corpse asks: do you believe in the government?
and I respond with the hammer and sickle
my corpse asks: do you believe in the police?
and I respond with a punch in the face
then he gets up out of his coffin
and we go arm in arm to the altar
0
THE TRUE PROBLEM of philosophy
is who does the dishes
nothing otherworldly
God
the truth
the passage of time
absolutely
but first, who does the dishes
whoever wants to do them, go ahead
see ya later, alligator
and we're right back to being enemies
0
HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENT
compose a sonnet
that begins with the following iambic pentameter line:
I would prefer to die ahead of you
and that ends with the following:
I would prefer that you be first to die
0
YOU KNOW what happened
while I was kneeling
in front of the cross
looking at His wounds?
He smiled at me and winked!
before I thought He didn’t ever laugh:
but now yeah I believe for real
0
A DECREPIT old man
throws red carnations
at his beloved mother’s coffin
what you are hearing, ladies and gentlemen:
an old wino
bombarding his mother’s tomb
with ribbons of red carnations
0
I QUIT sports for religion
(I went to mass every Sunday)
I abandoned religion for art
art for the mathematical sciences
until at last illumination hit
and now I’m someone only passing through
who puts no faith in the whole or its parts ~ Nicanor Parra,#NFDB
911:PD. DE "LA OTRA CONSULTA". Revisé la parte de la correspondencia externa que va dirigida a mi pasamontañas. Hay de todo: caricaturas, albures, mentadas (de menta y de las otras), amenazas de muerte y retos a duelo. Estos son los resultados preliminares:
-El 97.98% de los consultados piensa que soy muy mamón. El 2% dice que no soy mamón, sino bastante payaso. El 0.02% no contestó (está contando un chiste de pepito).
-El 87.56% piensa que voy a terminar vendiéndome con el gobierno. El 12% pregunta que cuál es el precio. El 0.44% revisa la cartera en busca de cambio.
-El 74.38% dice que yo no escribo las cartas y comunicados, que con esta cara (?) dudan que pueda hilvanar un par de ideas coherentes. El 25% señala que sí escribo yo, pero me dictan. El 0.62% mejor se puso a leer El Chahuistle.
-El 69.69% dice lo que dice. El resto no lo dice, pero lo piensa. Varios no contestaron, pero entornaron los ojos y jadearon ostensiblemente.
-El 53.45% dice que nunca he estado en la montaña, que despacho desde un escritorio público donde se mecanografían tesis y cartas como la que, el otro día, me dictó Rutilio y que dice: "Ufemia: Claro necesito que me digas si querétaro las manzanas para que poninas dijo popochas y, si naranjas podridas y ni maiz palomas, me boinas con los cuadernos". El 46% dice que sí estuve en la montaña pero en la de Vail, Colorado, iuesei. El 0.55% está haciendo fila en la taquilla de la montaña rusa.
-El 49.99% dice que nunca he agarrado un arma y que soy "soldado de escritorio". El 50% dice que la única arma que he agarrado es la que diosito me dio y quién sabe, dicen. El 0.01% se mantuvo a prudente distancia (¡órale! ¡no salpiquen!).
-El 33.71% dice que "perdí el piso" con la crítica al PRD y el veto a "importantes diarios" (?). El 66% dice que nunca he tenido piso alguno, que seguro me desalojaron. El 0.29% no trajo su copia de la boleta predial.
-El 26.62% dice que mi pasamontañas ya está muy guango y que enseña TODO. El 73% dice que me suba el cierre del pantalón. El 0.38% fue por unos binoculares.
-El 13.64% dice que soy egocentrista. El 86% dice que soy un presumido. El 0.36% cambió de periódico y ahora lee Nexos.
-El 99.99999% dice que ya está hasta la madre de encuestas y consultas. El 0.00001% fue al baño, ahorita regresa (ojo: se llevó la hoja de la encuesta, no se vayan a manchar). ~ Subcomandante Marcos,#NFDB
912:Journal of Interdisciplinary Science Topics How many lies could Pinocchio tell before it became lethal? Steffan Llewellyn The Centre for Interdisciplinary science, University of Leicester 25/03/2014 Abstract: This paper investigates how many lies Pinocchio could continuously tell before it would become fatal, treating the head and neck forces as a basic lever system with the exponential growth of the nose. This paper concludes that Pinocchio could only sustain 13 lies in a row before the maximum upward force his neck could exert cannot sustain his head and nose. The head’s overall centre of mass shifts over 85 metres after 13 lies, and the overall length of the nose is 208 metres. Pinocchio’s Nose Pinocchio is the fable of a wooden puppet, carved by Geppetto, who dreams of becoming a real boy [1]. Pinocchio was portrayed as a character prone to lying, which is manifested physically through the ability to grow his nose when he tells a lie. One issue of growing his nose would be the shift of Pinocchio’s centre of mass within his head, causing strain on his neck, which helps stabilise his head’s position with upwards force. If this continued, then his neck could not support his head, potentially decapitating the puppet. Outlined here is the minimum lie count Pinocchio could continuously expel. Where Pinocchio manages to form new is not addressed in this paper. Maximum Force Pinocchio’s Neck Can Exert The assumption is simplified by allowing the force exerted upwards through the neck to be positioned at the back of the head. The head is treated as a sphere, and the nose as a cylinder, as shown in The type of wood Pinocchio is carved from is disputed, but for this paper, it is concluded that Pinocchio is made from Oak, with a density of . Pinocchio’s neck will brake if its compression strength threshold is overcome by the weight of his head. The compression strength of oak is 1150Psi [2], and the circumference of the average human neck is 0.4m [3]. The maximum force Pinocchio’s neck can sustain is: ( ) ( ) Centre of Mass, and Force Exerted Figure 1. Figure 1: Illustrates the lever system of Pinocchio’s head and neck, with opposite forcesNeck muscles are required to balance the weight exerted by the skull.Usually, the weight of the nose can be considered negligible. In Pinocchio’s case, as the nose increases, it will have a significant impact on the centre of mass and weight of his head. The mass of the head is unchanged: ( ) ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
913:Consider a guess-the-number game in which players must guess a number between 0 and 100. The person whose guess comes closest to two-thirds of the average guess of all contestants wins. That’s it. And imagine there is a prize: the reader who comes closest to the correct answer wins a pair of business-class tickets for a flight between London and New York. The Financial Times actually held this contest in 1997, at the urging of Richard Thaler, a pioneer of behavioral economics. If I were reading the Financial Times in 1997, how would I win those tickets? I might start by thinking that because anyone can guess anything between 0 and 100 the guesses will be scattered randomly. That would make the average guess 50. And two-thirds of 50 is 33. So I should guess 33. At this point, I’m feeling pretty pleased with myself. I’m sure I’ve nailed it. But before I say “final answer,” I pause, think about the other contestants, and it dawns on me that they went through the same thought process as I did. Which means they all guessed 33 too. Which means the average guess is not 50. It’s 33. And two-thirds of 33 is 22. So my first conclusion was actually wrong. I should guess 22. Now I’m feeling very clever indeed. But wait! The other contestants also thought about the other contestants, just as I did. Which means they would have all guessed 22. Which means the average guess is actually 22. And two-thirds of 22 is about 15. So I should … See where this is going? Because the contestants are aware of each other, and aware that they are aware, the number is going to keep shrinking until it hits the point where it can no longer shrink. That point is 0. So that’s my final answer. And I will surely win. My logic is airtight. And I happen to be one of those highly educated people who is familiar with game theory, so I know 0 is called the Nash equilibrium solution. QED. The only question is who will come with me to London. Guess what? I’m wrong. In the actual contest, some people did guess 0, but not many, and 0 was not the right answer. It wasn’t even close to right. The average guess of all the contestants was 18.91, so the winning guess was 13. How did I get this so wrong? It wasn’t my logic, which was sound. I failed because I only looked at the problem from one perspective—the perspective of logic. Who are the other contestants? Are they all the sort of people who would think about this carefully, spot the logic, and pursue it relentlessly to the final answer of 0? ~ Philip E Tetlock, #NFDB
914:RAIN IN MEASURED AMOUNTS
Another item of information provided in the Qur'an about rain is
that it is sent down to Earth in "due measure." This is mentioned in
Surat az-Zukhruf as follows:
It is He Who sends down water in measured amounts from the sky by
which We bring a dead land back to life. That is how you too will be
raised [from the dead]. (Qur'an, 43:11)
This measured quantity in rain has again been discovered by modern
research. It is estimated that in one second, approximately 16 million
tons of water evaporates from the Earth. This figure amounts to
513 trillion tons of water in one year. This number is equal to the
amount of rain that falls on the Earth in a year. Therefore, water continuously
circulates in a balanced cycle, according to a "measure." Life
on Earth depends on this water cycle. Even if all the available technology
in the world were to be employed for this purpose, this cycle could
not be reproduced artificially.
Even a minor deviation in this equilibrium would soon give rise to
a major ecological imbalance that would bring about the end of life on
Earth. Yet, it never happens, and rain continues to fall every year in
exactly the same measure, just as revealed in the Qur'an.
The proportion of rain does not merely apply to its quantity, but
also to the speed of the falling raindrops. The speed of raindrops,
regardless of their size, does not exceed a certain limit.
Philipp Lenard, a German physicist who received the Nobel Prize
in physics in 1905, found that the fall speed increased with drop diameter
until a size of 4.5 mm (0.18 inch). For larger drops, however, the fall
speed did not increase beyond 8 metres per second (26 ft/sec).57 He
attributed this to the changes in drop shape caused by the air flow as
the drop size increased. The change in shape thus increased the air
resistance of the drop and slowed its fall rate.
As can be seen, the Qur'an may also be drawing our attention to
the subtle adjustment in rain which could not have been known 1,400
years ago.
Every year, the amount of water that evaporates and that falls back to the
Earth in the form of rain is "constant": 513 trillion tons. This constant
amount is declared in the Qur'an by the expression "sending down water in
due measure from the sky." The constancy of this quantity is very important
for the continuity of the ecological balance, and therefore, life. ~ Harun Yahya,#NFDB
915:Daemons
A daemon is a process that runs in the background, not connecting to any controlling terminal. Daemons are normally started at boot time, are run as root or some
other special user (such as apache or postfix), and handle system-level tasks. As a
convention, the name of a daemon often ends in d (as in crond and sshd), but this is
not required, or even universal.
The name derives from Maxwell's demon, an 1867 thought experiment by the physicist James Maxwell. Daemons are also supernatural beings in Greek mythology,
existing somewhere between humans and the gods and gifted with powers and divine
knowledge. Unlike the demons of Judeo-Christian lore, the Greek daemon need not
be evil. Indeed, the daemons of mythology tended to be aides to the gods, performing
tasks that the denizens of Mount Olympus found themselves unwilling to do-much
as Unix daemons perform tasks that foreground users would rather avoid.
A daemon has two general requirements: it must run as a child of init, and it must
not be connected to a terminal.
In general, a program performs the following steps to become a daemon:
1. Call fork( ). This creates a new process, which will become the daemon.
2. In the parent, call exit( ). This ensures that the original parent (the daemon's
grandparent) is satisfied that its child terminated, that the daemon's parent is no
longer running, and that the daemon is not a process group leader. This last
point is a requirement for the successful completion of the next step.
3. Call setsid( ), giving the daemon a new process group and session, both of
which have it as leader. This also ensures that the process has no associated controlling terminal (as the process just created a new session, and will not assign
one).
4. Change the working directory to the root directory via chdir( ). This is done
because the inherited working directory can be anywhere on the filesystem. Daemons tend to run for the duration of the system's uptime, and you don't want to
keep some random directory open, and thus prevent an administrator from
unmounting the filesystem containing that directory.
5. Close all file descriptors. You do not want to inherit open file descriptors, and,
unaware, hold them open.
6. Open file descriptors 0, 1, and 2 (standard in, standard out, and standard error)
and redirect them to /dev/null.
Following these rules, here is a program that daemonizes itself:
~ OReilly Linux System Programming,#NFDB
916:RAIN IN MEASURED AMOUNTS
Another item of information provided in the Qur'an about rain is
that it is sent down to Earth in "due measure." This is mentioned in
Surat az-Zukhruf as follows:
It is He Who sends down water in measured amounts from the sky by
which We bring a dead land back to life. That is how you too will be
raised [from the dead]. (Qur'an, 43:11)
This measured quantity in rain has again been discovered by modern
research. It is estimated that in one second, approximately 16 million
tons of water evaporates from the Earth. This figure amounts to
513 trillion tons of water in one year. This number is equal to the
amount of rain that falls on the Earth in a year. Therefore, water continuously
circulates in a balanced cycle, according to a "measure." Life
on Earth depends on this water cycle. Even if all the available technology
in the world were to be employed for this purpose, this cycle could
not be reproduced artificially.
Even a minor deviation in this equilibrium would soon give rise to
a major ecological imbalance that would bring about the end of life on
Earth. Yet, it never happens, and rain continues to fall every year in
exactly the same measure, just as revealed in the Qur'an.
The proportion of rain does not merely apply to its quantity, but
also to the speed of the falling raindrops. The speed of raindrops,
regardless of their size, does not exceed a certain limit.
Philipp Lenard, a German physicist who received the Nobel Prize
in physics in 1905, found that the fall speed increased with drop diameter
until a size of 4.5 mm (0.18 inch). For larger drops, however, the fall
speed did not increase beyond 8 metres per second (26 ft/sec).57 He
attributed this to the changes in drop shape caused by the air flow as
the drop size increased. The change in shape thus increased the air
Allah's Miracles in the Qur'an
113
resistance of the drop and slowed its fall rate.
As can be seen, the Qur'an may also be drawing our attention to
the subtle adjustment in rain which could not have been known 1,400
years ago.
Harun Yahya
Every year, the amount of water that evaporates and that falls back to the
Earth in the form of rain is "constant": 513 trillion tons. This constant
amount is declared in the Qur'an by the expression "sending down water in
due measure from the sky." The constancy of this quantity is very important
for the continuity of the ecological balance, and therefore, life. ~ Harun Yahya,#NFDB
917:Yuguo fell apart, into a thousand little pieces. He felt it happen, fragments of his mind detaching from the rest, splitting off, becoming their own, being mapped by Nexus. Here was Yuguo’s knowledge of coding, his comprehension of data structures, of objects and methods, of intents and game players, of threads and loops and conditions. Here was football Yuguo, the precise way his left foot grounded into the grass and his hips swiveled and his arm balanced as his right foot shot forward to kick the checked ball at the goal. Here was Yuguo’s shy lust for girls, the patterns his eyes drew over their curves when he saw them, the anxiety that struck him dumb when they were near. Here was Yuguo’s despair that had led him to this room, his quiet dread that his country and the world were getting worse instead of better, that the future was one of slow strangulation at the electronic hands of smiling tame AIs with famous faces, their forked tongues lapping out of the viewscreens to feed saccharine to the masses, the old men who’d always ruled China laughing and holding their leashes. Here were the words a young woman had said to him just minutes ago. “Critical mass. Weak apart, strong together.” Here were her eyes, fiery eyes, hanging in space. Here was her name: Lifen. Then those pieces fell apart, into smaller pieces, which fell apart into fragments even smaller: Yuguo’s sensation of red. Yuguo’s concept of 1 and 0. Yuguo’s left thumb. The sound in Yuguo’s head when he heard the third note of his favorite pop song. Yuguo’s yes. Yuguo’s no. Yuguo’s and. Yuguo’s or. Yuguo’s xor. Yuguo’s now. Yuguo’s future. Yuguo’s past. He could see himself now. He was a golden statue of Yuguo, immobile, one foot in front of the other, standing in a space of white light. But the statue wasn’t solid, it was made of grains, millions of grains, flecks of gold dust, millions of parts of him. And as he watched they were separating, pulling gradually apart, so that he was no longer a single entity but a cloud, a fog, a fog of Yuguo, and if a strong wind came, he would just blow away, and if the pieces split any more he knew there wouldn’t be any such thing as Yuguo left at all. Yuguo’s fear. Yuguo’s end. And then the pieces rushed together, and he was inside that statue, he was that statue, and he was all of it, 1 and 0, yes and no, future and past, sound and sight, football and coding. He was all of it. He was whole. He was a mind. I’m Yuguo, he realized. I’m him. I’m me. I’m Yuguo! His eyes snapped open. He was in his body. His body made of molten gold. No, not gold, flesh and blood. ~ Ramez Naam, #NFDB
918:Bir dahaki sefere kimde toplanılacağı konuşuldu. Bir daha hazırlıksız davranmamaya karar verildi. Yeni toplantının iş bölümü yapıldı. Kimlerin hangi yemekleri getireceği tespit edildi. Bütün bunlar, görünür bir telaş olmadan yapıldı. Bu sefer Kirkor’dan getirilecek kap kaçak için Şoför Tahsin’in kamyonetinin kullanılması kararlaştırıldı. Muhasebeci Rüştü Beyin de hesapları tutması ve ziyafetten sonra, adam başına kaç para düştüğünü bildirmesi uygun görüldü. Bu sefer, eşit bir masraf dağılımı sağlanamamıştı. Bununla birlikte, en çok Hikmet’in harcamada bulunduğu açık olduğundan ve kimsenin durumu kimseden iyi olmadığı için hemen aralarında para topladılar ve Hikmet’e bıraktılar. Parayı Hikmet’e verme görevi oy birliğiyle Dumrul’a verildi. «Sakın itiraz etme, yoksa bir daha gelemeyiz,» sözü, bir sitem havasında, fakat gene de içten ve sevgi dolu bir ifadeyle aynı kişiye söyletildi. Bir sonraki toplantının daha geniş bir yerde yapılması ve çocuklarla o gün gelemeyen kadınların da çağrılması teklif edildi ve teklif, iki çekimser bir muhalif oya karşı çoğunlukla kabul edildi. (Hikmet hiç bir oylamaya katılmadı.) Sonra, evi geniş olanlar arasında, kura çekildi ve kura, bir itiraz üzerine tekrarlandı. Ergun kurayı kazandı. Bazıları bu kazanç değil kayıptır diyerek ona takıldılar. Adam başına düşen paranın hesabında, yedi yaşına kadar olan çocukların dörtte bir, yedi yaşından büyüklerin yarım sayılması teklifi, görüşme açılmadan aynen kabul edildi. İçki içen erkeklerin 1,25, içki içmeyen kadınların da 0,90 katsayısı ile çarpılması da aynı dostane hava içinde kararlaştırıldı. Yanlış anlaşılmalara ve gereksiz tartışmalara yol açmamak için, dereden tepeden ve havadan sudan yapılacak konuşmaların dışında kalacak konuların bir gündemle tespiti istendi ve edinilen tecrübeler de göz önünde tutularak teklif, değişikliğe uğramadan kabul edildi. Gündemi herkes cep defterine kaydetti ve gündemdeki maddeler üzerinde konuşmak isteyenlerin, konuları inceleyerek hazırlıklı gelmeleri de bir karar niteliğinde olmasa bile bir temenni olarak belirtildi. Yapılacak başka bir iş kalmadığından oturuma son verildi. Önce, evi uzakta olanlar, sırayla yola çıktılar. Herkes, ayrılmadan önce Hikmet’in elini sıktığı gibi, sokağa çıkınca da birer ikişer, sırayla el salladı. Hikmet, «Yalan söylüyorsunuz, günlük işlerle oyalanıyorsunuz, gerçeklerden kaçıyorsunuz!» diye herkesin arkasından bağırıyordu. Onlar da, daha önce alınmış olan gizli bir karar uyarınca, bu sözleri duymamış gibi yaparak, aynı biçimde ve hep birlikte gülümsüyorlardı. «İşte hepiniz gittiniz!» diye bağırdı Hikmet sonunda. «Cehenneme kadar yolunuz var!» ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
919:All Night, All Night
"I have been one acquainted with the night" - Robert Frost
Rode in the train all night, in the sick light. A bird
Flew parallel with a singular will. In daydream's moods and
attitudes
The other passengers slumped, dozed, slept, read,
Waiting, and waiting for place to be displaced
On the exact track of safety or the rack of accident.
Looked out at the night, unable to distinguish
Lights in the towns of passage from the yellow lights
Numb on the ceiling. And the bird flew parallel and still
As the train shot forth the straight line of its whistle,
Forward on the taut tracks, piercing empty, familiar -The bored center of this vision and condition looked and
looked
Down through the slick pages of the magazine (seeking
The seen and the unseen) and his gaze fell down the well
Of the great darkness under the slick glitter,
And he was only one among eight million riders and
readers.
And all the while under his empty smile the shaking drum
Of the long determined passage passed through him
By his body mimicked and echoed. And then the train
Like a suddenly storming rain, began to rush and thresh-The silent or passive night, pressing and impressing
The patients' foreheads with a tightening-like image
Of the rushing engine proceeded by a shaft of light
Piercing the dark, changing and transforming the silence
Into a violence of foam, sound, smoke and succession.
A bored child went to get a cup of water,
And crushed the cup because the water too was
Boring and merely boredom's struggle.
The child, returning, looked over the shoulder
Of a man reading until he annoyed the shoulder.
A fat woman yawned and felt the liquid drops
Drip down the fleece of many dinners.
And the bird flew parallel and parallel flew
The black pencil lines of telephone posts, crucified,
At regular intervals, post after post
Of thrice crossed, blue-belled, anonymous trees.
And then the bird cried as if to all of us:
0 your life, your lonely life
What have you ever done with it,
And done with the great gift of consciousness?
What will you ever do with your life before death's
knife
Provides the answer ultimate and appropriate?
As I for my part felt in my heart as one who falls,
Falls in a parachute, falls endlessly, and feel the vast
Draft of the abyss sucking him down and down,
An endlessly helplessly falling and appalled clown:
This is the way that night passes by, this
Is the overnight endless trip to the famous unfathomable
abyss.
~ Delmore Schwartz,#NFDB
920:Many kinds of animal behavior can be explained by genetic similarity theory. Animals have a preference for close kin, and study after study has shown that they have a remarkable ability to tell kin from strangers. Frogs lay eggs in bunches, but they can be separated and left to hatch individually. When tadpoles are then put into a tank, brothers and sisters somehow recognize each other and cluster together rather than mix with tadpoles from different mothers.
Female Belding’s ground squirrels may mate with more than one male before they give birth, so a litter can be a mix of full siblings and half siblings. Like tadpoles, they can tell each other apart. Full siblings cooperate more with each other than with half-siblings, fight less, and are less likely to run each other out of the territory when they grow up.
Even bees know who their relatives are. In one experiment, bees were bred for 14 different degrees of relatedness—sisters, cousins, second cousins, etc.—to bees in a particular hive. When the bees were then released near the hive, guard bees had to decide which ones to let in. They distinguished between degrees of kinship with almost perfect accuracy, letting in the closest relatives and chasing away more distant kin. The correlation between relatedness and likelihood of being admitted was a remarkable 0.93.
Ants are famous for cooperation and willingness to sacrifice for the colony. This is due to a quirk in ant reproduction that means worker ants are 70 percent genetically identical to each other. But even among ants, there can be greater or less genetic diversity, and the most closely related groups of ants appear to cooperate best.
Linepithema humile is a tiny ant that originated in Argentina but migrated to the United States. Many ants died during the trip, and the species lost much of its genetic diversity. This made the northern branch of Linepithema humile more cooperative than the one left in Argentina, where different colonies quarrel and compete with each other. This new level of cooperation has helped the invaders link nests into supercolonies and overwhelm local species of ants. American entomologists want to protect American ants by introducing genetic diversity so as to make the newcomers more quarrelsome.
Even plants cooperate with close kin and compete with strangers. Normally, when two plants are put in the same pot, they grow bigger root systems, trying to crowd each other out and get the most nutrients. A wild flower called the Sea Rocket, which grows on beaches, does not do that if the two plants come from the same “mother” plant. They recognize each others’ root secretions and avoid wasteful competition. ~ Jared Taylor,#NFDB
921:Deerfield, Massachusetts
February 29, 1704
Temperature 0 degrees
Mercy could not keep up the pace. Gradually the line passed her by, until she was walking with Eben Nims, and she must not fall farther behind than that, because the Indians behind Eben were the end of the line. Daniel held tight and sucked his thumb. But not only did Marah refuse to walk, she kept yelling that her feet were cold, and she wanted Stepmama, and she needed her mittens, and she was hungry.
Mercy could walk, though not fast enough, and she could carry, though not easily. But she could not supply food, warmth or Stepmama.
Mercy tried to believe that Stepmama was up ahead of her with the baby; that it was so crowded and chaotic Mercy could not spot her. But in her heart, she did not think Stepmama had left the stockade.
“The savage put food in my pack, Mercy,” said Eben quietly. “If you slip your hand into the opening near my left shoulder, there’s a loaf of bread on top.”
They walked on, considering whether the Indians would tomahawk her for stealing Eben’s own bread. Well, they’d shortly tomahawk Marah for whining, so Mercy might as well get on with it. She set the two children down, and Eben bent his knees so she could reach and Mercy fished around in the pack. She slid the loaf out. It was long and fat and crusty.
Her Indian was watching. Mercy looked straight at him while she ripped off a chunk for Marah. He did nothing. Mercy decided to give some to Jemima too, which would give her something to do besides whine. She would give bread to Eliza and hope food would break Eliza’s grieving stupor.
Marah didn’t take a single bite. She threw the bread across the snow. “I want Mama!” she said fiercely. She glared at Mercy, as if all this hiking and shivering were Mercy’s fault.
Mercy could not abandon the bread out there in the snow. She was going to need that bread. It was all they had, and somehow Mercy had become responsible for Marah and Daniel and Ruth and Eliza and Jemima, and probably even for Eben. Mercy stepped off the trodden path to retrieve the crust, but her Indian stopped her, shaking his head.
On his face was no expression but the one painted in black. His arms were tattooed with snakes that curled their fangs when he tightened his muscles. How could he go half bare in this weather? she thought, and then remembered that she wore his rabbit-lined cloak.
Daniel, sitting happily on her hip, reached out from under the rabbit fur and patted the snake. The Indian tensed his upper arm to make the snake slither. Daniel giggled, so the Indian did it again, and it seemed to Mercy that he actually smiled at Daniel.
Then, blessedly, he took Marah for her. ~ Caroline B Cooney,#NFDB
922:The first thing to note about Korean industrial structure is the sheer concentration of Korean industry. Like other Asian economies, there are two levels of organization: individual firms and larger network organizations that unite disparate corporate entities. The Korean network organization is known as the chaebol, represented by the same two Chinese characters as the Japanese zaibatsu and patterned deliberately on the Japanese model. The size of individual Korean companies is not large by international standards. As of the mid-1980s, the Hyundai Motor Company, Korea’s largest automobile manufacturer, was only a thirtieth the size of General Motors, and the Samsung Electric Company was only a tenth the size of Japan’s Hitachi.1 However, these statistics understate their true economic clout because these businesses are linked to one another in very large network organizations. Virtually the whole of the large-business sector in Korea is part of a chaebol network: in 1988, forty-three chaebol (defined as conglomerates with assets in excess of 400 billion won, or US$500 million) brought together some 672 companies.2 If we measure industrial concentration by chaebol rather than individual firm, the figures are staggering: in 1984, the three largest chaebol alone (Samsung, Hyundai, and Lucky-Goldstar) produced 36 percent of Korea’s gross domestic product.3 Korean industry is more concentrated than that of Japan, particularly in the manufacturing sector; the three-firm concentration ratio for Korea in 1980 was 62.0 percent of all manufactured goods, compared to 56.3 percent for Japan.4 The degree of concentration of Korean industry grew throughout the postwar period, moreover, as the rate of chaebol growth substantially exceeded the rate of growth for the economy as a whole. For example, the twenty largest chaebol produced 21.8 percent of Korean gross domestic product in 1973, 28.9 percent in 1975, and 33.2 percent in 1978.5 The Japanese influence on Korean business organization has been enormous. Korea was an almost wholly agricultural society at the beginning of Japan’s colonial occupation in 1910, and the latter was responsible for creating much of the country’s early industrial infrastructure.6 Nearly 700,000 Japanese lived in Korea in 1940, and a similarly large number of Koreans lived in Japan as forced laborers. Some of the early Korean businesses got their start as colonial enterprises in the period of Japanese occupation.7 A good part of the two countries’ émigré populations were repatriated after the war, leading to a considerable exchange of knowledge and experience of business practices. The highly state-centered development strategies of President Park Chung Hee and others like him were formed as a result of his observation of Japanese industrial policy in Korea in the prewar period. ~ Francis Fukuyama, #NFDB
923:Lo que sigue es una pregunta de un examen de física en la Universidad de Copenhague: «Describa cómo se puede determinar la altura de un rascacielos con un barómetro». Un alumno respondió: «Se ata un largo cabo de cuerda al cuello del barómetro y entonces se descuelga el barómetro desde el tejado del rascacielos hasta el suelo. La longitud de la cuerda más la longitud del barómetro será igual a la altura del edificio». Esta original respuesta irritó tanto al examinador que el estudiante fue suspendido. El estudiante recurrió basándose en que su respuesta era indiscutiblemente correcta y la universidad nombró un árbitro independiente para decidir el caso. El árbitro juzgó que la respuesta era realmente correcta pero no mostraba ningún conocimiento apreciable de la física. Para resolver el problema se decidió llamar al estudiante y concederle seis minutos para que pudiera dar una respuesta oral que mostrase al menos una mínima familiaridad con los principios básicos de la física. Durante cinco minutos, el estudiante se sentó en silencio, centrado en sus pensamientos. El árbitro le recordó que el tiempo estaba corriendo, a lo que el estudiante respondió que tenía varias respuestas pero que no sabía cuál utilizar. Al ser advertido de que debía apresurarse, el estudiante respondió como sigue: «En primer lugar, se puede llevar el barómetro hasta el tejado del rascacielos, dejarlo caer desde el borde y medir el tiempo que tarda en llegar al suelo. La altura del edificio puede calcularse entonces a partir de la fórmula H = 0.5gt2. Pero ¡adiós barómetro! »O si hay sol, se podría medir la altura del barómetro, ponerlo luego vertical y medir la longitud de la sombra. Luego se podría medir la longitud de la sombra del rascacielos y, a partir de ahí, es una simple cuestión de aritmética proporcional calcular la altura del rascacielos. »Pero si uno quiere ser muy científico, se podría atar un corto cabo de cuerda al barómetro y hacerlo oscilar como un péndulo, primero al nivel del suelo y luego en el tejado del rascacielos. La altura se calcula por la diferencia en la fuerza gravitatoria restauradora T = 2π(l/g)1/2. »O si el rascacielos tiene una escalera de emergencia exterior, sería más fácil subirla y marcar la altura del rascacielos en longitudes del barómetro, y luego sumarlas. »Por supuesto, si simplemente se quiere ser aburrido y ortodoxo, se podría utilizar el barómetro para medir la presión del aire en el tejado del rascacielos y en el suelo, y convertir la diferencia de milibares en metros para saber la altura del edificio. »Pero puesto que continuamente se nos exhorta a ejercer la independencia mental y aplicar métodos científicos, indudablemente la mejor manera sería llamar a la puerta del conserje y decirle “Si usted quiere un bonito barómetro nuevo, le daré este si me dice la altura de este rascacielos”». El estudiante era Niels Bohr ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
924:A Real Motorcycle
Unspeakable. The word that fills up the
poem, that the head
tries to excise.
At 6 a.m., the wet lion. Its sewn plush face
on the porch rail in the rain.
Heavy rains later, & maybe a thunderstorm.
12 or 13 degrees.
Inside: an iris, candle, poster of the
many-breasted Artemis in a stone hat
from Anatolia
A little pedal steel guitar
A photograph of her at a table by the sea,
her shoulder blocked by the red geranium.
The sea tho invisible can be smelled by the casual watcher
Incredible salt air
in my throat when I see her.
'Suddenly you discover that you'll spend your entire life
in disorder; it's all that you have; you must learn to live
with it.'
Four tanks, & the human white-shirted body
stopped on June 5 in Place Tian an Men.
Or 'a red pullover K-Way.' There is not much time left
to say these things. The urgency of that,
desire that dogged the body all winter
& has scarcely left,
now awaits the lilacs, their small white bunches.
Gaily.
As if their posies will light up
the curious old intentional bruise.
10
Adjective, adjective, adjective, noun!
Or just, lilac moon.
What we must, & cannot, excise from the head.
Her hand holding, oh, The New Path to the Waterfall?
Or the time I walked in too quickly, looked up
at her shirtless, grinning.
Pulling her down into the front of me, silly!
Sitting down sudden to make a lap for her...
Kissing the back of her leg.
Actually the leg kiss was a dream, later enacted
we laughed at it,
why didn't you do it
she said
when you thought of it.
The excisable thought, later
desired or
necessary.
Or shuddered at, in memory.
Later, it is repeated for the cameras
with such unease.
& now, stuck in the head.
Like running the motorcycle full-tilt into the hay bales.
What is the motorcycle doing in the poem
A. said.
It's an image, E. said back.
It's a crash in the head, she said.
It's a real motorcycle.
11
Afterthought 1
0 excise this: her back turned,
she concentrates on something
in a kitchen sink,
& I sit behind her,
running my fingers on
the table edge.
0 excise this.
Afterthought 2
& after, excise, excise.
If the source of the pain could be located
using geological survey equipment.
Into the sedimentary layers, the slippage,
the surge of the igneous intrusion.
Or the flat bottom of the former sea
I grew up on,
Running the motorcycle into the round
bay bales.
Hay grass poking the skin.
The back wet.
Hey, I shouted,
Her back turned to me, its location
now visible only in the head.
When I can't stand it,
I invent anything, even memories.
She gets up, hair stuck with hay.
I invented this. Yeow.
~ Erin Mouré,#NFDB
925:EARNINGS McDonald's Plans Marketing Push as Profit Slides By Julie Jargon | 436 words Associated Press The burger giant has been struggling to maintain relevance among younger consumers and fill orders quickly in kitchens that have grown overwhelmed with menu items. McDonald's Corp. plans a marketing push to emphasize its fresh-cooked breakfasts as it battles growing competition for the morning meal. Competition at breakfast has heated up recently as Yum Brands Inc.'s Taco Bell entered the business with its new Waffle Taco last month and other rivals have added or discounted breakfast items. McDonald's Chief Executive Don Thompson said it hasn't yet noticed an impact from Taco Bell's breakfast debut, but that the overall increased competition "forces us to focus even more on being aggressive in breakfast." Mr. Thompson's comments came after McDonald's on Tuesday reported that its profit for the first three months of 2014 dropped 5.2% from a year earlier, weaker than analysts' expectations. Comparable sales at U.S. restaurants open more than a year declined 1.7% for the quarter and 0.6% for March, the fifth straight month of declines in the company's biggest market. Global same-store sales rose 0.5% for both the quarter and month. Mr. Thompson acknowledged again that the company has lost relevance with some customers and needs to strengthen its menu offerings. He emphasized Tuesday that McDonald's is focused on stabilizing key markets, including the U.S., Germany, Australia and Japan. The CEO said McDonald's has dominated the fast-food breakfast business for 35 years, and "we don't plan on giving that up." The company plans in upcoming ads to inform customers that it cooks its breakfast, unlike some rivals. "We crack fresh eggs, grill sausage and bacon," Mr. Thompson said. "This is not a microwave deal." Beyond breakfast, McDonald's also plans to boost marketing of core menu items such as Big Macs and french fries, since those core products make up 40% of total sales. To serve customers more quickly, the chain is working to optimize staffing, and is adding new prep tables that let workers more efficiently add new toppings when guests want to customize orders. McDonald's also said it aims to sell more company-owned restaurants outside the U.S. to franchisees. Currently, 81% of its restaurants around the world are franchised. Collecting royalties from franchisees provides a stable source of income for a restaurant company and removes the cost of operating them. McDonald's reported a first-quarter profit of $1.2 billion, or $1.21 a share, down from $1.27 billion, or $1.26 a share, a year earlier. The company partly attributed the decline to the effect of income-tax benefits in the prior year. Total revenue for the quarter edged up 1.4% to $6.7 billion, though costs rose faster, at 2.3%. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters forecast earnings of $1.24 a share on revenue of $6.72 billion. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
926:I mention all this to make the point that if you were designing an organism to look after life in our lonely cosmos, to monitor where it is going and keep a record of where it has been, you wouldn't choose human beings for the job.
But here's an extremely salient point: we have been chosen, by fate or Providence or whatever you wish to call it. It's an unnerving thought that we may be living the universe's supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously.
Because we are so remarkably careless about looking after things, both when alive and when not, we have no idea-- really none at all-- about how many things have died off permanently, or may soon, or may never, and what role we have played in any part of the process. In 1979, in the book The Sinking Ark, the author Norman Myers suggested that human activities were causing about two extinctions a week on the planet. By the early 1990s he had raised the figure to about some six hundred per week. (That's extinctions of all types-- plants, insects, and so on as well as animals.) Others have put the figure ever higher-- to well over a thousand a week. A United Nations report of 1995, on the other hand, put the total number of known extinctions in the last four hundred years at slightly under 500 for animals and slightly over 650 for plants-- while allowing that this was "almost certainly an underestimate," particularly with regard to tropical species. A few interpreters think most extinction figures are grossly inflated.
The fact is, we don't know. Don't have any idea. We don't know when we started doing many of the things we've done. We don't know what we are doing right now or how our present actions will affect the future. What we do know is that there is only one planet to do it on, and only one species of being capable of making a considered difference. Edward O. Wilson expressed it with unimprovable brevity in The Diversity of Life: "One planet, one experiment."
If this book has a lesson, it is that we are awfully lucky to be here-- and by "we" i mean every living thing. To attain any kind of life in this universe of ours appears to be quite an achievement. As humans we are doubly lucky, of course: We enjoy not only the privilege of existence but also the singular ability to appreciate it and even, in a multitude of ways, to make it better. It is a talent we have only barely begun to grasp.
We have arrived at this position of eminence in a stunningly short time. Behaviorally modern human beings-- that is, people who can speak and make art and organize complex activities-- have existed for only about 0.0001 percent of Earth's history. But surviving for even that little while has required a nearly endless string of good fortune.
We really are at the beginning of it all. The trick, of course, is to make sure we never find the end. And that, almost certainly, will require a good deal more than lucky breaks. ~ Bill Bryson,#NFDB
927:cell, for example, has about 2 m
of DNA—a length about 250,000 times greater than the cell’s diameter. Yet before the cell can divide to form genetically identical daughter cells, all of this DNA must be copied, or replicated,
and then the two copies must be separated so that each daughter cell ends up with a complete genome.
The replication and distribution of so much DNA is manageable because the DNA molecules are packaged into structures called chromosomes, so named because they take up
certain dyes used in microscopy (from the Greek chroma,
color, and soma, body) (Figure 12.3). Each eukaryotic chromosome consists of one very long, linear DNA molecule associated with many proteins (see Figure 6.9). The DNA molecule
carries several hundred to a few thousand genes, the units of
information that specify an organism’s inherited traits. The
associated proteins maintain the structure of the chromosome and help control the activity of the genes. Together, the
entire complex of DNA and proteins that is the building material of chromosomes is referred to as chromatin. As you
will soon see, the chromatin of a chromosome varies in its degree of condensation during the process of cell division.
Every eukaryotic species has a characteristic number of
chromosomes in each cell nucleus. For example, the nuclei of
human somatic cells (all body cells except the reproductive
cells) each contain 46 chromosomes, made up of two sets of
23, one set inherited from each parent. Reproductive cells, or
gametes—sperm and eggs—have half as many chromosomes
as somatic cells, or one set of 23 chromosomes in humans. The
Figure 12.4 A highly condensed, duplicated human
chromosome (SEM).
Circle one sister chromatid of the chromosome in this
micrograph.
DRAW IT
Sister
chromatids
Centromere
0.5μm
number of chromosomes in somatic cells varies widely among
species: 18 in cabbage plants, 48 in chimpanzees, 56 in elephants, 90 in hedgehogs, and 148 in one species of alga. We’ll
now consider how these chromosomes behave during cell
division.
Distribution of Chromosomes During
Eukaryotic Cell Division
When a cell is not dividing, and even as it replicates its DNA
in preparation for cell division, each chromosome is in the
form of a long, thin chromatin fiber. After DNA replication,
however, the chromosomes condense as a part of cell division: Each chromatin fiber becomes densely coiled and
folded, making the chromosomes much shorter and so thick
that we can see them with a light microscope.
Each duplicated chromosome has two sister chromatids,
which are joined copies of the original chromosome
(Figure 12.4). The two chromatids, each containing an identical DNA molecule, are initially attached all along their lengths
by protein complexes called cohesins; this attachment is known
as sister chromatid cohesion. Each sister chromatid has a
centromere, a region containing ~ Jane B Reece,#NFDB
928: ON THE ADDER'S BITE
One day Zarathustra had fallen asleep under a fig
tree, for it was hot, and had put his arms over his face.
And an adder came and bit him in the neck, so that
Zarathustra cried out in pain. When he had taken his
arm from his face, he looked at the snake, and it
recognized the eyes of Zarathustra, writhed awkwardly,
and wanted to get away. "Oh no," said Zarathustra,
"as yet you have not accepted my thanks. You waked
me in time, my way is still long." "Your way is short,"
the adder said sadly; "my poison kills." Zarathustra
smiled. "When has a dragon ever died of the poison
of a snake?" he said. "But take back your poison. You
are not rich enough to give it to me." Then the adder
fell around his neck a second time and licked his
wound.
When Zarathustra once related this to his disciples
they asked: "And what, 0 Zarathustra, is the moral of
your story?" Then Zarathustra answered thus:
The annihilator of morals, the good and just call me:
my story is immoral.
But if you have an enemy, do not requite him evil
with good, for that would put him to shame. Rather
prove that he did you some good.
And rather be angry than put to shame. And if you
are cursed, I do not like it that you want to bless.
Rather join a little in the cursing.
And if you have been done a great wrong, then
quickly add five little ones: a gruesome sight is a
person single-mindedly obsessed by a wrong.
Did you already know this? A wrong shared is half
right. And he who is able to bear it should take the
wrong upon himself.
A little revenge is more human than no revenge.
And if punishment is not also a right and an honor for
the transgressor, then I do not like your punishments
either.
It is nobler to declare oneself wrong than to insist
on being right-especially when one is right. Only one
must be rich enough for that.
I do not like your cold justice; and out of the eyes
of your judges there always looks the executioner and
his cold steel. Tell me, where is that justice which is
love with open eyes? Would that you might invent for
me the love that bears not only all punishment but also
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all guilt! Would that you might invent for me the
justice that acquits everyone, except him that judges
Do you still want to hear this too? In him who
would be just through and through even lies become
kindness to others. But how could I think of being just
through and through? How can I give each his own?
Let this be sufficient for me: I give each my own.
Finally, my brothers, beware of doing wrong to any
hermit. How could a hermit forget? How could he repay? Like a deep well is a hermit. It is easy to throw
in a stone; but if the stone sank to the bottom, tell me,
who would get it out again? Beware of insulting the
hermit. But if you have done so-well, then kill him
too.
Thus spoke Zarathustra.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, ON THE ADDERS BITE
,#NFDB
929:What are the implications of ethnic identity for multi-racial and multi-ethnic societies? Tatu Vanhanen of the University of Tampere, Finland, has probably researched the effects of ethnic diversity more systematically than anyone else. In a massive, book-length study, he measured ethnic diversity and levels of conflict in 148 countries, and found correlations in the 0.5 to 0.9 range for the two variables, depending on how the variables were defined and measured. Homogeneous countries like Japan and Iceland show very low levels of conflict, while highly diverse countries like Lebanon and Sudan are wracked with strife.
Prof. Vanhanen found tension in all multi-ethnic societies: “Interest conflicts between ethnic groups are inevitable because ethnic groups are genetic kinship groups and because the struggle for existence concerns the survival of our own genes through our own and our relatives’ descendants.” Prof. Vanhanen also found that economic and political institutions make no difference; wealthy, democratic countries suffer from sectarian strife as much as poor, authoritarian ones: “Ethnic nepotism belongs to human nature and . . . it is independent from the level of socioeconomic development (modernization) and also from the degree of democratization.”
Others have argued that democracy is particularly vulnerable to ethnic tensions while authoritarian regimes like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or Tito’s Yugoslavia can give the impression of holding it in check. One expert writing in Foreign Affairs explained that for democracy to work “the party or group that loses has to trust the new majority and believe that its basic interests will still be protected and that there is nothing to fear from a change in power.” He wrote that this was much less likely when opposing parties represent different races or ethnicities.
The United Nations found that from 1989 to 1992 there were 82 conflicts that had resulted in at least 1,000 deaths each. Of these, no fewer than 79, or 96 percent, were ethnic or religious conflicts that took place within the borders of recognized states. Only three were cross-border conflicts.
Wars between nations are usually ethnic conflicts as well. Internal ethnic conflict has very serious consequences. As J. Philippe Rushton has argued, “The politics of ethnic identity are increasingly replacing the politics of class as the major threat to the stability of nations.”
One must question the wisdom of then-president Bill Clinton’s explanation for the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia: “[T]he principle we and our allies have been fighting for in the Balkans is the principle of multi-ethnic, tolerant, inclusive democracy. We have been fighting against the idea that statehood must be based entirely on ethnicity.”
That same year, the American supreme commander of NATO, Wesley Clark, was even more direct: “There is no place in modern Europe for ethnically pure states. That’s a 19th century idea and we are trying to transition into the 21st century, and we are going to do it with multi-ethnic states. ~ Jared Taylor,#NFDB
930:Mexická kuchyně? Nic nestravitelně exotického. Zkuste plněné taštičky Když se řekne empanadas, představíte si něco složitého, exotického, co se v našich zeměpisných šířkách v podstatě nedá připravit. V praxi však zjistíte, že jsou to obyčejné plněné taštičky. Plněné surovinami, které používají Mexičané, ale jsou v každé samoobsluze dostupné i pro nás. Taštičky empanadas se servírují například se salsou. Náplň se bude skládat ze směsi pokrájené krkovičky, salámu chorizo, rajčat a koření. Celé se to zabalí do těsta a upeče. Podává se například se salsou, což je zase jen nasekané rajče s mangem a kořením. Tedy k pečenému trocha čerstvé chuti pro kontrast. Nejprve si připravíme náplň. Maso omyjeme, osušíme a nakrájíme na malé kostičky. Opravdu malé, uvědomme si, že musí vzniknout směska, kterou se bude plnit malá taštička. Takže oloupeme cibuli a nakrájíme najemno, přidáme nahrubo nakrájený česnek. V pánvi rozpálíme olej, zpěníme cibulku, přidáme česnek a nadrobno pokrájené maso a chorizo. Restujeme asi 10 minut. Ochutíme pepřem, solí, oreganem a římským kmínem. Záleží na chuti, místo choriza je výborné použít třeba pancettu, tedy slaninu. Stejně tak se často používají do směsi i černé olivy, které se běžně nepovažují za nejtypičtější mexickou surovinu a evokují nám spíše Středomoří. Je ale pravdou, že od 16. století byly olivovníky do Mexika importovány, takže už měly možnost se ve stravě prosadit. Do orestované směsi přidáme olivy, k nim přidáme chilli papričky, najemno nakrájená rajčata nebo passatu, vařená vejce na kostičky a důkladně promícháme a necháme krátce povařit. Nakonec přidáme strouhanou kůru z limetky a limetkovou šťávu, promícháme a necháme vychladnout. „Dávkování koření typického pro mexickou kuchyni bych nechal na vás. Jsou lidi, kteří milují chilli, česnek, římský kmín a koriandr, ale jsou i takoví, kteří tyto chuti nemusí. Berte tento mexický recept jen jako inspiraci k vytvoření chutných plněných taštiček,“ říká kuchař Michal Suchánek, který mexickou kuchyni učí na kurzech vaření v pražském studiu Chefparade. Salsa Pico de Gallo Ingredience: 500 g rajčata 2 červené cibule 2 papričky - zelené jalapeňos 1/2 svazku koriandru 1 limeta 1 mango sůl a pepř Postup: Rajčata nasekáme na kostičky, přidáme nasekané papričky, koriandr, mango, cibuli. Dochutíme solí pepřem a limetkovou šťávou. Zatímco bude směs chladnout, vyrobíme si těsto. Smícháme 600 g hladké mouky, 80–100 g másla, sůl, 2 ks vejce, 100 ml ledové vody, 40 ml octa. Mouku s vejci a máslem smícháme důkladně dohromady, vodu, sůl a ocet postupně přidáváme a vše vypracujeme do hladkého těsta. Necháme na půl hodinky odpočinout do lednice. Pak rozválíme na cca 0,5 cm silnou placku a vykrajujeme kolečka o průměru zhruba 10 cm. Na ně rozdělíme připravenou masovou náplň. Pozor, nepřehánět to s náplní – myslete a to, že placku budete přehýbat a utěsňovat, tak aby vám směs při pečení nevytékala, jak to s oblibou dělá. Kolečka přehneme a okraje pečlivě stiskneme k sobě. Taštičky rozložíme na plech a pečeme v předehřáté troubě při 200 °C asi 15 minut dozlatova. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
931:Mexická kuchyně? Nic nestravitelně exotického. Zkuste plněné taštičky Když se řekne empanadas, představíte si něco složitého, exotického, co se v našich zeměpisných šířkách v podstatě nedá připravit. V praxi však zjistíte, že jsou to obyčejné plněné taštičky. Plněné surovinami, které používají Mexičané, ale jsou v každé samoobsluze dostupné i pro nás. Taštičky empanadas se servírují například se salsou. Náplň se bude skládat ze směsi pokrájené krkovičky, salámu chorizo, rajčat a koření. Celé se to zabalí do těsta a upeče. Podává se například se salsou, což je zase jen nasekané rajče s mangem a kořením. Tedy k pečenému trocha čerstvé chuti pro kontrast. Nejprve si připravíme náplň. Maso omyjeme, osušíme a nakrájíme na malé kostičky. Opravdu malé, uvědomme si, že musí vzniknout směska, kterou se bude plnit malá taštička. Takže oloupeme cibuli a nakrájíme najemno, přidáme nahrubo nakrájený česnek. V pánvi rozpálíme olej, zpěníme cibulku, přidáme česnek a nadrobno pokrájené maso a chorizo. Restujeme asi 10 minut. Ochutíme pepřem, solí, oreganem a římským kmínem. Záleží na chuti, místo choriza je výborné použít třeba pancettu, tedy slaninu. Stejně tak se často používají do směsi i černé olivy, které se běžně nepovažují za nejtypičtější mexickou surovinu a evokují nám spíše Středomoří. Je ale pravdou, že od 16. století byly olivovníky do Mexika importovány, takže už měly možnost se ve stravě prosadit. Do orestované směsi přidáme olivy, k nim přidáme chilli papričky, najemno nakrájená rajčata nebo passatu, vařená vejce na kostičky a důkladně promícháme a necháme krátce povařit. Nakonec přidáme strouhanou kůru z limetky a limetkovou šťávu, promícháme a necháme vychladnout. „Dávkování koření typického pro mexickou kuchyni bych nechal na vás. Jsou lidi, kteří milují chilli, česnek, římský kmín a koriandr, ale jsou i takoví, kteří tyto chuti nemusí. Berte tento mexický recept jen jako inspiraci k vytvoření chutných plněných taštiček,“ říká kuchař Michal Suchánek, který mexickou kuchyni učí na kurzech vaření v pražském studiu Chefparade. Salsa Pico de Gallo Ingredience: 500 g rajčata 2 červené cibule 2 papričky - zelené jalapeňos 1/2 svazku koriandru 1 limeta 1 mango sůl a pepř Postup: Rajčata nasekáme na kostičky, přidáme nasekané papričky, koriandr, mango, cibuli. Dochutíme solí pepřem a limetkovou šťávou. Zatímco bude směs chladnout, vyrobíme si těsto. Smícháme 600 g hladké mouky, 80–100 g másla, sůl, 2 ks vejce, 100 ml ledové vody, 40 ml octa. Mouku s vejci a máslem smícháme důkladně dohromady, vodu, sůl a ocet postupně přidáváme a vše vypracujeme do hladkého těsta. Necháme na půl hodinky odpočinout do lednice. Pak rozválíme na cca 0,5 cm silnou placku a vykrajujeme kolečka o průměru zhruba 10 cm. Na ně rozdělíme připravenou masovou náplň. Pozor, nepřehánět to s náplní – myslete a to, že placku budete přehýbat a utěsňovat, tak aby vám směs při pečení nevytékala, jak to s oblibou dělá. Kolečka přehneme a okraje pečlivě stiskneme k sobě. Taštičky rozložíme na plech a pečeme v předehřáté troubě při 200 °C asi 15 minut dozlatova. Kompletní postup krok za krokem najdete ve fotogalerii. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
932:It is a common misconception, in the spirit of the sentiments expressed in Q16, that Godel's theorem shows that there are many different kinds of arithmetic, each of which is equally valid. The particular arithmetic that we may happen to choose to work with would, accordingly, be defined merely by some arbitrarily chosen formal system. Godel's theorem shows that none of these formal systems, if consistent, can be complete; so-it is argued-we can keep adjoining new axioms, according to our whim, and obtain all kinds of alternative consistent systems within which we may choose to work. The comparison is sometimes made with the situation that occurred with Euclidean geometry. For some 21 centuries it was believed that Euclidean geometry was the only geometry possible. But when, in the eighteenth century, mathematicians such as Gauss, Lobachevsky, and Bolyai showed that indeed there are alternatives that are equally possible, the matter of geometry was seemingly removed from the absolute to the arbitrary. Likewise, it is often argued, Godel showed that arithmetic, also, is a matter of arbitrary choice, any one set of consistent axioms being as good as any other.
This, however, is a completely misleading interpretation of what Godel has demonstrated for us. He has taught us that the very notion of a formal axiomatic system is inadequate for capturing even the most basic of mathematical concepts. When we use the term 'arithmetic' without further qualification, we indeed mean the ordinary arithmetic which operates with the ordinary natural numbers 0,1,2,3,4,...(and perhaps their negatives) and not with some kind of 'supernatural' numbers. We may choose, if we wish, to explore the properties of formal systems, and this is certainly a valuable part of mathematical endeavour. But it is something different from exploring the ordinary properties of the ordinary natural numbers. The situation is, in some ways, perhaps not so very unlike that which occurs with geometry. The study of non-Euclidean geometries is something mathematically interesting, with important applications (such as in physics, see ENM Chapter 5 especially Figs 5.1 and 5.2, and also 4.4), but when the term 'geometry' is used in ordinary language (as distinct from when a mathematician or theoretical physicist might use that term), we do indeed mean the ordinary geometry of Euclid. There is a difference, however, in that what a logician might refer to as 'Euclidean geometry' can indeed be specified (with some reservations) in terms of a particular formal system, whereas, as Godel has shown, ordinary 'arithmetic' cannot be so specified.
Rather than showing that mathematics (most particularly arithmetic) is an arbitrary pursuit, whose direction is governed by the whim of Man, Godel demonstrated that it is something absolute, there to be discovered rather than invented (cf. 1.17). We discover for ourselves what the natural numbers are, and we do not have trouble in distinguishing them from any sort of supernatural numbers. Godel showed that no system of 'man-made' rules can, by themselves, achieve this for us. Such a Platonic viewpoint was important to Godel, and it will be important also for us in the later considerations of this book (8.7). ~ Roger Penrose,#NFDB
933:Cover the war, what a gig to frame for yourself, going out after one kind of information and getting another, totally other, to lock your eyes open, drop your blood temperature down under the 0, dry your mouth out so a full swig of water disappeared in there before you could swallow, turn your breath fouler than corpse gas. There were times when your fear would take directions so wild that you had to stop and watch the spin. Forget the Cong, the trees would kill you, the elephant grass grew up homicidal, the ground you were walking over possessed malignant intelligence, your whole environment was a bath. Even so, considering where you were and what was happening to so many people, it was a privilege just to be able to feel afraid.
So you learned about fear, it was hard to know what you really learned about courage. How many times did somebody have to run in front of a machine gun before it became an act of cowardice? What about those acts that didn’t require courage to perform, but made you a coward if you didn’t? It was hard to know at the moment, easy to make a mistake when it came, like the mistake of thinking that all you needed to perform a witness act were your eyes. A lot of what people called courage was only undifferentiated energy cut loose by the intensity of the moment, mind loss that sent the actor on an incredible run; if he survived it he had the chance later to decide whether he’d really been brave or just overcome with life, even ecstasy. A lot of people found the guts to just call it all off and refuse to ever go out anymore, they turned and submitted to the penalty end of the system or they just split. A lot of reporters, too, I had friends in the press corps who went out once or twice and then never again. Sometimes I thought that they were the sanest, most serious people of all, although to be honest I never said so until my time there was almost over.
“We had this gook and we was gonna skin him” (a grunt told me), “I mean he was already dead and everything, and the lieutenant comes over and says, ‘Hey asshole, there’s a reporter in the TOC, you want him to come out and see that? I mean, use your fucking heads, there’s a time and place for everything.…”
“Too bad you wasn’t with us last week” (another grunt told me, coming off a no-contact operation), “we killed so many gooks it wasn’t even funny.”
Was it possible that they were there and not haunted? No, not possible, not a chance, I know I wasn’t the only one. Where are they now? (Where am I now?) I stood as close to them as I could without actually being one of them, and then I stood as far back as I could without leaving the planet. Disgust doesn’t begin to describe what they made me feel, they threw people out of helicopters, tied people up and put the dogs on them. Brutality was just a word in my mouth before that. But disgust was only one color in the whole mandala, gentleness and pity were other colors, there wasn’t a color left out. I think that those people who used to say that they only wept for the Vietnamese never really wept for anyone at all if they couldn’t squeeze out at least one for these men and boys when they died or had their lives cracked open for them.
But of course we were intimate, I’ll tell you how intimate: they were my guns, and I let them do it. ~ Michael Herr,#NFDB
934:Pham Nuwen spent years learning to program/explore. Programming went back to the beginning of time. It was a little like the midden out back of his father’s castle. Where the creek had worn that away, ten meters down, there were the crumpled hulks of machines—flying machines, the peasants said—from the great days of Canberra’s original colonial era. But the castle midden was clean and fresh compared to what lay within the Reprise’s local net. There were programs here that had been written five thousand years ago, before Humankind ever left Earth. The wonder of it—the horror of it, Sura said—was that unlike the useless wrecks of Canberra’s past, these programs still worked! And via a million million circuitous threads of inheritance, many of the oldest programs still ran in the bowels of the Qeng Ho system. Take the Traders’ method of timekeeping. The frame corrections were incredibly complex—and down at the very bottom of it was a little program that ran a counter. Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth’s moon. But if you looked at it still more closely. . .the starting instant was actually some hundred million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind’s first computer operating systems.
So behind all the top-level interfaces was layer under layer of support. Some of that software had been designed for wildly different situations. Every so often, the inconsistencies caused fatal accidents. Despite the romance of spaceflight, the most common accidents were simply caused by ancient, misused programs finally getting their revenge.
“We should rewrite it all,” said Pham.
“It’s been done,” said Sura, not looking up. She was preparing to go off-Watch, and had spent the last four days trying to root a problem out of the coldsleep automation.
“It’s been tried,” corrected Bret, just back from the freezers. “But even the top levels of fleet system code are enormous. You and a thousand of your friends would have to work for a century or so to reproduce it.” Trinli grinned evilly. “And guess what—even if you did, by the time you finished, you’d have your own set of inconsistencies. And you still wouldn’t be consistent with all the applications that might be needed now and then.”
Sura gave up on her debugging for the moment. “The word for all this is ‘mature programming environment.’ Basically, when hardware performance has been pushed to its final limit, and programmers have had several centuries to code, you reach a point where there is far more signicant code than can be rationalized. The best you can do is understand the overall layering, and know how to search for the oddball tool that may come in handy—take the situation I have here.” She waved at the dependency chart she had been working on. “We are low on working fluid for the coffins. Like a million other things, there was none for sale on dear old Canberra. Well, the obvious thing is to move the coffins near the aft hull, and cool by direct radiation. We don’t have the proper equipment to support this—so lately, I’ve been doing my share of archeology. It seems that five hundred years ago, a similar thing happened after an in-system war at Torma. They hacked together a temperature maintenance package that is precisely what we need.”
“Almost precisely. ~ Vernor Vinge,#NFDB
935:
ON THE DESPISES OF THE BODY
I want to speak to the despisers of the body. I would
not have them learn and teach differently, but merely
say farewell to their own bodies-and thus become
silent.
"Body am I, and soul"-thus speaks the child. And
why should one not speak like children?
But the awakened and knowing say: body am I entirely, and nothing else; and soul is only a word for
something about the body.
The body is a great reason, a plurality with one
sense, a war and a peace, a herd and a shepherd. An
instrument of your body is also your little reason, my
brother, which you call "spirit"-a little instrument
and toy of your great reason.
"I," you say, and are proud of the word. But greater
is that in which you do not wish to have faith-your
body and its great reason: that does not say "I," but
does "I."
What the sense feels, what the spirit knows, never
has its end in itself. But sense and spirit would persuade you that they are the end of all things: that is
how vain they are. Instruments and toys are sense and
spirit: behind them still lies the self. The self also
seeks with the eyes of the senses; it also listens with
the ears of the spirit. Always the self listens and seeks:
it compares, overpowers, conquers, destroys. It controls, and it is in control of the ego too.
Behind your thoughts and feelings, my brother,
there stands a mighty ruler, an unknown sage-whose
name is self. In your body he dwells; he is your
body.
There is more reason in your body than in your best
35
wisdom. And who knows why your body needs precisely your best wisdom?
Your self laughs at your ego and at its bold leaps.
"What are these leaps and flights of thought to me?"
it says to itself. "A detour to my end. I am the leading
strings of the ego and the prompter of its concepts."
The self says to the ego, "Feel pain here" Then the
ego suffers and thinks how it might suffer no more and that is why it is made to think.
The self says to the ego, "Feel pleasure here" Then
the ego is pleased and thinks how it might often be
pleased again-and that is why it is made to think.
I want to speak to the despisers of the body. It is
their respect that begets their contempt. What is it that
created respect and contempt and worth and will? The
creative self created respect and contempt; it created
pleasure and pain. The creative body created the spirit
as a hand for its will.
Even in your folly and contempt, you despisers of
the body, you serve your self. I say unto you: your self
itself wants to die and turns away from life. It is no
longer capable of what it would do above all else: to
create beyond itself. That is what it would do above
all else, that is its fervent wish.
But now it is too late for it to do this: so your self
wants to go under, 0 despisers of the body. Your self
wants to go under, and that is why you have become
despisers of the body For you are no longer able to
create beyond yourselves.
And that is why you are angry with life and the
earth. An unconscious envy speaks out of the squinteyed glance of your contempt.
I shall not go your way, 0 despisers of the body
You are no bridge to the overman!
Thus spoke Zarathustra.
36
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, ON THE DESPISERS OF THE BODY
,#NFDB
936:How did you even get in here?” I asked him. “Would you believe they leave the door open all night?” Gus asked. “Um, no,” I said. “As well you shouldn’t.” Gus smiled. “Anyway, I know it’s a bit self-aggrandizing.” “Hey, you’re stealing my eulogy,” Isaac said. “My first bit is about how you were a self-aggrandizing bastard.” I laughed. “Okay, okay,” Gus said. “At your leisure.” Isaac cleared his throat. “Augustus Waters was a self-aggrandizing bastard. But we forgive him. We forgive him not because he had a heart as figuratively good as his literal one sucked, or because he knew more about how to hold a cigarette than any nonsmoker in history, or because he got eighteen years when he should have gotten more.” “Seventeen,” Gus corrected. “I’m assuming you’ve got some time, you interrupting bastard. “I’m telling you,” Isaac continued, “Augustus Waters talked so much that he’d interrupt you at his own funeral. And he was pretentious: Sweet Jesus Christ, that kid never took a piss without pondering the abundant metaphorical resonances of human waste production. And he was vain: I do not believe I have ever met a more physically attractive person who was more acutely aware of his own physical attractiveness. “But I will say this: When the scientists of the future show up at my house with robot eyes and they tell me to try them on, I will tell the scientists to screw off, because I do not want to see a world without him.” I was kind of crying by then. “And then, having made my rhetorical point, I will put my robot eyes on, because I mean, with robot eyes you can probably see through girls’ shirts and stuff. Augustus, my friend, Godspeed.” Augustus nodded for a while, his lips pursed, and then gave Isaac a thumbs-up. After he’d recovered his composure, he added, “I would cut the bit about seeing through girls’ shirts.” Isaac was still clinging to the lectern. He started to cry. He pressed his forehead down to the podium and I watched his shoulders shake, and then finally, he said, “Goddamn it, Augustus, editing your own eulogy.” “Don’t swear in the Literal Heart of Jesus,” Gus said. “Goddamn it,” Isaac said again. He raised his head and swallowed. “Hazel, can I get a hand here?” I’d forgotten he couldn’t make his own way back to the circle. I got up, placed his hand on my arm, and walked him slowly back to the chair next to Gus where I’d been sitting. Then I walked up to the podium and unfolded the piece of paper on which I’d printed my eulogy. “My name is Hazel. Augustus Waters was the great star-crossed love of my life. Ours was an epic love story, and I won’t be able to get more than a sentence into it without disappearing into a puddle of tears. Gus knew. Gus knows. I will not tell you our love story, because—like all real love stories—it will die with us, as it should. I’d hoped that he’d be eulogizing me, because there’s no one I’d rather have…” I started crying. “Okay, how not to cry. How am I—okay. Okay.” I took a few breaths and went back to the page. “I can’t talk about our love story, so I will talk about math. I am not a mathematician, but I know this: There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1. There’s .1 and .12 and .112 and an infinite collection of others. Of course, there is a bigger infinite set of numbers between 0 and 2, or between 0 and a million. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities. A writer we used to like taught us that. There are days, many of them, when I resent the size of my unbounded set. ~ John Green, #NFDB
937:The Memory Business Steven Sasson is a tall man with a lantern jaw. In 1973, he was a freshly minted graduate of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His degree in electrical engineering led to a job with Kodak’s Apparatus Division research lab, where, a few months into his employment, Sasson’s supervisor, Gareth Lloyd, approached him with a “small” request. Fairchild Semiconductor had just invented the first “charge-coupled device” (or CCD)—an easy way to move an electronic charge around a transistor—and Kodak needed to know if these devices could be used for imaging.4 Could they ever. By 1975, working with a small team of talented technicians, Sasson used CCDs to create the world’s first digital still camera and digital recording device. Looking, as Fast Company once explained, “like a ’70s Polaroid crossed with a Speak-and-Spell,”5 the camera was the size of a toaster, weighed in at 8.5 pounds, had a resolution of 0.01 megapixel, and took up to thirty black-and-white digital images—a number chosen because it fell between twenty-four and thirty-six and was thus in alignment with the exposures available in Kodak’s roll film. It also stored shots on the only permanent storage device available back then—a cassette tape. Still, it was an astounding achievement and an incredible learning experience. Portrait of Steven Sasson with first digital camera, 2009 Source: Harvey Wang, From Darkroom to Daylight “When you demonstrate such a system,” Sasson later said, “that is, taking pictures without film and showing them on an electronic screen without printing them on paper, inside a company like Kodak in 1976, you have to get ready for a lot of questions. I thought people would ask me questions about the technology: How’d you do this? How’d you make that work? I didn’t get any of that. They asked me when it was going to be ready for prime time? When is it going to be realistic to use this? Why would anybody want to look at their pictures on an electronic screen?”6 In 1996, twenty years after this meeting took place, Kodak had 140,000 employees and a $28 billion market cap. They were effectively a category monopoly. In the United States, they controlled 90 percent of the film market and 85 percent of the camera market.7 But they had forgotten their business model. Kodak had started out in the chemistry and paper goods business, for sure, but they came to dominance by being in the convenience business. Even that doesn’t go far enough. There is still the question of what exactly Kodak was making more convenient. Was it just photography? Not even close. Photography was simply the medium of expression—but what was being expressed? The “Kodak Moment,” of course—our desire to document our lives, to capture the fleeting, to record the ephemeral. Kodak was in the business of recording memories. And what made recording memories more convenient than a digital camera? But that wasn’t how the Kodak Corporation of the late twentieth century saw it. They thought that the digital camera would undercut their chemical business and photographic paper business, essentially forcing the company into competing against itself. So they buried the technology. Nor did the executives understand how a low-resolution 0.01 megapixel image camera could hop on an exponential growth curve and eventually provide high-resolution images. So they ignored it. Instead of using their weighty position to corner the market, they were instead cornered by the market. ~ Peter H Diamandis, #NFDB
938: ON THE
FRIEND
"There is always one too many around me"-thus
thinks the hermit. "Always one times one-eventually
that makes two."
I and me are always too deep in conversation: how
56
could one stand that if there were no friend? For the
hermit the friend is always the third person: the third
is the cork that prevents the conversation of the two
from sinking into the depths. Alas, there are too many
depths for all hermits; therefore they long so for a
friend and his height.
Our faith in others betrays in what respect we would
like to have faith in ourselves. Our longing for a friend
is our betrayer. And often love is only a device to overcome envy. And often one attacks and makes an enemy
in order to conceal that one is open to attack. "At least
be my enemyl"-thus speaks true reverence, which
does not dare ask for friendship.
If one wants to have a friend one must also want
to wage war for him: and to wage war, one must be
capable of being an enemy.
In a friend one should still honor the enemy. Can
you go close to your friend without going over to
him?
In a friend one should have one's best enemy. You
should be closest to him with your heart when you
resist him.
You do not want to put on anything for your friend?
Should it be an honor for your friend that you give
yourself to him as you are? But he sends you to the
devil for that. He who makes no secret of himself,
enrages: so much reason have you for fearing nakedness. Indeed, if you were gods, then you might be
ashamed of your clothes. You cannot groom yourself
too beautifully for your friend: for you shall be to him
an arrow and a longing for the overman.
Have you ever seen your friend asleep-and found
out how he looks? What is the face of your friend anyway? It is your own face in a rough and imperfect
mirror.
57
Have you ever seen your friend asleep? Were you
not shocked that your friend looks like that? 0 my
friend, man is something that must be overcome.
A friend should be a master at guessing and keeping still: you must not want to see everything. Your
dream should betray to you what your friend does
while awake.
Your compassion should be a guess-to know first
whether your friend wants compassion. Perhaps what
he loves in you is the unbroken eye and the glance of
eternity. Compassion for the friend should conceal itself under a hard shell, and you should break a tooth
on it. That way it will have delicacy and sweetness.
Are you pure air and solitude and bread and medicine for your friend? Some cannot loosen their own
chains and can nevertheless redeem their friends.
Are you a slave? Then you cannot be a friend. Are
you a tyrant? Then you cannot have friends. All-toolong have a slave and a tyrant been concealed in
woman. Therefore woman is not yet capable of friendship: she knows only love.
Woman's love involves injustice and blindness against
everything that she does not love. And even in the
knowing love of a woman there are still assault and
lightning and night alongside light.
Woman is not yet capable of friendship: women are
still cats and birds. Or at best, cows.
Woman is not yet capable of friendship. But tell
me, you men, who among you is capable of friendship?
Alas, behold your poverty, you men, and the meanness of your souls As much as you give the friend, I
will give even my enemy, and I shall not be any the
poorer for it. There is comradeship: let there be friendshipl
Thus spoke Zarathustra.
58
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, ON THE FRIEND
,#NFDB
939:HISTORICAL NOTE There are no nuclear power stations in Belarus. Of the functioning stations in the territory of the former USSR, the ones closest to Belarus are of the old Soviet-designed RBMK type. To the north, the Ignalinsk station, to the east, the Smolensk station, and to the south, Chernobyl. On April 26, 1986, at 1:23:58, a series of explosions destroyed the reactor in the building that housed Energy Block #4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station. The catastrophe at Chernobyl became the largest technological disaster of the twentieth century. For tiny Belarus (population: 10 million), it was a national disaster. During the Second World War, the Nazis destroyed 619 Belarussian villages along with their inhabitants. As a result of Chernobyl, the country lost 485 villages and settlements. Of these, 70 have been forever buried underground. During the war, one out of every four Belarussians was killed; today, one out of every five Belarussians lives on contaminated land. This amounts to 2.1 million people, of whom 700,000 are children. Among the demographic factors responsible for the depopulation of Belarus, radiation is number one. In the Gomel and Mogilev regions, which suffered the most from Chernobyl, mortality rates exceed birth rates by 20%. As a result of the accident, 50 million Ci of radionuclides were released into the atmosphere. Seventy percent of these descended on Belarus; fully 23% of its territory is contaminated by cesium-137 radionuclides with a density of over 1 Ci/km2. Ukraine on the other hand has 4.8% of its territory contaminated, and Russia, 0.5%. The area of arable land with a density of more than 1 Ci/km2 is over 18 million hectares; 2.4 thousand hectares have been taken out of the agricultural economy. Belarus is a land of forests. But 26% of all forests and a large part of all marshes near the rivers Pripyat, Dniepr, and Sozh are considered part of the radioactive zone. As a result of the perpetual presence of small doses of radiation, the number of people with cancer, mental retardation, neurological disorders, and genetic mutations increases with each year. —“Chernobyl.” Belaruskaya entsiklopedia On April 29, 1986, instruments recorded high levels of radiation in Poland, Germany, Austria, and Romania. On April 30, in Switzerland and northern Italy. On May 1 and 2, in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Great Britain, and northern Greece. On May 3, in Israel, Kuwait, and Turkey. . . . Gaseous airborne particles traveled around the globe: on May 2 they were registered in Japan, on May 5 in India, on May 5 and 6 in the U.S. and Canada. It took less than a week for Chernobyl to become a problem for the entire world. —“The Consequences of the Chernobyl Accident in Belarus.” Minsk, Sakharov International College on Radioecology The fourth reactor, now known as the Cover, still holds about twenty tons of nuclear fuel in its lead-and-metal core. No one knows what is happening with it. The sarcophagus was well made, uniquely constructed, and the design engineers from St. Petersburg should probably be proud. But it was constructed in absentia, the plates were put together with the aid of robots and helicopters, and as a result there are fissures. According to some figures, there are now over 200 square meters of spaces and cracks, and radioactive particles continue to escape through them . . . Might the sarcophagus collapse? No one can answer that question, since it’s still impossible to reach many of the connections and constructions in order to see if they’re sturdy. But everyone knows that if the Cover were to collapse, the consequences would be even more dire than they were in 1986. —Ogonyok magazine, No. 17, April 1996 ~ Svetlana Alexievich, #NFDB
940:The Happy Gardeners
We were storemen, clerks and packers on
an ammunition dump
Twice the size of Cootamundra, and the goods
we had to hump
They were bombs as big as water-butts, and
cartridges in tons,
Shells that looked like blessed gasmains, and
a line in traction-guns.
We had struck a warehouse dignity in dealing
with the stocks.
It was, “Sign here, Mr. Eddie!” “Clarkson,
forward to the socks!”
Our floor-walker was a major, with a nozzle
like a peach,
And a stutter in his Trilbies; and a limping
kind of speech.
We were off at eight to business, we were free
for lunch at one,
And we talked of new Spring fashions, and the
brisk trade being done.
After five we sought our dugouts lying snug
beneath the hill,
Each with hollyhocks before it and geraniums
on the sill.
Singing “Home, Sweet home,” we swept,
and scrubbed, and dusted up the place,
Then smoked out on the doorstep in the twilight's tender grace.
After which with spade and rake we sought
our special garden plot,
And we 'tended to the cabbage and the shrinking young shallot.
So long lived we unmolested that this seemed
indeed “the life.”
Set apart from mirk and worry and the inci-
128
dence of strife;
And we trimmed our Kitchen Eden, swapping
vegetable lore,
Whi1e the whole demented world beside was
muddled up with war.
There was little talk of Boches and of bloody
battle scenes,
But a deal about Bill's spuds and Billy
Carkeek's butter-beans;
Porky specialised on onion and he had a sort
of gift
For a cabbage plump and tender that it took
two men to lift.
In the pleasant Sabbath morning, when the
sun lit on our “street,”
And illumed the happy dugout with effulgence
kind and sweet,
It was fine to see us forking, raking, picking
off the bugs,
Treading flat the snails and woodlice and
demolishing the slugs.
Then one day old Fritz got going. He had
a hint of us,
And the shell the blighter posted was as roomy
as a 'bus;
He was groping round the dump, and kind of
pecking after it;
When he plugged the hill the world heeled up,
the dome of heaven split.
Then, 0 Gott and consternation! Swooped a
shell a and stuck her nose
In Carkeek's beans. Those beans came up!
A cry of grief arose!
As we watched them—plunk! another shell
cut loose, and everywhere
Flew the spuds of Billy Murphy. There were
turnips in the air.
129
Bill! she tore a quarter-acre from the landscape. With it burst
Tommy's carrots, and we watched them, and
in whispers prayed and cursed.
Then a wail of anguish 'scaped us. Boomed
in Porky's cabbage plot
A detestable concussion. Porky's cabbages
were not!
There the Breaking strain was reached, for
Porky fetched an awful cry,
And he rushed away and armed himself.
With loathing in his eye,
Up and over went the hero. He was savage
Through and through,
And he tore across the distance like a maddened kangaroo.
They had left a woeful sight indeed—frail cabbages all rent,
Turnips mangled, little carrots all in one red
burial blent,
Parsnips ruined, lettuce shattered, torn and
wilted beet and bean,
And a black and grinning gap where once our
garden flourished green.
Five and fifty hours had passed when came a
German in his shirt.
On his back he carried Porky black with
blood, and smoke and dirt.
“I sniped six of 'em,” said Porky, “an' me
pris'ner here,” he sez“I done in the crooel swine what strafed me
helpless cabba-ges.”
~ Edward George Dyson,#NFDB
941:In North America, there is no nostalgia for the postwar period, quite simply because the Trente Glorieuses never existed there: per capita output grew at roughly the same rate of 1.5–2 percent per year throughout the period 1820–2012. To be sure, growth slowed a bit between 1930 and 1950 to just over 1.5 percent, then increased again to just over 2 percent between 1950 and 1970, and then slowed to less than 1.5 percent between 1990 and 2012. In Western Europe, which suffered much more from the two world wars, the variations are considerably greater: per capita output stagnated between 1913 and 1950 (with a growth rate of just over 0.5 percent) and then leapt ahead to more than 4 percent from 1950 to 1970, before falling sharply to just slightly above US levels (a little more than 2 percent) in the period 1970–1990 and to barely 1.5 percent between 1990 and 2012.
Western Europe experienced a golden age of growth between 1950 and 1970, only to see its growth rate diminish to one-half or even one-third of its peak level during the decades that followed.
[...]
If we looked only at continental Europe, we would find an average per capita output growth rate of 5 percent between 1950 and 1970—a level well beyond that achieved in other advanced countries over the past two centuries.
These very different collective experiences of growth in the twentieth century largely explain why public opinion in different countries varies so widely in regard to commercial and financial globalization and indeed to capitalism in general. In continental Europe and especially France, people quite naturally continue to look on the first three postwar decades—a period of strong state intervention in the economy—as a period blessed with rapid growth, and many regard the liberalization of the economy that began around 1980 as the cause of a slowdown.
In Great Britain and the United States, postwar history is interpreted quite differently. Between 1950 and 1980, the gap between the English-speaking countries and the countries that had lost the war closed rapidly. By the late 1970s, US magazine covers often denounced the decline of the United States and the success of German and Japanese industry. In Britain, GDP per capita fell below the level of Germany, France, Japan, and even Italy. It may even be the case that this sense of being rivaled (or even overtaken in the case of Britain) played an important part in the “conservative revolution.” Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the United States promised to “roll back the welfare state” that had allegedly sapped the animal spirits of Anglo-Saxon entrepreneurs and thus to return to pure nineteenth-century capitalism, which would allow the United States and Britain to regain the upper hand. Even today, many people in both countries believe that the conservative revolution was remarkably successful, because their growth rates once again matched continental European and Japanese levels.
In fact, neither the economic liberalization that began around 1980 nor the state interventionism that began in 1945 deserves such praise or blame. France, Germany, and Japan would very likely have caught up with Britain and the United States following their collapse of 1914–1945 regardless of what policies they had adopted (I say this with only slight exaggeration). The most one can say is that state intervention did no harm. Similarly, once these countries had attained the global technological frontier, it is hardly surprising that they ceased to grow more rapidly than Britain and the United States or that growth rates in all of these wealthy countries more or less equalized [...] Broadly speaking, the US and British policies of economic liberalization appear to have had little effect on this simple reality, since they neither increased growth nor decreased it. ~ Thomas Piketty,#NFDB
942:[GEEK SCHOOL] Android Guide 3: Extending your Android Device’s Battery Life One of the biggest gripes among device users is battery life. Devices and batteries are not created equal and the status quo for battery life seems to be about a day, from the time that someone wakes up in the morning and unplug their phone from the charger, to the point where they plug it in at night before they go to bed. This all assumes that you don’t have one of those days where you’re talking to people all day or you get into a heated texting discussion with a friend, or you just can’t get off of Facebook. There’s a bunch of different factors that conspire to deprive you of battery life. So we’ll talk about all that, such as the very nature of the batteries in your devices, and why they eventually wear out. Also, there’s the conditions under which your battery must operate, which can also quickly sap it dry. Then there’s your apps, which directly affect not only device performance but battery life in the process. Think of it this way, if you have an app that depends on constantly updating itself to update you, that is going to quickly drain your battery. And this discussion wouldn’t be complete of course, without a look at how using your screen. As we’ll show you later, you screen is the number one battery killer. Adjusting its brightness and timeout length can reduce battery drain of course, so we’ll teach you exactly how to accomplish that. Help! My battery keeps dying! There are times when just seems like you never have enough battery and when everyone else’s battery seems to have the same problem. This happens more often than we care to think about. In fact, if your device is more than a year old, and you use your phone or tablet a great deal, then it’s probable that you can’t even get a full day’s use out of it. Batteries are a fickle thing and most people don’t know the first thing about what makes them fail. It’s highly unlikely that you’ll ever be able to create a perfect environment that is conducive to long life. Just using your device, such as jogging with it and streaming music on a hot day will drain wear on the battery more, but there’s not a whole lot you can do other than not use it, which defeats the purpose of having it in the first place. Still, simply knowing that temperature extremes (not just heat, cold kills batteries too) means that you’re more aware and can take actions to extend their life. Remember, all batteries die given time, but the way you use your devices can impact how much longer they live just as much as how quickly they wear out. Maximizing Battery Life – Things to remember If you want to really get the most out of your battery, we suggest you read our full article on battery myths. In any event, you should be at least aware of the following facts so as to better treat your batteries with tender loving care. Extreme temperatures kill If you’ve ever lived up North, then you know that when the temperatures drop below freezing, car batteries start to fail. Similarly, in hot, desert climates, car batteries face a similar fate. In fact, a whole subset of the car batter industry is devoted to higher performing batteries that continue to operate under extreme conditions. The batteries that come with your phone, tablet, and laptops are different from the lead acid beasts in your car or truck, but the conditions under which they operate best are similar. Device batteries start to suffer once the temperature dips to or below 0°C (32°F), and they can operate for a time at 70°C (158°F) to 90°C (194°F) without permanently damaging the battery, but keep in mind, that’s the upper limit. “But oh,” you say, “there’s no way it gets that hot where I live!” Well, yes, that is true however, there’s other factors to take into account. First of all, your device produces heat – the screen, the CPU, along with pretty much every chip in there. Then of course, your device ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
943: ON
THE PALE
CRIMINAL
You do not want to kill, 0 judges and sacrificers,
until the animal has nodded? Behold, the pale criminal
has nodded: out of his eyes speaks the great contempt.
"My ego is something that shall be overcome: my
38
ego is to me the great contempt of man," that is what
his eyes say.
That he judged himself, that was his highest moment; do not let the sublime return to his baseness!
There is no redemption for one who suffers so of himself, except a quick death.
Your killing, 0 judges, shall be pity and not revenge. And as you kill, be sure that you yourselves
justify life It is not enough to make your peace with
the man you kill. Your sadness shall be love of the
overman: thus you shall justify your living on.
'Enemy" you shall say, but not "villain"; "sick" you
shall say, but not "scoundrel"; "fool" you shall say, but
not "sinner."
And you, red judge, if you were to tell out loud all
that you have already done in thought, everyone would
cry, "Away with this filth and this poisonous worm!"
But thought is one thing, the deed is another, and
the image of the deed still another: the wheel of
causality does not roll between them.
An image made this pale man pale. He was equal to
his deed when he did it; but he could not bear its
image after it was done. Now he always saw himself
as the doer of one deed. Madness I call this: the exception now became the essence for him. A chalk
streak stops a hen; the stroke that he himself struck
stopped his poor reason: madness after the deed I call
this.
Listen, 0 judges: there is yet another madness, and
that comes before the deed. Alas, you have not yet
crept deep enough into this soul.
Thus speaks the red judge, 'Why did this criminal
murder? He wanted to rob." But I say unto you: his
soul wanted blood, not robbery; he thirsted after the
39
bliss of the knife. His poor reason, however, did not
comprehend this madness and persuaded him: 'What
matters blood?" it asked; "don't you want at least to
commit a robbery with it? To take revenge?" And he
listened to his poor reason: its speech lay upon him likelead; so he robbed when he murdered. He did not
want to be ashamed of his madness.
And now the lead of his guilt lies upon him, and
again his poor reason is so stiff, so paralyzed, so heavy.
If only he could shake his head, then his burden would
roll off: but who could shake this head?
What is this man? A heap of diseases, which, through
his spirit, reach out into the world: there they want
to catch their prey.
What is this man? A ball of wild snakes, which rarely
enjoy rest from each other: so they go forth singly and
seek prey in the world.
Behold this poor body What it suffered and coveted
this poor soul interpreted for itself: it interpreted it as
murderous lust and greed for the bliss of the knife.
Those who become sick today are overcome by that
evil which is evil today: they want to hurt with that
which hurts them. But there have been other ages and
another evil and good. Once doubt was evil and the will
to self. Then the sick became heretics or witches: as
heretics or witches they suffered and wanted to inflict
suffering.
But your ears do not want to accept this: it harms
your good people, you say to me. But what matter
your good people to me? Much about your good people
nauseates me; and verily, it is not their evil. Indeed, I
wish they had a madness of which they might perish
like this pale criminal.
Verily, I wish their madness were called truth or
40
loyalty or justice: but they have their virtue in order
to live long and in wretched contentment.
I am a railing by the torrent: let those who can,
grasp mel Your crutch, however, I am not.
Thus spoke Zarathustra.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, ON THE PALE CRIMINAL
,#NFDB
944:The Right Intake Protein, protein, protein. Is there any other food group that causes so much angst? Have too little and you may be in trouble, have too much and you may be in greater trouble. Proteins are the main building blocks of the body making muscles, organs, skin and also enzymes. Thus, a lack of protein in your diet affects not only your health (think muscle deficiency and immune deficiency) but also your looks (poor skin and hair). On the other hand, excess protein can be harmful. “High protein intake can lead to dehydration and also increase the risk of gout, kidney afflictions, osteoporosis as well as some forms of cancer,” says Taranjeet Kaur, metabolic balance coach and senior nutritionist at AktivOrtho. However, there are others who disagree with her. "In normal people a high-protein natural diet is not harmful. In people who are taking artificial protien supplements , the level of harm depends upon the kind of protein and other elements in the supplement (for example, caffiene, etc.) For people with a pre- existing, intestinal, kidney or liver disease, a high-protein diet can be harmful," says leading nutritionist Shikha Sharma, managing director of Nutri-Health. However, since too much of anything can never be good, the trick is to have just the right amount of protein in your diet. But how much is the right amount? As a ballpark figure, the US Institute of Medicine recommends 0.8 gm of protein per kilogram of body weight. This amounts to 56 gm per day for a 70 kg man and 48 gm per day for a 60 kg woman. However, the ‘right’ amount of protein for you will depend upon many factors including your activity levels, age, muscle mass, physical goals and the current state of health. A teenager, for example, needs more protein than a middle-aged sedentary man. Similarly, if you work out five times a day for an hour or so, your protein requirement will go up to 1.2-1.5 gm per kg of body weight. So if you are a 70kg man who works out actively, you will need nearly 105 gm of protein daily. Proteins are crucial, even when you are trying to lose weight. As you know, in order to lose weight you need to consume fewer calories than what you burn. Proteins do that in two ways. First, they curb your hunger and make you feel full. In fact, proteins have a greater and prolonged satiating effect as compared to carbohydrates and fats. “If you have proteins in each of your meals, you have lesser cravings for snacks and other such food items,” says Kaur. By dulling your hunger, proteins can help prevent obesity, diabetes and heart disease. Second, eating proteins boosts your metabolism by up to 80-100 calories per day, helping you lose weight. In a study conducted in the US, women who increased protein intake to 30 per cent of calories, ended up eating 441 fewer calories per day, leading to weight loss. Kaur recommends having one type of protein per meal and three different types of proteins each day to comply with the varied amino acid requirements of the body. She suggests that proteins should be well distributed at each meal instead of concentrating on a high protein diet only at dinner or lunch. “Moreover, having one protein at a time helps the body absorb it better and it helps us decide which protein suits our system and how much of it is required by us individually. For example, milk may not be good for everyone; it may help one person but can produce digestive problems in the other,” explains Kaur. So what all should you eat to get your daily dose of protein? Generally speaking, animal protein provides all the essential amino acids in the right ratio for us to make full use of them. For instance, 100 gm of chicken has 30 gm of protein while 75gm of cottage cheese (paneer) has only 8 gm of proteins (see chart). But that doesn’t mean you need to convert to a non-vegetarian in order to eat more proteins, clarifies Sharma. There are plenty of vegetarian options such as soya, tofu, sprouts, pulses, cu ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
945:Zarathustra's Speeches
ON THE THREE METAMORPHOSES
Of three metamorphoses of the spirit I tell you: how
the spirit becomes a camel; and the camel, a lion; and
the lion, finally, a child.
There is much that is difficult for the spirit, the
strong reverent spirit that would bear much: but the
difficult and the most difficult are what its strength
demands.
26
What is difficult? asks the spirit that would bear
much, and kneels down like a camel wanting to be
well loaded. What is most difficult, 0 heroes, asks the
spirit that would bear much, that I may take it upon
myself and exult in my strength? Is it not humbling
oneself to wound one's haughtiness? Letting one's folly
shine to mock one's wisdom?
Or is it this: parting from our cause when it
triumphs? Climbing high mountains to tempt the
tempter?
Or is it this: feeding on the acorns and grass of
knowledge and, for the sake of the truth, suffering
hunger in one's soul?
Or is it this: being sick and sending home the comforters and making friends with the deaf, who never
hear what you want?
Or is it this: stepping into filthy waters when they
are the waters of truth, and not repulsing cold frogs
and hot toads?
Or is it this: loving those who despise us and offering a hand to the ghost that would frighten us?
All these most difficult things the spirit that would
bear much takes upon itself: like the camel that, burdened, speeds into the desert, thus the spirit speeds
into its desert.
In the loneliest desert, however, the second metamorphosis occurs: here the spirit becomes a lion who
would conquer his freedom and be master in his own
desert. Here he seeks out his last master: he wants to
fight him and his last god; for ultimate victory he
wants to fight with the great dragon.
Who is the great dragon whom the spirit will no
longer call lord and god? "Thou shalt" is the name of
the great dragon. But the spirit of the lion says, 'I
27
will." 'Thou shalt" lies in his way, sparkling like gold,
an animal covered with scales; and on every scale
shines a golden "thou shalt."
Values, thousands of years old, shine on these scales;
and thus speaks the mightiest of all dragons: "All value
of all things shines on me. All value has long been
created, and I am all created value. Verily, there shall
be no more 'I will.'" Thus speaks the dragon.
My brothers, why is there a need in the spirit for
the lion? Why is not the beast of burden, which renounces and is reverent, enough?
To create new values-that even the lion cannot do;
but the creation of freedom for oneself for new creation-that is within the power of the lion. The creation of freedom for oneself and a sacred "No" even to
duty-for that, my brothers, the lion is needed. To
assume the right to new values-that is the most terrifying assumption for a reverent spirit that would bear
much. Verily, to him it is preying, and a matter for a
beast of prey. He once loved "thou shalt" as most
sacred: now he must find illusion and caprice even in
the most sacred, that freedom from his love may become his prey: the lion is needed for such prey.
But say, my brothers, what can the child do that
even the lion could not do? Why must the preying lion
still become a child? The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-propelled
wheel, a first movement, a sacred "Yes." For the game
of creation, my brothers, a sacred "Yes" is needed: the
spirit now wills his own will, and he who had been
lost to the world now conquers his own world.
Of three metamorphoses of the spirit I have told
you: how the spirit became a camel; and the cameL a
lion; and the lion, finally, a child.
Thus spoke Zarathustra. And at that time he sojourned in the town that is called The Motley Cow.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, ON THE THREE METAMORPHOSES
,#NFDB
946:Appletrees
Sweet appletree, your branches delight me,
Luxuriantly budding my pride and joy!
I will put before the lord of Macreu,
That on Wednesday, in the valley of Machawy
Blood will flow.
Lloegyr's (England's) blades will shine.
But hear, O little pig! on Thursday
The Cymry will rejoyce
In their defence of Cymimawd,
Furiously cutting and thrusting.
The Saesons (Saxons) will be slaughtered by our ashen spears,
And their heads used as footballs.
I prophesy the unvarnished truth The rising of a child in the secluded South.
II
Sweet and luxuriant appletree,
Great its branches, beautiful its form!
I predict a battle that fills me with far.
At Pengwern, men drink mead,
But around Cyminawd is a deadly hewing
By a chieftain from Eryri - til only hatred remains.
III
Sweet yellow appletree,
Growing in Tal Ardd,
I predict a battle at Prydyn,
In defense of frontiers.
Seven ships will come
Across a wide lake,
Seven hundred men come to conquer.
Of those who come, only seven will return
According to my prophecy.
IV
Sweet appletree of luxuriant growth!
I used to find food at its foot,
When because of a maid,
53
I slept alone in the woods of Celyddon,
Shield on shoulder, sword on ,
Hear, 0 little pig! listen to my
As sweet as birds that sing on Monday
When the sovereigns come across the sea,
Blessed by the Cymry (Welsh), because of their strength.
Sweet appletree in the glade,
Trodden is the earth around its base.
The men of Rhydderch see me not,
Gwendyyd no longer loves nor greets me
I am hated by Rhydderch's strongest scion.
I have despoiled both his son and daughter:
Death visits them all - why not me?
After Gwnddoleu no one shall honour me,
No diversions attend me,
No fair women visit me.
Though at Arderydd (Arthuret) I wore a golden torque
The swan-white woman despises me now.
VI
Sweet appletree, growing by the river,
Who will thrive on its wondrous fruit?
When my reason was intact
I used to lie at its foot
With a fair wanton maid, of slender form.
Fifty years the plaything of lawless en
I have wandered in gloom among spirits
After great wealth, and gregarious minstrels,
I have been here so long not even sprites
Can lead me astray. I never sleep, but tremble at the thought
Of my Lord Gwenddoleu, and y own native people.
Long have I suffered unease and longingMay I be given freedom in the end.
VII
Sweet appletree, with delicate blossom,
Growing concealed, in the wind!
At the tale was told to me
That my words had offended the most powerful minister,
Not once, not twice, but thrice in a single day.
54
Christ! that my end has come
Before the killing of Gwndydd's son
Was upon my hands!
VIII
Sweet appletree with your delicate blossom,
Growing amid the thickets of trees!
Chwyfleian foretells,
A tale that will come to pass
A staff of gold, signifying bravery
Will be given by the glorious Dragon Kings.
The grateful one will vanquish the profaner,
Before the child, bright and bold,
The Saesons shall fall, and bards will flourish
IX
Sweet appletree of crimson colour,
Growing, concealed in the wood of Celyddon:
Though men seek your fruit, their search is vain
Until Cadwaladyr comes from Cadfaon's meeting
To Teiwi river and Tywi's lands,
Till anger and anguish come from Arawynion,
And the long-hairs are tamed.
Sweet appletree of crimson colour,
Crowing, concealed, in the wood of Celyddon
Though men seek your fruit, their search is vain,
Till Cadwalad comes from Rhyd Rheon's meeting,
And with Cynon advances against the Saeson.
Victorious Cymry, glorious their leaden,
All shall how their rights again,
All Britons rejoice, sounding joyful horns.
Chanting songs of happiness and peace!
~ Anonymous Olde English,#NFDB
947:discovered the painter's body, an apparent suicide. That same year, the Thaxters
bought 186 acres (75 hectares) along Seapoint Beach on Cutts Island, Kittery
Point, where they built a grand Shingle Style "cottage" called Champernowne
Farm. In 1880, they auctioned the Newtonville house, and by 1881, moved to
the new home. It stayed in the family until the 1989 death of her granddaughter
and biographer, Rosamond Thaxter.
Her poems first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly and she became one of
America's favorite authors in the late 19th century. Among her best-known
poems are The Burgomaster Gull, Landlocked, Milking, The Great White Owl, The
Kingfisher, and especially The Sandpiper.
~ Celia Thaxter
died suddenly while on Appledore Island. She was buried not far
from her cottage, which unfortunately burned in the 1914 fire that destroyed The
Appledore House hotel.
A Tryst
From out the desolation of the North
An iceberg took it away,
From its detaining comrades breaking forth,
And traveling night and day.
At whose command? Who bade it sail the deep
With that resistless force?
Who made the dread appointment it must keep?
Who traced its awful course?
To the warm airs that stir in the sweet South,
A good ship spread her sails;
Stately she passed beyond the harbor's mouth,
Chased by the favoring gales;
And on her ample decks a happy crowd
Bade the fair land good-by;
Clear shone the day, with not a single cloud
In all the peaceful sky.
Brave men, sweet women, little children bright
For all these she made room,
And with her freight of beauty and delight
She went to meet her doom.
Storms buffeted the iceberg, spray was swept
Across its loftiest height;
Guided alike by storm and calm, it kept
Its fatal path aright.
Then warmer waves gnawed at its crumbling base,
As if in piteous plea;
The ardent sun sent slow tears down its face
Soft flowing to the sea.
Dawn kissed it with her tender rose tints. Eve
Bathed it in violet,
The wistful color o'er it seemed to grieve
With a divine regret.
Whether Day clad its clefts in rainbows dim
And shadowy as a dream,
Or Night through lonely spaces saw it swim
White in the moonlight's gleam,
Ever Death rode upon its solemn heights,
Ever his watch he kept;
Cold at its heart through changing days and nights
Its changeless purpose slept.
And where afar a smiling coast it passed,
Straightway the air grew chill;
Dwellers thereon perceived a bitter blast,
A vague report of ill.
Like some imperial creature, moving slow,
Meanwhile, with matchless grace,
The stately ship, unconscious of her foe,
Drew near the trysting place.
For still the prosperous breezes followed her,
And half the voyage was o'er;
In many a breast glad thoughts began to stir
Of lands that lay before.
And human hearts with longing love were dumb,
That soon should cease to beat,
Thrilled with the hope of meetings soon to come,
And lost in memories sweet.
Was not the weltering waste of water wide
Enough for both to sail?
What drew the two together o'er the tide,
Fair ship and iceberg pale?
There came a night with neither moon nor star,
Clouds draped the sky in black;
With fluttering canvas reefed at every spar,
And weird fire in her track,
The ship swept on; a wild wind gathering fast
Drove her at utmost speed.
Bravely she bent before the fitful blast
That shook her like a reed.
0 helmsman, turn thy wheel! Will no surmise
Cleave through the midnight drear?
No warning of the horrible surprise
Reach thine unconscious ear?
She rushed upon her ruin. Not a flash
Broke up the waiting dark;
Dully through wind and sea one awful crash
Sounded, with none to mark.
Scarcely her crew had time to clutch despair.
So swift the work was done:
Ere their pale lips could frame a speechless prayer,
They perished, every one!
~ Celia Thaxter,#NFDB
948: THE DANCING
SONG
One evening Zarathustra walked through a forest
with his disciples; and as he sought a well, behold, he
came upon a green meadow, silently surrounded by
trees and shrubs, and upon it girls were dancing with
each other. As soon as the girls recognized Zarathustra
they ceased dancing. But Zarathustra walked up to
them with a friendly gesture and spoke these words:
"Do not cease dancing, you lovely girls No killjoy
has come to you with evil eyes, no enemy of girls. God's
advocate am I before the devil: but the devil is the
spirit of gravity. How could I, you lightfooted ones, be
an enemy of godlike dances? Or of girls' feet with
pretty ankles?
"Indeed, I am a forest and a night of dark trees: but
he who is not afraid of my darkness will also find rose
slopes under my cypresses. And he will also find the
little god whom girls like best: beside the well he lies,
still, with his eyes shut. Verily, in bright daylight he
fell asleep, the sluggard Did he chase after butterflies
too much? Do not be angry with me, you beautiful
dancers, if I chastise the little god a bit. He may cry
and weep-but he is laughable even when he weeps.
And with tears in his eyes he shall ask you for a dance,
and I myself will sing a song for his dance: a dancing and mocking song on the spirit of gravity, my supreme and most powerful devil, of whom they say that
he is 'the master of the world.'"
And this is the song that Zarathustra sang while
Cupid and the girls danced together:
Into your eyes I looked recently, 0 life! And into
the unfathomable I then seemed to be sinking. But
you pulled me out with a golden fishing rod; and you
laughed mockingly when I called you unfathomable.
"Thus runs the speech of all fish," you said; "what
they do not fathom is unfathomable. But I am merely
changeable and wild and a woman in every way, and
not virtuous-even if you men call me profound, faithful, eternal, and mysterious. But you men always present us with your own virtues, 0 you virtuous men!"
Thus she laughed, the incredible one; but I never
believe her and her laughter when she speaks ill of
herself.
And when I talked in confidence with my wild wisdom she said to me in anger, "You will, you want, you
love-that is the only reason why you praise life." Then
109
I almost answered wickedly and told the angry woman
the truth; and there is no more wicked answer than
telling one's wisdom the truth.
For thus matters stand among the three of us: Deeply
I love only life-and verily, most of all when I hate life.
But that I am well disposed toward wisdom, and often
too well, that is because she reminds me so much of
life. She has her eyes, her laugh, and even her little
golden fishing rod: is it my fault that the two
look so similar?
And when life once asked me, "Who is this wisdom?"
I answered fervently, "Oh yes, wisdom One thirsts
after her and is never satisfied; one looks through veils,
one grabs through nets. Is she beautiful? How should
I know? But even the oldest carps are baited with her.
She is changeable and stubborn; often I have seen her
bite her lip and comb her hair against the grain. Perhaps she is evil and false and a female in every way;
but just when she speaks ill of herself she is most
seductive."
When I said this to life she laughed sarcastically and
closed her eyes. "Of whom are you speaking?" she
asked; "no doubt, of me. And even if you are right
-should that be said to my face? But now speak of
your wisdom too."
Ah, and then you opened your eyes again, 0 beloved
life. And again I seemed to myself to be sinking into
the unfathomable.
Thus sang Zarathustra. But when the dance was over
and the girls had gone away, he grew sad.
"The sun has set long ago," he said at last; "the
meadow is moist, a chill comes from the woods. Something unknown is around me and looks thoughtfuL
What? Are you still alive, Zarathustra?
110
"Why? What for? By what? Whither? Where? How?
Is it not folly still to be alive?
"Alas, my friends, it is the evening that asks thus
through me. Forgive me my sadness. Evening has come;
forgive me that evening has come."
Thus spoke Zarathustra.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, THE DANCING SONG
,#NFDB
949: ON THE THOUSAND AND ONE GOALS
Zarathustra saw many lands and many peoples: thus
he discovered the good and evil of many peoples. And
Zarathustra found no greater power on earth than good
and evil.
No people could live without first esteeming; but if
they want to preserve themselves, then they must not
esteem as the neighbor esteems. Much that was good to
one people was scorn and infamy to another: thus I
found it. Much I found called evil here, and decked
out with purple honors there. Never did one neighbor
understand the other: ever was his soul amazed at the
neighbor's delusion and wickedness.
A tablet of the good hangs over every people. Behold, it is the tablet of their overcomings; behold, it
is the voice of their will to power.
Praiseworthy is whatever seems difficult to a people;
whatever seems indispensable and difficult is called
good; and whatever liberates even out of the deepest
need, the rarest, the most difficult-that they call holy.
Whatever makes them rule and triumph and shine,
to the awe and envy of their neighbors, that is to them
the high, the first, the measure, the meaning of all
things.
Verily, my brother, once you have recognized the
need and land and sky and neighbor of a people, you
may also guess the law of their overcomings, and why
they climb to their hope on this ladder.
"You shall always be the first and excel all others:
your jealous soul shall love no one, unless it be the
friend"-that made the soul of the Greek quiver: thus
he walked the path of his greatness.
59
"To speak the truth and to handle bow and arrow
well"-that seemed both dear and difficult to the
people who gave me my name-the name which is
both dear and difficult to me.
"To honor father and mother and to follow their
will to the root of one's soul"- this was the tablet of
overcoming that another people hung up over themselves and became powerful and eternal thereby.
"To practice loyalty and, for the sake of loyalty, to
risk honor and blood even for evil and dangerous
things"-with this teaching another people conquered
themselves; and through this self-conquest they became
pregnant and heavy with great hopes.
Verily, men gave themselves all their good and evil.
Verily, they did not take it, they did not find it, nor
did it come to them as a voice from heaven. Only
man placed values in things to preserve himself-he
alone created a meaning for things, a human meaning.
Therefore he calls himself "man," which means: the
esteemed.
To esteem is to create: hear this, you creators! Esteeming itself is of all esteemed things the most estimable treasure. Through esteeming alone is there value:
and without esteeming, the nut of existence would
be hollow. Hear this, you creators
Change of values-that is a change of creators. Whoever must be a creator always annihilates.
First, peoples were creators; and only in later times,
individuals. Verily, the individual himself is still the
most recent creation.
Once peoples hung a tablet of the good over themselves. Love which would rule and love which would
obey have together created such tablets.
The delight in the herd is more ancient than the
60
delight in the ego; and as long as the good conscience
is identified with the herd, only the bad conscience
says: I.
Verily, the clever ego, the loveless ego that desires
its own profit in the profit of the many-that is not
the origin of the herd, but its going under.
Good and evil have always been created by lovers
and creators. The fire of love glows in the names of
all the virtues, and the fire of wrath.
Zarathustra saw many lands and many peoples. No
greater power did Zarathustra find on earth than the
works of the lovers: "good" and "evil" are their names.
Verily, a monster is the power of this praising and
censuring. Tell me, who will conquer it, 0 brothers?
Tell me, who will throw a yoke over the thousand
necks of this beast?
A thousand goals have there been so far, for there
have been a thousand peoples. Only the yoke for the
thousand necks is still lacking: the one goal is lacking.
Humanity still has no goal.
But tell me, my brothers, if humanity still lacks a
goal-is humanity itself not still lacking too?
Thus spoke Zarathustra.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, ON THE THOUSAND AND ONE GOALS
,#NFDB
950: ON THE LAND
OF EDUCATION
I flew too far into the future: dread overcame me.
and when I looked around, behold, time was my sole
contemporary. Then I flew back toward home, faster
and faster; and thus I came to you, 0 men of today,
and into the land of education. For the first time I
really had eyes for you, and a genuine desire; verily, it
was with longing in my heart that I came.
But what happened to me? For all my anxiety I had
to laugh. Never had my eyes beheld anything so dappled and motley. I laughed and laughed while my foot
was still trembling, and my heart no less. "This is
clearly the home of all paint pots," I said.
With fifty blotches painted on your faces and limbs
you were sitting there, and I was amazed, you men of
today. And with fifty mirrors around you to flatter and
echo your color display! Verily, you could wear no better masks, you men of today, than your own faces! Who
could possibly find you out?
With the characters of the past written all over you,
and these characters in turn painted over with new
characters: thus have you concealed yourselves perfectly from all interpreters of characters. And even if
one could try the reins, who would be fool enough to
believe that you have reins? You seem baked out of
colors and pasted notes. Motley, all ages and peoples
120
peek out of your veils; motley, all customs and faiths
speak out of your gestures.
If one took the veils and wraps and colors and
gestures away from you, just enough would be left to
scare away the crows. Verily, I myself am the scared
crow who once saw you naked and without color;
and I flew away when the skeleton beckoned to me
lovingly. Rather would I be a day laborer in Hades
among the shades of the past! Even the underworldly
are plumper and fuller than you.
This, indeed this, is bitterness for my bowels, that
I can endure you neither naked nor clothed, you men
of today. All that is uncanny in the future and all that
has ever made fugitive birds shudder is surely more
comfortable and cozy than your "reality." For thus you
speak: "Real are we entirely, and without belief or
superstition." Thus you stick out your chests-but alas,
they are hollow! Indeed, how should you be capable
of any belief, being so dappled and motley-you who
are paintings of all that men have ever believed? You
are walking refutations of all belief, and you break the
limbs of all thought. Unbelievable: thus I call you, for
all your pride in being real!
All ages prate against each other in your spirits; and
the dreams and ratings of all ages were yet more real
than your waking. You are sterile: that is why you lack
faith. But whoever had to create also had his prophetic
dreams and astral signs-and had faith in faith. You are
half-open gates at which the gravediggers wait. And
this is your reality: "Everything deserves to perish."
How you stand there, you who are sterile, how thin
around the ribsl And some among you probably realized
this and said, "Probably some god secretly took something from me while I slept. Verily, enough to make
121
himself a little female! Strange is the poverty of my
ribs." Thus have some men of today already spoken.
Indeed, you make me laugh, you men of today, and
particularly when you are amazed at yourselves. And 1
should be in a sorry plight if I could not laugh at your
amazement and had to drink down everything disgusting out of your bowls. But I shall take you more lightly,
for I have a heavy burden; and what does it matter to
me if bugs and winged worms still light on my bundle?
Verily, that will not make it heavier. And not from
you, you men of today, shall the great weariness come
over me.
Alas, where shall I climb now with my longing? From
all mountains I look out for fatherlands and motherlands. But home I found nowhere; a fugitive am I in
all cities and a departure at all gates. Strange and a
mockery to me are the men of today to whom my heart
recently drew me; and I am driven out of fatherlands
and motherlands. Thus I now love only my children's
land, yet undiscovered, in the farthest sea: for this I
bid my sails search and search.
In my children I want to make up for being the child
of my fathers-and to all the future, for this today.
Thus spoke Zarathustra.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, ON THE LAND OF EDUCATION
,#NFDB
951: THE CHILD WITH THE MIRROR
Then Zarathustra returned again to the mountains
and to the solitude of his cave and withdrew from men,
waiting like a sower who has scattered his seed. But his
soul grew full of impatience and desire for those whom
he loved, because he still had much to give them. For
this is what is hardest: to close the open hand because
one loves, and to keep a sense of shame as a giver.
Thus months and years passed for the solitary; but
his wisdom grew and caused him pain with its fullness.
One morning, however, he woke even before the dawn,
reflected long, lying on his bed, and at last spoke to his
heart:
Why was I so startled in my dream that I awoke?
Did not a child step up to me, carrying a mirror? "0
Zarathustra," the child said to me, 'look at yourself in
the mirror." But when I looked into the mirror I cried
out, and my heart was shaken: for it was not myself I
saw, but a devil's grimace and scornful laughter. Verily,
all-too-well do I understand the sign and admonition of
the dream: my teaching is in danger; weeds pose as
wheat. My enemies have grown powerful and have distorted my teaching till those dearest to me must be
ashamed of the gifts I gave them. I have lost my friends;
the hour has come to seek my lost ones."
With these words Zarathustra leaped up, not like a
frightened man seeking air but rather as a seer and
singer who is moved by the spirit. Amazed, his eagle
and his serpent looked at him: for, like dawn, a coming
happiness lay reflected in his face.
What has happened to me, my animals? said Zarathustra. Have I not changed? Has not bliss come to me
as a storm? My happiness is foolish and will say foolish
things: it is still young, so be patient with it. I am
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wounded by my happiness: let all who suffer be my
physicians. I may go down again to my friends, and to
my enemies too. Zarathustra may speak again and give
and do what is dearest to those dear to him. My impatient love overflows in rivers, downward, toward sunrise
and sunset. From silent mountains and thunderstorms
of suffering my soul rushes into the valleys.
Too long have I longed and looked into the distance.
Too long have I belonged to loneliness; thus I have forgotten how to be silent. Mouth have I become through
and through, and the roaring of a stream from towering
cliffs: I want to plunge my speech down into the valleys. Let the river of my love plunge where there is no
wayl How could a river fail to find its way to the sea?
Indeed, a lake is within me, solitary and self-sufficient;
but the river of my love carries it along, down to the
sea.
New ways I go, a new speech comes to me; weary I
grow, like all creators, of the old tongues. My spirit no
longer wants to walk on worn soles.
Too slowly runs all speech for me: into your chariot I
leap, storm! And even you I want to whip with my
sarcasm. Like a cry and a shout of joy I want to sweep
over wide seas, till I find the blessed isles where my
friends are dwelling. And my enemies among them
How I now love all to whom I may speak! My enemies
too are part of my bliss.
And when I want to mount my wildest horse, it is always my spear that helps me up best, as the ever-ready
servant of my foot: the spear that I hurl against my
enemies. How grateful I am to my enemies that I may
finally hurl itl
The tension of my cloud was too great: between the
laughter of lightning bolts I want to throw showers of
hail into the depths. Violently my chest will expand,
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violently will it blow its storm over the mountains and
thus find relief. Verily, like a storm come my happiness
and my freedom. But let my enemies believe that the
evil one rages over their heads.
Indeed, you too will be frightened, my friends, by my
wild wisdom; and perhaps you will flee from it, together
with my enemies. Would that I knew how to lure you
back with shepherds' flutes! Would that my lioness, wisdom, might learn how to roar tenderly And many
things have we already learned together.
My wild wisdom became pregnant on lonely mountains; on rough stones she gave birth to her young, her
youngest. Now she runs foolishly through the harsh
desert and seeks and seeks gentle turf-my old wild
wisdom. Upon your hearts' gentle turf, my friends, upon
your love she would bed her most dearly beloved.
Thus spoke Zarathustra.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, THE CHILD WITH THE MIRROR
,#NFDB
952: UPON THE BLESSED ISLES
The figs are falling from the trees; they are good and
sweet; and, as they fall, their red skin bursts. I am a
north wind to ripe figs.
Thus, like figs, these teachings fall to you, my friends;
now consume their juice and their sweet meat. It is
autumn about us, and pure sky and afternoon. Behold
what fullness there is about usl And out of such overflow
it is beautiful to look out upon distant seas. Once one
said God when one looked upon distant seas; but now
I have taught you to say: overman.
God is a conjecture; but I desire that your conjectures
should not reach beyond your creative will. Could you
create a god? Then do not speak to me of any gods. But
you could well create the overman. Perhaps not you
yourselves, my brothers. But into fathers and forefa thers
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of the overman you could re-create yourselves: and let
this be your best creation.
God is a conjecture; but I desire that your conjectures should be limited by what is thinkable. Could you
think a god? But this is what the will to truth should
mean to you: that everything be changed into what is
thinkable for man, visible for man, feelable by man. You
should think through your own senses to their consequences.
And what you have called world, that shall be created
only by you: your reason, your image, your will, your
love shall thus be realized. And verily, for your own
bliss, you lovers of knowledge.
And how would you bear life without this hope, you
lovers of knowledge? You could not have been born
either into the incomprehensible or into the irrational.
But let me reveal my heart to you entirely, my
friends: if there were gods, how could I endure not to
be a godl Hence there are no gods. Though I drew this
conclusion, now it draws me.
God is a conjecture; but who could drain all the
agony of this conjecture without dying? Shall his faith
be taken away from the creator, and from the eagle, his
soaring to eagle heights?
God is a thought that makes crooked all that is
straight, and makes turn whatever stands. How? Should
time be gone, and all that is impermanent a mere lie?
To think this is a dizzy whirl for human bones, and a
vomit for the stomach; verily, I call it the turning sickness to conjecture thus. Evil I call it, and misanthropic
-all this teaching of the One and the Plenum and the
Unmoved and the Sated and the Permanent. All the
permanent-that is only a parable. And the poets lie
too much.
It is of time and becoming that the best parables
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should speak: let them be a praise and a justification of
all impermanence.
Creation-that is the great redemption from suffering,
and life's growing light. But that the creator may be,
suffering is needed and much change. Indeed, there
must be much bitter dying in your life, you creators.
Thus are you advocates and justifiers of all impermanence. To be the child who is newly born, the creator
must also want to be the mother who gives birth and
the pangs of the birth-giver.
Verily, through a hundred souls I have already passed
on my way, and through a hundred cradles and birth
pangs. Many a farewell have I taken; I know the heartrending last hours. But thus my creative will, my destiny, wills it. Or, to say it more honestly: this very
destiny-my will wills.
Whatever in me has feeling, suffers and is in prison;
but my will always comes to me as my liberator and
joy-bringer. Willing liberates: that is the true teaching
of will and liberty-thus Zarathustra teaches it. Willing
no more and esteeming no more and creating no moreoh, that this great weariness might always remain far
from mel In knowledge too I feel only my will's joy in
begetting and becoming; and if there is innocence in
my knowledge, it is because the will to beget is in it.
Away from God and gods this will has lured me; what
could one create if gods existed?
But my fervent will to create impels me ever again
toward man; thus is the hammer impelled toward the
stone. 0 men, in the stone there sleeps an image,
the image of my images. Alas, that it must sleep in the
hardest, the ugliest stone! Now my hammer rages
cruelly against its prison. Pieces of rock rain from the
stone: what is that to me? I want to perfect it; for a
shadow came to me-the stillest and lightest of all
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things once came to me. The beauty of the overman
came to me as a shadow. 0 my brothers, what are the
gods to me now?
Thus spoke Zarathustra.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, UPON THE BLESSED ISLES
,#NFDB
953: ON THE PITYING
My friends, a gibe was related to your friend: "Look
at Zarathustral Does he not walk among us as if we
were animals?"
But it were better said: "He who has knowledge
walks among men as among animals."
To him who has knowledge, man himself is "the
animal with red cheeks." How did this come about? Is
it not because man has had to be ashamed too often?
0 my friends Thus speaks he who has knowledge:
shame, shame, shame-that is the history of man. And
that is why he who is noble bids himself not to shame:
shame he imposes on himself before all who suffer.
Verily, I do not like them, the merciful who feel
blessed in their pity: they are lacking too much in
shame. If I must pity, at least I do not want it known;
and if I do pity, it is preferably from a distance.
I should also like to shroud my face and flee before
I am recognized; and thus I bid you do, my friends.
Would that my destiny led those like you, who do not
suffer, across my way, and those with whom I may
share hope and meal and honey. Verily, I may have
done this and that for sufferers; but always I seemed to
have done better when I learned to feel better joys. As
long as there have been men, man has felt too little joy:
that alone, my brothers, is our original sin. And learning
better to feel joy, we learn best not to hurt others or to
plan hurts for them.
Therefore I wash my hand when it has helped the
sufferer; therefore I wipe even my soul. Having seen the
sufferer suffer, I was ashamed for the sake of his shame;
and when I helped him, I transgressed grievously
against his pride.
Great indebtedness does not make men grateful, but
vengeful; and if a little charity is not forgotten, it turns
into a gnawing worm.
"Be reserved in accepting! Distinguish by accepting!"
Thus I advise those who have nothing to give.
But I am a giver of gifts. I like to give, as a friend to
friends. Strangers, however, and the poor may themselves pluck the fruit from my tree: that will cause them
less shame.
But beggars should be abolished entirely! Verily, it is
annoying to give to them and it is annoying not to give
to them.
And also sinners and bad consciences! Believe me, my
friends: the bite of conscience teaches men to bite.
Worst of all, however, are petty thoughts. Verily,
even evil deeds are better than petty thoughts.
To be sure, you say: "The pleasure in a lot of petty
nastiness saves us from many a big evil deed." But here
one should not wish to save.
An evil deed is like a boil: it itches and irritates and
breaks open-it speaks honestly. "Behold, I am disease"
-thus speaks the evil deed; that is its honesty.
But a petty thought is like a fungus: it creeps and
stoops and does not want to be anywhere-until the
whole body is rotten and withered with little fungi.
But to him who is possessed by the devil I whisper
this' word: "Better for you to rear up your devil! Even
for you there is still a way to greatness!"
My brothers, one knows a little too much about
everybody. And we can even see through some men and
yet we can by no means pass through them.
It is difficult to live with people because it is so difficult to be silent. And not against him who is repugnant
to us are we most unfair, but against him who is no
concern of ours.
But if you have a suffering friend, be a resting place
for his suffering, but a hard bed as it were, a field cot:
thus will you profit him best.
And if a friend does you evil, then say: 'I forgive
you what you did to me; but that you have done it to
yourself-how could I forgive that?" Thus speaks all
great love: it overcomes even forgiveness and pity.
One ought to hold on to one's heart; for if one lets it
go, one soon loses control of the head too. Alas, where
in the world has there been more folly than among the
pitying? And what in the world has caused more suffering than the folly of the pitying? Woe to all who love
without having a height that is above their pityl
Thus spoke the devil to me once: "God too has his
hell: that is his love of man." And most recently I heard
him say this: "God is dead; God died of his pity for
man.
Thus be warned of pity: from there a heavy cloud
will yet come to man. Verily, I understand weather
signs. But mark this too: all great love is even above all
its pity; for it still wants to create the beloved.
"Myself I sacrifice to my love, and my neighbor as
myself}-thus runs the speech of all creators. But all
creators are hard.
Thus spoke Zarathustra.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, ON THE PITYING
,#NFDB
954: ON THE GREAT LONGING
o my soul, I taught you to say "today' and "one day"
and "formerly" and to dance away over all Here and
There and Yonder.
o my soul, I delivered you from all nooks; I brushed
dust, spiders, and twihght off you.
0 my soul, I washed the little bashfulness and the
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nook-virtue off you and persuaded you to stand naked
before the eyes of the sun. With the storm that is called
"spirit" I blew over your wavy sea; I blew all clouds
away; I even strangled the strangler that is called "sin."
o my soul, I gave you the right to say No like the
storm, and to say Yes as the clear sky says Yes: now you
are still as light whether you stand or walk through
storms of negation.
o my soul, I gave you back the freedom over the
created and untreated; and who knows, as you know,
the voluptuous delight of what is yet to come?
o my soul, I taught you the contempt that does not
come like the worm's gnawing, the great, the loving
contempt that loves most where it despises most.
o my soul, I taught you to persuade so well that you
persuade the very ground-like the sun who persuades
even the sea to his own height.
o my soul, I took from you all obeying, knee-bending,
and "Lord"-saying; I myself gave you the name "cessation of need" and "destiny."
o my soul, I gave you new names and colorful toys;
I called you "destiny" and "circumference of circumferences" and "umbilical cord of time" and "azure bell."
o my soul, I gave your soil all wisdom to drink, all
the new wines and also all the immemorially old strong
wines of wisdom.
o my soul, I poured every sun out on you, and every
night and every silence and every longing: then you
grew up like a vine.
o my soul, overrich and heavy you now stand there,
like a vine with swelling udders and crowded brown
gold-grapes-crowded and pressed by your happiness,
waiting in your superabundance and still bashful about
waiting.
0 my soul, now there is not a soul anywhere that
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would be more loving and comprehending and comprehensive. Where would future and past dwell closer together than in you?
o my soul, I gave you all, and I have emptied all my
hands to you; and now-now you say to me, smiling
and full of melancholy, "Which of us has to be thankful? Should not the giver be thankful that the receiver
received? Is not giving a need? Is not receiving mercy?"
o my soul, I understand the smile of your melancholy: now your own overrichness stretches out longing
hands. Your fullness gazes over roaring, seas and seeks
and waits; the longing of overfullness gazes out of the
smiling skies of your eyes. And verily, 0 my soul, who
could see your smile and not be melted by tears? The
angels themselves are melted by tears because of the
overgraciousness of your smile. Your graciousness and
overgraciousness do not want to lament and weep; and
yet, 0 my soul, your smile longs for tears and your
trembling mouth for sobs. "Is not all weeping a lamentation? And all lamentation an accusation?" Thus you
speak to yourself, and therefore, my soul, you would
sooner smile than pour out your suffering-pour out
into plunging tears all your suffering over your fullness
and over the vine's urge for the vintage and his knife.
But if you will not weep, not weep out your crimson
melancholy, then you will have to sing, 0 my soul. Behold, I myself smile as I say this before you: sing with
a roaring song till all seas are silenced, that they may
listen to your longing-till over silent, longing seas the
bark floats, the golden wonder around whose gold all
good, bad, wondrous things leap-also many great and
small animals and whatever has light, wondrous feet for
running on paths blue as violets-toward the golden
wonder, the voluntary bark and its master; but that is
the vintage who is waiting with his diamond knife-
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your great deliverer, 0 my soul, the nameless one for
whom only future songs will find names. And verily,
even now your breath is fragrant with future songs;
even now you are glowing and dreaming and drinking
thirstily from all deep and resounding wells of comfort;
even now your melancholy is resting in the happiness of
future songs.
0 my soul, now I have given you all, and even the
last I had, and I have emptied all my hands to you:
that I bade you sing, behold, that was the last I had.
That I bade you sing-speak now, speak: which of us
has to be thankful now? Better yet, however: sing to
me, sing, 0 my soul And let me be thankful.
Thus spoke Zarathustra.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, ON THE GREAT LONGING
,#NFDB
955:THE
OTHER DANCING
SONG
1
Into your eyes I looked recently, 0 life: I saw gold
blinking in your night-eye; my heart stopped in delight:
a golden boat I saw blinking on nocturnal waters, a
golden rocking-boat, sinking, drinking, and winking
again. At my foot, frantic to dance, you cast a glance, a
laughing, questioning, melting rocking-glance: twice
only you stirred your rattle with your small hands, and
my foot was already rocking with dancing frenzy.
My heels twitched, then my toes hearkened to understand you, and rose: for the dancer has his ear in his
toes.
I leaped toward you, but you fled back from my leap,
and the tongue of your fleeing, flying hair licked me in
its sweep.
Away from you I leaped, and from your serpents' ire;
and already you stood there, half turned, your eyes full
of desire.
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With crooked glances you teach me-crooked ways;
on crooked ways my foot learns treachery.
I fear you near, I love you far; your flight lures me,
your seeking cures me: I suffer, but what would I not
gladly suffer for you?
You, whose coldness fires, whose hatred seduces,
whose flight binds, whose scorn inspires:
Who would not hate you, you great binder, entwiner,
temptress, seeker, and finder? Who would not love you,
you innocent, impatient, wind-swift, child-eyed sinner?
Whereto are you luring me now, you never-tame extreme? And now you are fleeing from me again, you
sweet wildcat and ingratel
I dance after you, I follow wherever your traces
linger. Where are you? Give me your hand! Or only one
finger
Here are caves and thickets; we shall get lost. Stop!
Stand still Don't you see owls and bats whirring past?
You owll You batl Intent to confound Where are we?
Such howling and yelping you have learned from a
hound.
Your lovely little white teeth are gnashing at me; out
of a curly little mane your evil eyes are flashing at me.
That is a dance up high and down low: I am the
hunter; would you be my dog or my doe?
Alongside me nowl And swift, you malicious leaping
belle! Now up and over there Alas, as I leaped I fell.
Oh, see me lying there, you prankster, suing for
grace. I should like to walk with you in a lovelier place.
Love's paths through silent bushes, past many-hued
plants. Or there along that lake: there goldfish swim
and dance.
You are weary now? Over there are sunsets and
sheep: when shepherds play on their flutes-is it not
lovely to sleep?
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You are so terribly weary? I'll carry you there; just
let your arms sink. And if you are thirsty-I have got
something, but your mouth does not want it to drink.
Oh, this damned nimble, supple snake and slippery
witch! Where are you? In my face two red blotches
from your hand itch.
I am verily weary of always being your sheepish
shepherd. You witch, if I have so far sung to you, now
you shall cry.
Keeping time with my whip, you shall dance and cryl
Or have I forgotten the whip? Not II
2
Then life answered me thus, covering up her delicate
ears: "O Zarathustra, don't crack your whip so frightfullyl After all, you know that noise murders thoughtand just now such tender thoughts are coming to me. We
are both two real good-for-nothings and evil-for-nothings. Beyond good and evil we found our island and
our green meadow-we two alone. Therefore we had
better like each other. And even if we do not love each
other from the heart-need we bear each other a
grudge if we do not love each other from the heart?
And that I like you, often too well, that you know; and
the reason is that I am jealous of your wisdom. Oh, this
mad old fool of a wisdom! If your wisdom ever ran
away from you, then my love would quickly run away
from you too."
Then life looked back and around thoughtfully and
said softly: "O Zarathustra, you are not faithful enough
to me. You do not love me nearly as much as you say;
I know you are thinking of leaving me soon. There is
an old heavy, heavy growl-bell that growls at night all
the way up to your cave; when you hear this bell strike
the hour at midnight, then you think between one and
227
twelve-you think, 0 Zarathustra, I know it, of how you
want to leave me soon."
"Yes," I answered hesitantly, "but you also know-"
and I whispered something into her ear, right through
her tangled yellow foolish tresses.
"You know that, 0 Zarathustra? Nobody knows that."
And we looked at each other and gazed on the green
meadow over which the cool evening was running just
then, and we wept together. But then life was dearer to
me than all my wisdom ever was.
Thus spoke Zarathustra.
3
One!
0 man, take care
Two!
What does the deep midnight declare?
Three
"I was asleepFour!
"From a deep dream I woke and swear:
Five!
"The world is deep,
Six!
"Deeper than day had been aware.
Seven!
"Deep is its woe;
Eight!
"Joy-deeper yet than agony:
Nine!
"Woe implores: Gol
Ten!
"But all joy wants eternity-
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Eleven!
'Wants deep, wants deep eternity."
Twelve!
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, THE OTHER DANCING SONG
,#NFDB
956:AT NOON
And Zarathustra ran and ran and did not find anybody any more, and he was alone and found himself
again and again, and he enjoyed and quaffed his
solitude and thought of good things for hours. But
around the hour of noon, when the sun stood straight
over Zarathustra's head, he came to an old crooked
and knotty tree that was embraced, and hidden from
itself, by the rich love of a grapevine; and yellow
276
grapes hung from it in abundance, inviting the wanderer. Then he felt the desire to quench a slight thirst
and to break off a grape; but even as he was stretching out his arm to do so, he felt a still greater desire for
something else: namely, to lie down beside the tree at
the perfect noon hour, and to sleep.
This Zarathustra did; and as soon as he lay on the
ground in the stillness and secrecy of the many-hued
grass, he forgot his slight thirst and fell asleep. For, as
Zarathustra's proverb says, one thing is more necessary
than another. Only his eyes remained open: for they
did not tire of seeing and praising the tree and the
love of the grapevine. Falling asleep, however, Zarathustra spoke thus to his heart:
Still! Still! Did not the world become perfect just
now? What is happening to me? As a delicate wind
dances unseen on an inlaid sea, light, feather-light,
thus sleep dances on me. My eyes he does not close,
my soul he leaves awake. Light he is, verily, featherlight. He persuades me, I know not how. He touches
me inwardly with caressing hands, he conquers me. Yes,
he conquers me and makes my soul stretch out: how
she is becoming long and tired, my strange soul! Did
the eve of a seventh day come to her at noon? Has she
already roamed happily among good and ripe things
too long? She stretches out long, long-longer. She
lies still, my strange soul. Too much that is good has
she tasted; this golden sadness oppresses her, she makes
a wry mouth.
Like a ship that has sailed into its stillest cove-now
it leans against the earth, tired of the long voyages
and the uncertain seas. Is not the earth more faithful?
The way such a ship lies close to, and nestles to, the
land-it is enough if a spider spins its thread to it from
the land: no stronger ropes are needed now. Like such
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a tired ship in the stillest cove, I too rest now near the
earth, faithful, trusting, waiting, tied to it with the
softest threads.
0 happiness! 0 happiness! Would you sing, 0 my
soul? You are lying in the grass. But this is the secret
solemn hour when no shepherd plays his pipe. Refrain!
Hot noon sleeps on the meadows. Do not single Stilll
The world is perfect. Do not sing, you winged one in
the grass, 0 my soul-do not even whisper Behold-
still!-the old noon sleeps, his mouth moves: is he not
just now drinking a drop of happiness, an old brown
drop of golden happiness, golden wine? It slips over
him, his happiness laughs. Thus laughs a god. Still!
"O happiness, how little is sufficient for happiness!"
Thus I spoke once and seemed clever to myself. But
it was a blasphemy: that I have learned now. Clever
fools speak better. Precisely the least, the softest,
lightest, a lizard's rustling, a breath, a breeze, a moment's glance-it is little that makes the best happiness.
Still!
What happened to me? Listen Did time perhaps fly
away? Do I not fall? Did I not fall-listen!-into the
well of eternity? What is happening to me? Still! I
have been stung, alas-in the heart? In the heart! Oh
break, break, heart, after such happiness, after such a
sting. How? Did not the world become perfect just
now? Round and ripe? Oh, the golden round ringwhere may it fly? Shall I run after it? Quick! Still! (And
here Zarathustra stretched and felt that he was asleep.)
"Upl" he said to himself; "you sleeper You noon
napperl Well, get up, old legsl It is time and overtime;
many a good stretch of road still lies ahead of you. Now
you have slept out-how long? Half an eternity! Well!
Up with you now, my old heart! After such a sleep, how
long will it take you to-wake it off?" (But then he
278
fell asleep again, and his soul spoke against him and
resisted and lay down again.) "Leave me alone Stilll
Did not the world become perfect just now? Oh, the
golden round ball"
"Get upl" said Zarathustra, "you little thief, you
lazy little thief of time What? Still stretching, yawning,
sighing, falling into deep wells? Who are you? 0 my
soul!" (At this point he was startled, for a sunbeam fell
from the sky onto his face.) "O heaven over mel" he
said, sighing, and sat up. "You are looking on? You are
listening to my strange soul? When will you drink this
drop of dew which has fallen upon all earthly things?
When will you drink this strange soul? When, well of
eternity? Cheerful, dreadful abyss of noonl When will
you drink my soul back into yourself?"
Thus spoke Zarathustra, and he got up from his
resting place at the tree as from a strange drunkenness;
and behold, the sun still stood straight over his head.
But from this one might justly conclude that Zarathustra had not slept long.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, AT NOON
,#NFDB
957:BEFORE
SUNRISE
o heaven above me, pure and deep! You abyss of
lightly Seeing you, I tremble with godlike desires. To
throw myself into your height, that is my depth. To
hide in your purity, that is my innocence.
Gods are shrouded by their beauty; thus you conceal
your stars. You do not speak; thus you proclaim your
wisdom to me. Today you rose for me silently over the
roaring sea; your love and your shyness are a revelation
to my roaring soul. That you came to me, beautiful,
shrouded in your beauty, that you speak to me silently,
revealing your wisdom-oh, how should I not guess
all that is shy in your soul! Before the sun you came to
me, the loneliest of all.
We are friends from the beginning: we share grief
and ground and gray dread; we even share the sun.
We do not speak to each other, because we know
too much; we are silent to each other, we smile our
knowledge at each other. Are you not the light for my
fire? Have you not the sister soul to my insight? Together we have learned everything; together we have
learned to ascend over ourselves to ourselves and to
smile cloudlessly-to smile down cloudlessly from
bright eyes and from a vast distance when constraint
and contrivance and guilt steam beneath us like rain.
And when I wandered alone, for whom did my soul
hunger at night, on false paths? And when I climbed
mountains, whom did I always seek on the mountains,
if not you? And all my wandering and mountain climbing were sheer necessity and a help in my helplessness:
what I want with all my will is to fly, to fly up into you.
And whom did I hate more than drifting clouds and
165
all that stains you? And I hated even my own hatred
because it stained you. I loa the the drifting clouds,
those stealthy great cats which prey on what you and
I have in common-the uncanny, unbounded Yes and
Amen. We loa the these mediators and mixers, the drifting clouds that are half-and-half and have learned
neither to bless nor to curse from the heart.
Rather would I sit in a barrel under closed heavens,
rather sit in the abyss without a heaven, than see you,
bright heaven, stained by drifting clouds.
And often I had the desire to tie them fast with the
jagged golden wires of the lightning, that, like thunder, I might beat the big drums on their kettle-bellyan angry kettle-drummer-because they rob me of
your Yes and Amen, 0 heaven over me, pure and lightly
You abyss of light! Because they rob you of my Yes and
Amen. For I prefer even noise and thunder and stormcurses to this deliberate, doubting cats' calm; and
among men too I hate most of all the soft-treaders and
those who are half-and-half and doubting, tottering
drift clouds.
And "whoever cannot bless should learn to curse"this bright doctrine fell to me from a bright heaven;
this star stands in my heaven even in black nights.
But I am one who can bless and say Yes, if only you
are about me, pure and light, you abyss of light; then
I carry the blessings of my Yes into all abysses. I have
become one who blesses and says Yes; and I fought
long for that and was a fighter that I might one day
get my hands free to bless. But this is my blessing: to
stand over every single thing as its own heaven, as its
round roof, its azure bell, and eternal security; and
blessed is he who blesses thus.
For all things have been baptized in the well of
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eternity and are beyond good and evil; and good and
evil themselves are but intervening shadows and damp
depressions and drifting clouds.
Verily, it is a blessing and not a blasphemy when I
teach: "Over all things stand the heaven Accident, the
heaven Innocence, the heaven Chance, the heaven
Prankishness."
"By Chance"-that is the most ancient nobility of
the world, and this I restored to all things: I delivered
them from their bondage under Purpose. This freedom
and heavenly cheer I have placed over all things like
an azure bell when I taught that over them and through
them no "eternal will" wills. This prankish folly I have
put in the place of that will when I taught: "In everything one thing is impossible: rationality."
A little reason, to be sure, a seed of wisdom scattered
from star to star-this leaven is mixed in with all
things: for folly's sake, wisdom is mixed in with all
things. A little wisdom is possible indeed; but this
blessed certainty I found in all things: that they would
rather dance on the feet of Chance.
O heaven over me, pure and high! That is what your
purity is to me now, that there is no eternal spider or
spider web of reason; that you are to me a dance floor
for divine accidents, that you are to me a divine table
for divine dice and dice players. But you blush? Did I
speak the unspeakable? Did I blaspheme, wishing to
bless you? Or is it the shame of twosomeness that makes
you blush? Do you bid me go and be silent because
the day is coming now?
The world is deep-and deeper than day had ever
been aware. Not everything may be put into words in
the presence of the day. But the day is coming, so let
us part.
167
0 heaven over me, bashful and glowing! 0 you, my
happiness before sunrise The day is coming, so let us
partly
Thus spoke Zarathustra.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, BEFORE SUNRISE
,#NFDB
958:ON PASSING BY
Thus, walking slowly among many peoples and
through numerous towns, Zarathustra returned on
roundabout paths to his mountains and his cave. And
on the way he also came unexpectedly to the gate of the
great city; but here a foaming fool jumped toward him
with outspread hands and barred his way. This, however, was the same fool whom the people called "Zarathustra's ape": for he had gathered something of his
phrasing and cadences and also liked to borrow from
the treasures of his wisdom. But the fool spoke thus to
Zarathustra:
"O Zarathustra, here is the great city; here you could
find nothing and lose everything. Why do you want to
wade through this mire? Have pity on your foot Rather
spit on the city gate and turn back. Here is hell for a
hermit's thoughts: here great thoughts are boiled alive
and cooked till they are small. Here all great feelings
decay: only the smallest rattleboned feelings may rattle
here. Don't you smell the slaughterhouses and ovens of
the spirit even now? Does not this town steam with the
fumes of slaughtered spirit?
"Don't you see the soul hanging like a limp, dirty rag?
And they still make newspapers of these ragst
"Don't you hear how the spirit has here been reduced
to plays on words? It vomits revolting verbal swill. And
they still make newspapers of this swill!
"They hound each other and know not where. They
overheat each other and know not why. They tinkle
with their tin, they jingle with their gold. They are cold
and seek warmth from brandy; they are heated and seek
coolness from frozen spirits; they are all diseased and
sick with public opinions.
"All lusts and vices are at home here; but there are
also some here who are virtuous: there is much serviceable, serving virtue-much serviceable virtue with pen
fingers and hard sitting- and waiting-flesh, blessed with
little stars on the chest and with padded, rumpless
daughters. There is also much piety, and there are many
devout lickspittles, batteries of fakers and flattery-bakers
before the God of Hosts. For it is 'from above' that the
stars and the gracious spittle trickle; every starless chest
longs above.
"The moon has her courtyard, and the courtyard has
its mooncalves; to everything, however, that comes from
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the court, the beggarly mob and all serviceable beggarvirtue pray. 'I serve, you serve, we serve'-thus all
serviceable virtue prays to the prince, that the deserved
star may finally be pinned on the narrow chest.
"The moon, however, still revolves around all that is
earthly: So too the prince still revolves around that
which is earthliest-but that is the gold of the shopkeeper. The God of Hosts is no god of gold bars; the
prince proposes, but the shopkeeper disposes.
"By everything in you that is bright and strong and
good, 0 Zarathustra, spit on this city of shopkeepers
and turn back! Here all blood flows putrid and lukewarm and spumy through all the veins; spit on the great
city which is the great swill room where all the swill
spumes together. Spit on the city of compressed souls
and narrow chests, of popeyes and sticky fingers-on
the city of the obtrusive, the impudent, the scribble and scream-throats, the overheated ambitious-conceited
-where everything infirm, infamous, lustful, dusky,
overmusty, pussy, and plotting putrefies together: spit
on the great city and turn back"
Here, however, Zarathustra interrupted the foaming
fool and put his hand over the fool's mouth. "Stop at
last" cried Zarathustra; "your speech and your manner
have long nauseated me. Why did you live near the
swamps so long, until you yourself have become a frog
and a toad? Does not putrid, spumy swamp-blood flow
through your own veins now that you have learned to
croak and revile thus? Why have you not gone into the
woods? Or to plow the soil? Does not the sea abound in
green islands? I despise your despising; and if you
warned me, why did you not warn yourself?
"Out of love alone shall my despising and my warning bird fly up, not out of the swamp.
"They call you my ape, you foaming fool; but I call
you my grunting swine: with your grunting you spoil
for me my praise of folly. What was it that first made
you grunt? That nobody flattered you sufficiently; you
sat down to this filth so as to have reason to grunt much
-to have reason for much revenge. For all your foaming is revenge, you vain fool; I guessed it well.
"But your fool's words injure me, even where you are
right. And even if Zarathustra's words were a thousand
times right, still you would always do wrong with my
words."
Thus spoke Zarathustra; and he looked at the great
city, sighed, and long remained silent. At last he spoke
thus: "I am nauseated by this great city too, and not only
by this fool. Here as there, there is nothing to better,
nothing to worsen. Woe unto this great city And I wish
I already saw the pillar of fire in which it will be
burned. For such pillars of fire must precede the great
noon. But this has its own time and its own destiny.
"This doctrine, however, I give you, fool, as a parting
present: where one can no longer love, there one should
pass by."
Thus spoke Zarathustra, and he passed by the fool
and the great city.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, ON PASSING BY
,#NFDB
959: UPON THE MOUNT OF OLIVES
Winter, a wicked guest, is sitting at home with me;
my hands are blue from the handshake of his friendship. I honor this wicked guest, but I like to let him sit
alone. I like to run away from him; and if one runs
well, one escapes him. With warm feet and warm
thoughts I run where the wind stands still, to the
sunny nook of my mount of olives. There I laugh at my
severe guest and am still well disposed toward him for
173
catching the flies at home and for silencing much small
noise. For he does not suffer it when a mosquito would
sing, or even two; he even makes the lane lonely till the
moonlight in it is afraid at night.
He is a hard guest, but I honor him, and I do not
pray, like the pampered, to the potbellied fire idol. Even
a little chattering of the teeth rather than adoring idols
-thus my nature dictates. And I have a special grudge
against all fire idols that are in heat, steaming and
musty.
Whomever I love, I love better in winter than in
summer; I mock my enemies better and more heartily
since winter dwells in my home. Heartily, in truth, even
when I crawl into bed; even then my hidden happiness
still laughs and is full of pranks; even the dream that
lies to me still laughs. I-a crawler? Never in my life
have I crawled before the mighty; and if ever I lied, I
lied out of love. Therefore I am glad in the wintry bed
too. A simple bed warms me more than a rich one, for
I am jealous of my poverty, and in winter it is most
faithful to me.
I begin every day with a bit of malice: I mock the
winter with a cold bath; that makes my severe house
guest grumble. Besides, I like to tickle him with a little
wax candle to make him let the sky come out of the
ashen gray twilight at last. For I am especially malicious
in the morning, in that early hour when the pail rattles
at the well and the horses whinny warmly through gray
lanes. Then I wait impatiently for the bright sky to rise
before me at last, the snow-bearded winter sky, the old
man with his white hair-the winter sky, so taciturn
that it often tacitly hides even its sun.
Was it from him that I learned the long bright
silence? Or did he learn it from me? Or did each of us
invent it independently? The origin of all good things
174
is thousandfold; all good prankish things leap into
existence from sheer joy: how could one expect them to
do that only once? Long silence too is a good prankish
thing-and to look out of a bright round-eyed face,
like the winter sky, and tacitly to hide one's sun and
one's indomitable solar will: verily, this art and this
winter prank I have learned well.
It is my favorite malice and art that my silence has
learned not to betray itself through silence. Rattling
with discourse and dice, I outwit those who wait
solemnly: my will and purpose shall elude all these
severe inspectors. That no one may discern my ground
and ultimate will, for that I have invented my long
bright silence. Many I found who were clever: they
veiled their faces and muddied their waters that nobody
might see through them, deep down. But precisely to
them came the cleverer mistrusters and nutcrackers:
precisely their most hidden fish were fished out. It is the
bright, the bold, the transparent who are cleverest
among those who are silent: their ground is down so
deep that even the brightest water does not betray it.
You snow-bearded silent winter sky, you round-eyed
white-head above mel 0 you heavenly parable of my
soul and its pranks!
And must I not conceal myself like one who has
swallowed gold, lest they slit open my soul? Must I not
walk on stilts that they overlook my long legs-all these
grudge-joys and drudge-boys who surround me? These
smoky, room-temperature, used-up, wilted, fretful souls
-how could their grudge endure my happiness? Hence
I show them only the ice and the winter of my peaksand not that my mountain still winds all the belts of
the sun round itself. They hear only my winter winds
whistling-and not that I also cross warm seas, like
longing, heavy, hot south winds. They still have pity on
175
my accidents; but my word says, "Let accidents come
to me, they are innocent as little children.'
How could they endure my happiness if I did not
wrap my happiness in accidents and winter distress and
polar-bear caps and covers of snowy heavens-if I myself did not have mercy on their pity, which is the pity
of grudge-joys and drudge-boys, if I myself did not
sigh before them and chatter with cold and patiently
suffer them to wrap me in their pity. This is the wise
frolicsomeness and friendliness of my soul, that it does
not conceal its winter and its icy winds; nor does it
conceal its chilblains.
Loneliness can be the escape of the sick; loneliness
can also be escape from the sick.
Let them hear me chatter and sigh with the winter
cold, all these poor jealous jokers around me! With such
sighing and chattering I still escape their heated rooms.
Let them suffer and sigh over my chilblains. "The ice
of knowledge will yet freeze him to death!" they moan.
Meanwhile I run crisscross on my mount of olives
with warm feet; in the sunny nook of my mount of
olives I sing and I mock all pity.
Thus sang Zarathustra.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, UPON THE MOUNT OF OLIVES
,#NFDB
960: THE TOMB
SONG
"There is the isle of tombs, the silent isle; there too
are the tombs of my youth. There I wish to carry an
evergreen wreath of life." Resolving this in my heart, I
crossed the sea.
0 you visions and apparitions of my youth! 0 all you
glances of love, you divine moments How quickly
you died. Today I recall you like dead friends. From
you, my dearest friends among the dead, a sweet scent
comes to me, loosening heart and tears. Verily, it perturbs and loosens the heart of the lonely seafarer. I am
still the richest and most enviable-I, the loneliest! For
once I possessed you, and you still possess me: say, to
whom fell, as to me, such rose apples from the bough?
I am still the heir of your love and its soil, flowering
in remembrance of you with motley wild virtues, 0
you most loved ones.
Alas, we were fashioned to remain close to each
other, you fair and strange wonders; and you came to
me and my craving, not like shy birds, but like trusting
ones to him who trusts. Indeed, fashioned for loyalty,
like myself, and for tender eternities-I must now call
you after your disloyalty, you divine glances and moments: I have not yet learned any other name. Verily,
you have died too soon for me, you fugitives. Yet you
did not flee from me, nor did I flee from you: we are
equally innocent in our disloyalty.
ill
To kill me, they strangled you, songbirds of my
hopes. Indeed, after you, my dearest friends, malice
has ever shot its arrows-to hit my heart. And it hitl
For you have always been closest to my heart, my possession and what possessed me: that is why you had
to die young and all-too-early. The arrow was shot at
my most vulnerable possession-at you, whose skin is
like down and even more like a smile that dies of a
glance.
But this word I want to speak to my enemies: What
is all murder of human beings compared to that which
you have done to me? What you have done to me is
more evil than any murder of human beings; you have
taken from me the irretrievable: thus I speak to you,
my enemies. For you murdered the visions and dearest
wonders of my youth. My playmates you took from me,
the blessed spirits. In their memory I lay down this
wreath and this curse. This curse against you, my enemiesl For you have cut short my eternal bliss, as a tone
that breaks off in a cold night. Scarcely as the gleam of
divine eyes it came to me-passing swiftly as a glance.
Thus spoke my purity once in a fair hour: "All beings
shall be divine to me." Then you assaulted me with
filthy ghosts; alas, where has this fair hour fled now?
"All days shall be holy to me"-thus said the wisdom
of my youth once; verily, it was the saying of a gay wisdom. But then you, my enemies, stole my nights from
me and sold them into sleepless agony; alas, where has
this gay wisdom fled now?
Once I craved happy omens from the birds; then you
led a monster of an owl across my way, a revolting one.
Alas, where did my tender desire flee then?
All nausea I once vowed to renounce: then you
changed those near and nearest me into putrid boils.
Alas, where did my noblest vow flee then?
I once walked as a blind man along blessed paths;
then you threw filth in the path of the blind man, and
now his old footpath nauseates him.
And when I did what was hardest for me and celebrated the triumph of my overcomings, then you made
those who loved me scream that I was hurting them
most.
Verily, this was always your practice: you galled my
best honey and the industry of my best bees. To my
charity you always dispatched the most impudent beggars; around my pity you always pushed the incurably
shameless. Thus you wounded my virtue in its faith.
And whenever I laid down for a sacrifice even what
was holiest to me, your "piety" immediately placed its
fatter gifts alongside, and in the fumes of your fat what
was holiest to me suffocated.
And once I wanted to dance as I had never danced
before: over all the heavens I wanted to dance. Then
you persuaded my dearest singer. And he struck up a
horrible dismal tune; alas, he tooted in my ears like a
gloomy horn. Murderous singer, tool of malice, most
innocent yourself! I stood ready for the best dance,
when you murdered my ecstasy with your sounds. Only
in the dance do I know how to tell the parable of the
highest things: and now my highest parable remained
unspoken in my limbs. My highest hope remained unspoken and unredeemed. And all the visions and consolations of my youth died How did I endure it? How
did I get over and overcome such wounds? How did
my soul rise again out of such tombs?
Indeed, in me there is something invulnerable and
unburiable, something that explodes rock: that is my
will. Silent and unchanged it strides through the years.
It would walk its way on my feet, my old will, and its
mind is hard of heart and invulnerable.
113
Invulnerable am I only in the heel. You are still alive
and your old self, most patient one. You have still
broken out of every tomb. What in my youth was unredeemed lives on in you; and as life and youth you
sit there, full of hope, on yellow ruins of tombs.
Indeed, for me, you are still the shatterer of all
tombs. Hail to thee, my will And only where there are
tombs are there resurrection.
Thus sang Zarathustra.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, THE TOMB SONG
,#NFDB
961:THE
SIGN
In the morning after this night, Zarathustra jumped
up from his resting place, girded his loins, and came
out of his cave glowing and strong as a morning sun
that comes out of dark mountains.
"'You great star," he said as he had said once before,
"you deep eye of happiness, what would your happiness
be had you not those for whom you shine? And if they
325
stayed in their chambers even after you had awakened
and come and given and distri buted, how angry would
your proud shame be!
"Well then, they still sleep, these higher men, while
I am awake: these are not my proper companions. It is
not for them that I wait here in my mountains. I want
to go to my work, to my day: but they do not understand the signs of my morning; my stride is for them
no summons to awaken. They still sleep in my cave,
their dream still drinks of my drunken songs. The ear
that listens for me, the heedful ear is lacking in their
limbs."
Thus had Zarathustra spoken to his heart when the
sun rose; then he looked questioning into the height, for
he heard the sharp cry of his eagle above him. "Well
then" he cried back; "thus it pleases and suits me. My
animals are awake, for I am awake. My eagle is awake
and honors the sun as I do. With eagle talons he grasps
for the new light. You are the right animals for me; I
love you. But I still lack the right men."
Thus spoke Zarathustra. But then it happened that
he suddenly heard himself surrounded as by innumerable
swarming and fluttering birds: but the whirring of so
many wings and the thronging about his head were so
great that he closed his eyes. And verily, like a cloud it
came over him, like a cloud of arrows that empties itself over a new enemy. But behold, here it was a cloud
of love, and over a new friend.
"What is happening to me?" thought Zarathustra in
his surprised heart, and slowly he sat down on the big
stone that lay near the exit of his cave. But as he reached
out with his hands around and over and under himself,
warding off the affectionate birds, behold, something
stranger yet happened to him: for unwittingly he
reached into a thick warm mane; and at the same time
326
he heard a roar in front of him-a soft, long lion roar.
"The sign is at hand," said Zarathustra, and a change
came over his heart. And indeed, as it became light
before him, a mighty yellow animal lay at his feet and
pressed its head against his knees and out of love did
not want to let go of him, and acted like a dog that
finds its old master again. But the doves were no less
eager in their love than the lion; and whenever a dove
slipped over the lion's nose, the lion shook its head and
was amazed and laughed.
About all this Zarathustra spoke but a single sentence:
"My children are near, my children." Then he became
entirely silent. But his heart was loosed, and tears
dropped from his eyes and fell on his bands. And he no
longer heeded anything and sat there motionless, without warding off the animals any more. Then the doves
flew about and sat on his shoulders and caressed his
white hair and did not weary of tenderness and jubilation. But the strong lion kept licking up the tears that
fell on Zarathustra's hands and roared and growled
bashfully. Thus acted these animals.
All this lasted a long time, or a short time: for properly
speaking, there is no time on earth for such things. But
meanwhile the higher men in Zarathustra's cave had
awakened and arranged themselves in a procession to
meet Zarathustra and bid him good morning; for they
had found when they awakened that he was no longer
among them. But when they reached the door of the
cave and the sound of their steps ran ahead of them, the
lion started violently, turned away from Zarathustra
suddenly, and jumped toward the cave, roaring savagely.
But when the higher men heard it roar, they all cried
out as with a single mouth, and they fled back and
disappeared in a flash.
327
Zarathustra himself, however, dazed and strange, rose
from his seat, looked around, stood there amazed, questioned his heart, reflected, and was alone. "What did
I hear?" he finally said slowly; "what happened to me
just now?" And presently memory came to him and
with a single glance he grasped everything that had
happened between yesterday and today. "Here is the
stone," he said, stroking his beard, "where I sat yesterday morning; and here the soothsayer came to me, and
here I first heard the cry which I heard just now, the
great cry of distress.
"O you higher men, it was your distress that this old
soothsayer prophesied to me yesterday morning; to your
distress he wanted to seduce and tempt me. 0 Zarathustra, he said to me, I come to seduce you to your
final sin.
"To my final sin?" shouted Zarathustra, and he
laughed angrily at his own words; "what was it that was
saved up for me as my final sin?"
And once more Zarathustra became absorbed in himself, and he sat down again on the big stone and reflected. Suddenly he jumped up. "Pity! Pity for the
higher man!" he cried out, and his face changed to
bronze. "Well then, that has had its time! My suffering
and my pity for suffering-what does it matter? Am I
concerned with happiness? I am concerned with my
work.
"Well then! The lion came, my children are near,
Zarathustra has ripened, my hour has come: this is my
morning, my day is breaking: rise now, rise, thou great
noon!"
Thus spoke Zarathustra, and he left his cave, glowing
and strong as a morning sun that comes out of dark
mountains.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, THE SIGN
,#NFDB
962:THE WANDERER
It was about midnight when Zarathustra started
across the ridge of the island so that he might reach
the other coast by early morning; for there he wanted
to embark. There he would find a good roadstead where
foreign ships too liked to anchor, and they often took
along people who wanted to cross the sea from the
blessed isles.
Now as Zarathustra was climbing the mountain he
thought how often since his youth he had wandered
alone and how many mountains and ridges and peaks
he had already climbed.
I am a wanderer and a mountain climber, he said to
his heart; I do not like the plains, and it seems I cannot
sit still for long. And whatever may yet come to me as
destiny and experience will include some wandering
and mountain climbing: in the end, one experiences
only oneself. The time is gone when mere accidents
could still happen to me; and what could still come to
me now that was not mine already? What returns, what
finally comes home to me, is my own self and what of
myself has long been in strange lands and scattered
among all things and accidents. And one further thing
I know: I stand before my final peak now and before
that which has been saved up for me the longest. Alas,
now I must face my hardest path! Alas, I have begun
my loneliest walk But whoever is of my kind cannot
escape such an hour-the hour which says to him:
"Only now are you going your way to greatness!
Peak and abyss-they are now joined together.
"You are going your way to greatness: now that
which has hitherto been your ultimate danger has become your ultimate refuge.
153
"You are going your way to greatness: now this must
give you the greatest courage that there is no longer
any path behind you.
"You are going your way to greatness: here nobody
shall sneak after you. Your own foot has effaced the
path behind you, and over it there is written: impossibility.
"And if you now lack all ladders, then you must know
how to climb on your own head: how else would you
want to climb upward? On your own head and away
over your own heart! Now what was gentlest in you
must still become the hardest. He who has always spared
himself much will in the end become sickly of so much
consideration. Praised be what hardens! I do not praise
the land where butter and honey flow.
"One must learn to look away from oneself in order
to see much: this hardness is necessary to every climber
of mountains.
"But the lover of knowledge who is obtrusive with
his eyes-how could he see more of all things than
their foregrounds? But you, 0 Zarathustra, wanted to
see the ground and background of all things; hence you
must climb over yourself-upward, up until even your
stars are under you!"
Indeed, to look down upon myself and even upon my
stars, that alone I should call my peak; that has remained for me as my ultimate peak.
Thus spoke Zarathustra to himself as he was climbing, comforting his heart with hard maxims; for his
heart was sore as never before. And when he reached
the height of the ridge, behold, the other sea lay spread
out before him; and he stood still and remained silent
a long time. But the night was cold at this height, and
clear and starry bright.
154
I recognize my lot, he finally said sorrowfully. Well,
I am ready. Now my ultimate loneliness has begun.
Alas, this black sorrowful sea below mel Alas, this
pregnant nocturnal dismay! Alas, destiny and seal To
you I must now go down! Before my highest mountain
I stand and before my longest wandering; to that end
I must first go down deeper than ever I descendeddeeper into pain than ever I descended, down into its
blackest flood. Thus my destiny wants it. Well, I am
ready.
Whence come the highest mountains? I once asked.
Then I learned that they came out of the sea. The
evidence is written in their rocks and in the walls of
their peaks. It is out of the deepest depth that the
highest must come to its height.
Thus spoke Zarathustra on the peak of the mountain, where it was cold; but when he came close to
the sea and at last stood alone among the cliffs, he had
become weary from walking and even more full of longing than before.
Everything is still asleep now, he said; even the sea
is asleep. Drunk with sleep and strange it looks at me.
But its breath is warm, that I feel. And I also feel that
it is dreaming. In its dreams it tosses on hard pillows.
Listen Listenl How it groans with evil memories Or
evil forebodings? Alas, I am sad with you, you dark
monster, and even annoyed with myself for your sake.
Alas, that my hand does not have strength enough!
Verily, I should like to deliver you from evil dreams.
And as Zarathustra was speaking thus he laughed at
himself in melancholy and bitterness. What, Zarathustra,
he said, would you sing comfort even to the sea? 0 you
loving fool, Zarathustra, you are trust-overfull. But thus
155
have you always been: you have always approached
everything terrible trustfully. You have wanted to pet
every monster. A whiff of warm breath, a little soft
tuft on the paw-and at once you were ready to love
and to lure it.
Love is the danger of the loneliest; love of everything if only it is alive. Laughable, verily, are my folly
and my modesty in love.
Thus spoke Zarathustra and laughed for the second
time. But then he recalled his friends whom he had
left; and, as if he had wronged them with his thoughts,
he was angry with himself for his thoughts. And soon
it happened that he who had laughed wept: from
wrath and longing Zarathustra wept bitterly.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, THE WANDERER
,#NFDB
963:THE AWAKENING
1
After the song of the wanderer and shadow, the cave
all at once became full of noise and laughter; and since
all of the assembled guests talked at the same time and
even the ass, thus encouraged, would no longer remain
silent, Zarathustra was overcome by a slight aversion
and by scorn for his company, although he enjoyed their
gaiety. For this seemed to him a sign of convalescence.
So he slipped out into the open and talked to his
animals.
'Where is their distress now?" he said, and immediately he felt relief from his own little annoyance. "Up
here with me, it seems, they have unlearned crying in
distress. Although unfortunately not yet crying in general." And Zarathustra covered up his ears, for just then
the Yeah-Yuh of the ass was strangely blended with the
jubilating noise of these higher men.
"They are merry," he began again, "and, who knows?
perhaps at their hoses expense. And if they learned to
laugh from me, it still is not my laughter that they have
learned. But what does it matter? They are old people,
convalescing in their own way, laughing in their own
way; my ears have suffered worse things without becoming grumpy. This day represents a triumph: he is
even now retreating, he is fleeing, the spirit of gravity,
my old archenemy. How happily this day wants to end
after beginning so badly and gravely. And it wants to
end. Even now evening is approaching: he is riding over
the sea, this good rider. How the blessed one, returning
home, sways in his crimson saddle! The sky looks clear,
the world lies deep: 0 all you strange visitors, living
with me is well worth while!"
311
Thus spoke Zarathustra. And again the clamor and
laughter of the higher men came to him from the cave,
so he began again: "They are biting, my bait is working: from them too their enemy retreats, the spirit of
gravity. Even now they have learned to laugh at themselves: do I hear right? My virile nourishment, the savor
and strength of my words, are taking effect; and verily,
I did not feed them bloating vegetables, but warriors'
nourishment, conquerors' nourishment: I wakened new
desires. New hopes throb in their arms and legs; their
hearts stretch out. They are finding new words, soon
their spirit will brea the prankishness. Such nourishment,
to be sure, may not be suitable for children or for
nostalgic old and young little females. Their entrails are
persuaded in a different way; I am not their physician
and teacher.
"Nausea is retreating from these higher men. Well
then That is my triumph. In my realm they feel safe,
all stupid shame runs away, they unburden themselves.
They unburden their hearts, good hours come back to
them, they celebrate and chew the cud: they become
grateful. This I take to be the best sign: they become
grateful. Not much longer, and they will think up
festivals and put up monuments to their old friends.
They are convalescing" Thus spoke Zarathustra gaily
to his heart, and he looked out; but his animals pressed
close to him and respected his happiness and his
silence.
2
Suddenly, however, Zarathustra's ears were startled;
for the cave which had so far been full of noise and
laughter suddenly became deathly still, while his nose
perceived a pleasant smoke and incense, as of burning
pine cones. "What is going on? What are they doing?"
312
he asked himself, and he stole to the entrance to watch
his guests, unnoticed. But, wonder upon wonder What
did he have to see with his own eyes?
"They have all become pious again, they are praying,
thev are mad!" he said, and he was amazed beyond
measure. And indeed, all these higher men, the two
kings, the retired pope, the wicked magician, the voluntary beggar, the wanderer and shadow, the old soothsayer, the conscientious in spirit, and the ugliest manthey were all kneeling like children and devout little
old women and adoring the ass. And just then the ugliest
man began to gurgle and snort as if something inexpressible wanted to get out of him; but when he really
found words, behold, it was a pious, strange litany to
glorify the adored and censed ass. And this litany went
thus:
Amen! And praise and honor and wisdom and thanks
and glory and strength be to our god, from everlasting
to everlasting
But the ass brayed: Yea-Yuh.
He carries our burden, he took upon himself the
form of a servant, he is patient of heart and never says
No; and whoever loves his God, chastises him.
But the ass brayed: Yea-Yuh.
He does not speak, except he always says Yea to the
world he created: thus he praises his world. It is his
cleverness that does not speak: thus he is rarely found
to be wrong.
But the ass brayed: Yea-Yuh.
Plain-looking, he walks through the world. Gray is
the body color in which he shrouds his virtue. If he has
spirit, he hides it; but everybody believes in his long
ears.
But the ass brayed: Yea-Yuh.
313
What hidden wisdom it is that he has long ears and
only says Yea and never No! Has he not created the
world in his own image, namely, as stupid as possible?
But the ass brayed: Yea-Yuh.
You walk on straight and crooked paths; it matters
little to you what seems straight or crooked to us men.
Beyond good and evil is your kingdom. It is your innocence not to know what innocence is.
But the ass brayed: Yea-Yuh.
Behold how you push none away from you, not the
beggars nor the kings. Little children you let come unto
you, and when sinners entice you, you simply say YeaYuh.
But the ass brayed: Yea-Yuh.
You love she-asses and fresh figs; you do not despise
food. A thistle tickles your heart if you happen to be
hungry. In this lies the wisdom of a god.
But the ass brayed: Yea-Yuh.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, THE AWAKENING
,#NFDB
964:THE SONG
OF MELANCHOLY
1
While Zarathustra delivered these discourses he stood
near the entrance of his cave; but with the last words
he slipped away from his guests and fled into the open
for a short while.
"O pure smells about me!" he cried out. "O happy
silence about me! But where are my animals? Come
here, come here, my eagle and my serpent! Tell me,
my animals: these higher men, all of them-do they
perhaps smell bad? 0 pure smells about me! Only now
I know and feel how much I love you, my animals."
And Zarathustra spoke once more: "I love you, my
animals." But the eagle and the serpent pressed close to
him as he spoke these words, and looked up to him. In
this way the three of them were together silently, and
they sniffed and sipped the good air together. For the
air out here was better than among the higher men.
2
But Zarathustra had scarcely left his cave when the
old magician got up, looked around cunningly, and said:
"He has gone out! And immediately, you higher menif I may tickle you with this laudatory, flattering name,
as he did-immediately my wicked spirit of deception
and magic seizes me, my melancholy devil, who is
through and through an adversary of this Zarathustraforgive him! Now he wants to show you his magic; he
has his hour right now; in vain do I wrestle with this
evil spirit. Of all of you, whatever honors you may
confer on yourselves with words, whether you call yourselves 'free spirits' or 'truthful' or 'ascetics of the spirit'
297
or 'the unbound' or 'the great longers'-of all of you
who, like me, are suffering of the great nausea, for whom
the old god has died and for whom no new god lies
as yet in cradles and swaddling clothes-of all of you
my evil spirit and magic devil is fond.
"I know you, you higher men; I know him; I also
know this monster whom I love against my will, this
Zarathustra: he himself sometimes seems to me like a
beautiful mask of a saint, like a new strange masquerade
in which my evil spirit, the melancholy devil, enjoys
himself. I love Zarathustra, it often seems to me, for
the sake of my evil spirit.
"But even now he attacks me and forces me, this
spirit of melancholy, this devil of the dusk; and verily,
you higher men, he has the desire-you may well open
your eyes widel-he has the desire to come naked;
whether male or female I do not know yet-but he is
coming, he is forcing me; alas, open up your senses! The
day is fading away, evening is now coming to all things,
even to the best things: hear then and see, you higher
men, what kind of devil, whether man or woman, this
spirit of evening melancholy isl"
Thus spoke the old magician, looked around cunningly, and then reached for his harp.
3
In dim, de-lighted air
When the dew's comfort is beginning
To well down to the earth,
Unseen, unheardFor tender is the footwear of
The comforter dew, as of all that gently comfortDo you remember then, remember, hot heart,
How you thirsted once
For heavenly tears and dripping dew,
Thirsting, scorched and weary,
While on yellow paths in the grass
The glances of the evening sun were running
Maliciously around you through black treesBlinding, glowing glances of the sun, mocking your
pain?
"Suitor of truth?" they mocked me; "you?
Nol Only poet!
An animal, cunning, preying, prowling,
That must lie,
That must knowingly, willingly lie:
Lusting for prey,
Colorfully masked,
A mask for itself,
Prey for itselfThis, the suitor of truth?
No! Only fooll Only poetl
Only speaking colorfully,
Only screaming colorfully out of fools' masks,
Climbing around on mendacious word bridges,
On colorful rainbows,
Between false heavens
And false earths,
Roaming, hoveringOnly fooll Only poetl
This-the suitor of truth?
Not still, stiff, smooth, cold,
Become a statue,
A pillar of God,
Not placed before temples,
A god's gate guardNol an enemy of all such truth statues,
More at home in any desert than before temples,
299
Full of cats' prankishness,
Leaping through every windowSwishl into every chance,
Sniffing for every jungle,
Eagerly, longingly sniffing:
That in jungles
Among colorfully speckled beasts of prey
You might roam, sinfully sound and colorful, beautiful
With lusting lips,
Blissfully mocking, blissfully hellish, blissfully bloodthirstyPreying, prowling, peeringOr like the eagle that gazes long,
Long with fixed eyes into abysses,
His own abyssesOh, how they wind downward,
Lower and lower
And into ever deeper depthsl Then,
Suddenly, straight as sight
In brandished flight,
Pounce on lambs,
Abruptly down, hot-hungry,
Lusting for lambs,
Hating all lamb souls,
Grimly hating whatever looks
Sheepish, lamb-eyed, curly-wooled,
Gray, with lambs' and sheeps' goodwill.
Thus
Eagle-like, panther-like,
Are the poet's longings,
Are your longings under a thousand masks,
You fool! You poetl
300
You that have seen man
As god and sheep:
Tearing to pieces the god in man
No less than the sheep in man,
And laughing while tearingThis, this is your bliss
A panther's and eagle's bliss
A poet's and fools bliss!"
In dim, de-lighted air
When the moon's sickle is beginning
To creep, green between crimson
Reds, enviouslyHating the day,
Secretly step for step
Scything at sloping rose meads
Till they sink and, ashen,
Drown in nightThus I myself once sank
Out of my truth-madness,
Out of my day-longings,
Weary of day, sick from the lightSank downward, eveningward, shadowward,
Burned by one truth,
And thirsty:
Do you remember still, remember, hot heart,
How you thirsted?
That I be banished
From all truth,
Only fool!
Only poet!
301
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, THE SONG OF MELANCHOLY
,#NFDB
965:A Lyric Of The Dawn
Alone I list
In the leafy tryst;
Silent the woodlands in their starry sleep—
Silent the phantom wood in waters deep:
No footfall of a wind along the pass
Startles a harebell—stirs a blade of grass.
Yonder the wandering weeds,
Enchanted in the light,
Stand in the gusty hollows, still and white;
Yonder are plumy reeds,
Dusking the border of the clear lagoon;
Far off the silver clifts
Hang in ethereal light below the moon;
Far off the ocean lifts,
Tossing its billows in the misty beam,
And shore-lines whiten, silent as a dream:
I hark for the bird, and all the hushed hills harken:
This is the valley: here the branches darken
The silver-lighted stream.
Hark—
That rapture in the leafy dark!
Who is it shouts upon the bough aswing,
Waking the upland and the valley under?
What carols, like the blazon of a king,
Fill all the dawn with wonder?
Oh, hush,
It is the thrush,
In the deep and woody glen!
Ah, thus the gladness of the gods was sung,
When the old Earth was young;
That rapture rang,
When the first morning on the mountains sprang:
And now he shouts, and the world is young again!
Carol, my king,
On your bough aswing!
Thou art not of these evil days—
Thou art a voice of the world’s lost youth:
Oh, tell me what is duty—what is truth—
How to find God upon these hungry ways;
Tell of the golden prime,
When bird and beast could make a man their friend ;
When men beheld swift deities descend,
Before the race was left alone with Time,
Homesick on Earth, and homeless to the end;
Before great Pan was dead,
Before the naiads fled;
When maidens white with dark eyes shy and bold,
With peals of laughter on the peaks of gold,
Startled the still dawn—
Shone in upon the mountains and were gone,
Their voices fading silverly in depths of forests old.
Sing of the wonders of their woodland ways,
Before the weird earth-hunger of these days,
When there was rippling mirth,
When justice was on Earth,
And light and grandeur of the Golden Age;
When never a heart was sad,
When all from king to herdsman had
A penny for a wage.
Ah, that old time has faded to a dream—
The moon’s fair face is broken in the stream;
Yet shout and carol on, O bird, and let
The exiled race not utterly forget;
Publish thy revelation on the lawns—
Sing ever in the dark ethereal dawns;
Sometime, in some sweet year,
These stormy souls, these men of Earth may hear.
But hark again,
From the secret glen,
That voice of rapture and ethereal youth
Now laden with despair.
Forbear, O bird, forbear:
Is life not terrible enough forsooth?
Cease, cease the mystic song—
No more, no more, the passion and the pain:
It wakes my life to fret against the chain;
It makes me think of all the agéd wrong—
Of joy and the end of joy and the end of all—
Of souls on Earth, and souls beyond recall.
Ah, ah, that voice again!
It makes me think of all these restless men
Called into time—their progress and their goal;
And now, oh now, it sends into my soul
Dreams of a love that might have been for me—
That might have been—and now can never be.
Tell me no more of these—
Tell me of trancéd trees;
(The ghosts, the memories, in pity spare)
Show me the leafy home of the wild bees;
Show me the snowy summits dim in air;
Tell me of things afar
In valleys silent under moon and star:
Dim hollows hushed with night,
The lofty cedars misty in the light,
Wild clusters of the vine,
Wild odors of the pine,
The eagle’s eyrie lifted to the moon—
High places where on quiet afternoon
A shadow swiftens by, a thrilling scream
Startles the cliff, and dies across the woodland to a dream.
Ha, now
He springs from the bough,
It flickers—he is lost!
Out of the copse he sprang;
This is the floating briar where he tossed:
The leaves are yet atremble where he sang
Here a long vista opens—look!
This is the way he took,
Through the pale poplars by the pond:
Hark! he is shouting in the field beyond.
Ho, there he goes
Through the alder close!
He leaves me here behind him in his flight,
And yet my heart goes with him out of sight!
What whispered spell
Of Faëry calls me on from dell to dell?
I hear the voice—it wanders in a dream—
Now in the grove, now on the hill, now on
the fading stream.
Lead on—you know the way
Lead on to Arcady,
O’er fields asleep; by river bank abrim;
Down leafy ways, dewy and cool and dim;
By dripping rocks, dark dwellings of the gnome,
Where hurrying waters dash their crests to foam.
I follow where you lead,
Down winding paths, across the flowery mead,
Down silent hollows where the woodbine blows,
Up water-courses scented by the rose.
I follow the wandering voice—
I follow, I rejoice,
I fade away into the Age of Gold—
We two together lost in forest old.0 ferny and thymy paths, 0 fields of Aidenn,
Canyons and cliffs by mortal feet untrod!
O souls that are weary and are heavy laden,
Here is the peace of God !
Lo! now the clamoring hours are on the way:
Faintly the pine tops redden in the ray;
From vale to vale fleet-footed rumors run,
With sudden apprehension of the sun;
A light wind stirs
The filmy tops of delicate dim firs,
And on the river border blows,
Breaking the shy bud softly to a rose.
Sing out, O throstle, sing:
I follow on, my king:
Lead me forever through the crimson dawn—
Till the world ends, lead me on!
Ho there! he shouts again—he sways—and now,
Upspringing from the bough,
Flashing a glint of dew upon the ground,
Without a sound
He drops into a valley and is gone!
~ Edwin Markham,#NFDB
966:ON INVOLUNTARY BLISS
With such riddles and bitternesses in his heart Zarathustra crossed the sea. But when he was four days
away from the blessed isles and from his friends, he
had overcome all his pain; triumphant and with firm
feet he stood on his destiny again. And then Zarathustra spoke thus to his jubilant conscience
I am alone again and I want to be so; alone with
the pure sky and open sea; again it is afternoon around
me. It was in the afternoon that I once found my
friends for the first time; it was afternoon the second
time too, at the hour when all light grows quieter. For
whatever of happiness is still on its way between heaven
and earth now seeks a shelter in a bright soul; it is from
happiness that all light has grown quieter.
161
0 afternoon of my life Once my happiness too
descended to the valley to seek shelter; and found those
open, hospitable souls. 0 afternoon of my life What
have I not given up to have one single thing: this
living plantation of my thoughts and this morning light
of my highest hope
Companions the creator once sought, and children of
his hope; and behold, it turned out that he could
not find them, unless he first created them himself.
Thus I am in the middle of my work, going to my
children and returning from them: for his children's
sake, Zarathustra must perfect himself. For from the
depths one loves only one's child and work; and where
there is great love of oneself it is the sign of pregnancy:
thus I found it to be. My children are still verdant in
their first spring, standing close together and shaken by
the same winds-the trees of my garden and my best
soil. And verily, where such trees stand together there
are blessed isles. But one day I want to dig them up
and place each by itself, so it may learn solitude and
defiance and caution. Gnarled and bent and with supple hardness it shall then stand by the sea, a living
lighthouse of invincible life.
Where the storms plunge down into the sea and the
mountain stretches out its trunk for water, there every
one shall once have his day and night watches for his
testing and knowledge. He shall be known and tested,
whether he is of my kind and kin, whether he is the
master of a long will, taciturn even when he speaks,
and yielding so that in giving he receives-so that he
may one day become my companion and a fellow
creator and fellow celebrant of Zarathustra-one who
writes my will on my tablets to contri bute to the greater
perfection of all things. And for his sake and the sake
162
of those like him I must perfect myself; therefore I now
evade my happiness and offer myself to all unhappiness,
for my final testing and knowledge.
And verily, it was time for me to leave; and the
wanderer's shadow and the longest boredom and the
stillest hour-they all urged me: "It is high time."
The wind blew through my keyhole and said, "Come!"
Cunningly, the door flew open and said to me, "Go!"
But I lay there chained to the love for my children:
desire set this snare for me-the desire for love that I
might become my children's prey and lose myself to
them. Desire-this means to me to have lost myself.
I have you, my children! In this experience everything
shall be security and nothing desire.
But, brooding, the sun of my love lay on me; Zarathustra was cooking in his own juice-then shadows
and doubts flew over me. I yearned for frost and
winter: "Oh, that frost and winter might make me crack
and crunch again" I sighed; then icy mists rose from
me. My past burst its tombs; many a pain that had been
buried alive awoke, having merely slept, hidden in
burial shrouds.
Thus everything called out to me in signs: "It is time!"
But I did not hear, until at last my abyss stirred and
my thought bit me. Alas, abysmal thought that is my
thought, when shall I find the strength to hear you
burrowing, without trembling any more? My heart
pounds to my very throat whenever I hear you burrowing. Even your silence wants to choke me, you who are
so abysmally silent. As yet I have never dared to summon you; it was enough that I carried you with me.
As yet I have not been strong enough for the final overbearing, prankish bearing of the lion. Your gravity was
always terrible enough for me; but one day I shall yet
find the strength and the lion's voice to summon you.
163
And once I have overcome myself that far, then I also
want to overcome myself in what is still greater; and
a victory shall seal my perfection.
Meanwhile I still drift on uncertain seas; smoothtongued accident flatters me; forward and backward I
look, and still see no end. As yet the hour of my final
struggle has not come to me-or is it coming just now?
Verily, with treacherous beauty sea and life look at me.
0 afternoon of my life 0 happiness before evening!
0 haven on the high seasl 0 peace in uncertainty How
I mistrust all of youl Verily, I am mistrustful of your
treacherous beauty. I am like the lover who mistrusts
the all-too-velvet smile. As he pushes his most beloved
before him, tender even in his hardness, and jealous,
thus I push this blessed hour before me.
Away with you, blessed hour: with you bliss came
to me against my will. Willing to suffer my deepest
pain, I stand here: you came at the wrong time.
Away with you, blessed hour: rather seek shelter
there-with my children. Hurry and bless them before
evening with my happiness.
There evening approaches even now: the sun sinks.
Gone-my happiness!
Thus spoke Zarathustra. And he waited for his unhappiness the entire night, but he waited in vain. The
night remained bright and still, and happiness itself
came closer and closer to him. Toward morning, however, Zarathustra laughed in his heart and said mockingly, "Happiness runs after me. That is because I do
not run after women. For happiness is a woman."
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, ON INVOLUNTARY BLISS
,#NFDB
967:THE SHADOW
But as soon as the voluntary beggar had run away
and Zarathustra was alone again, he heard a new voice
behind him, shouting, "Stop, Zarathustral Waitl It is I,
0 Zarathustra, I, your shadow" But Zarathustra did not
wait, for a sudden annoyance came over him at the
many intruders and obtruders in his mountains. "Where
has my solitude gone?" he said. "Verily, it is becoming
too much for me; this mountain range is teeming, my
kingdom is no longer of this world, I need new mountains. My shadow calls me? What does my shadow
matter? Let him run after mel I shall run away from
him."
Thus spoke Zarathustra to his heart, and he ran away.
But he who was behind him followed him, so that soon
there were three runners, one behind the other, first the
voluntary beggar, then Zarathustra, and third and last
his shadow. It was not long that they ran this way before Zarathustra realized his folly and with a single
shrug shook off all discontent and disgust. "Well!" he
said; "have not the most ridiculous things always happened among us old hermits and saints? Verily, my
273
folly has grown tall in the mountains. Now I hear six
old fools' legs clattering along in a row. But may
Zarathustra be afraid of a shadow? Moreover, it seems
to me that he has longer legs than I."
Thus spoke Zarathustra, laughing with his eyes and
entrails; he stopped quickly and turned around-and
behold, he almost threw his follower and shadow to the
ground: so close was the shadow by then, and so weak
too. And when Zarathustra examined him with his
eyes, he was startled as by a sudden ghost: so thin,
swarthy, hollow, and outlived did this follower look.
"WVho are you?" Zarathustra asked violently. "What are
you doing here? And why do you call yourself my
shadow? I do not like you."
"Forgive me," answered the shadow, "that it is I;
and if you do not like me, well then, 0 Zarathustra, for
that I praise you and your good taste. I am a wanderer
who has already walked a great deal at your heelsalways on my way, but without any goal, also without
any home; so that I really lack little toward being the
Eternal Jew, unless it be that I am not eternal, and not
a Jew. How? Must I always be on my way? Whirled
by every wind, restless, driven on? 0 earth, thou hast
become too round for me!
"I have already sat on every surface; like weary dust,
I have gone to sleep on mirrors and windowpanes: everything takes away from me, nothing gives, I become
thin-I am almost like a shadow. But after you, 0 Zarathustra, I flew and blew the longest; and even when I
hid from you I was still your best shadow: wherever
you sat, I sat too.
"With you I haunted the remotest, coldest worlds
like a ghost that runs voluntarily over wintery roofs and
snow. With you I strove to penetrate everything that
is forbidden, worst, remotest; and if there is anything in
274
me that is virtue, it is that I had no fear of any forbiddance. With you I broke whatever my heart revered;
I overthrew all boundary stones and images; I pursued
the most dangerous wishes: verily, over every crime I
have passed once. With you I unlearned faith in words
and values and great names. When the devil sheds his
skin, does not his name fall off too? For that too is skin.
The devil himself is perhaps-skin.
"'Nothing is true, all is permitted': thus I spoke to
myself. Into the coldest waters I plunged, with head
and heart. Alas, how often have I stood there afterward,
naked as a red crab! Alas, where has all that is good
gone from me-and all shame, and all faith in those
who are good? Alas, where is that mendacious innocence that I once possessed, the innocence of the good
and their noble lies?
"Too often, verily, did I follow close on the heels of
truth: so she kicked me in the face. Sometimes I thought
I was lying, and behold, only then did I hit the truth.
Too much has become clear to me: now it no longer
concerns me. Nothing is alive any more that I love; how
should I still love myself? 'To live as it pleases me, or
not to live at all': that is what I want, that is what the
saintliest want too. But alas, how could anything please
me any more? Do I have a goal any more? A haven
toward which my sail is set? A good wind? Alas, only
he who knows where he is sailing also knows which
wind is good and the right wind for him. What is left
to me now? A heart, weary and impudent, a restless
will, flutter-wings, a broken backbone. Trying thus to
find my home-O Zarathustra, do you know it?-trying
this was my trial; it consumes me. 'Where is-my home?'
I ask and search and have searched for it, but I have
not found it. 0 eternal everywhere, 0 eternal nowhere,
0 eternal-in vainl"
275
Thus spoke the shadow, and Zarathustra's face grew
long as he listened. "You are my shadow," he finally said
sadly. "Your danger is no small one, you free spirit and
wanderer. You have had a bad day; see to it that you
do not have a still worse evening. To those who are as
restless as you, even a jail will at last seem bliss. Have
you ever seen how imprisoned criminals sleep? They
sleep calmly, enjoying their new security. Beware lest
a narrow faith imprison you in the end-some harsh
and severe illusion. For whatever is narrow and solid
seduces and tempts you now.
"You have lost your goal; alas, how will you digest
and jest over this loss? With this you have also lost
your way. You poor roaming enthusiast, you weary
butterfly! Would you have a rest and home this evening?
Then go up to my cave. Up there goes the path to my
cave.
"And now let me quickly run away from you again.
Even now a shadow seems to lie over me. I want to
run alone so that it may become bright around me
again. For that, I shall still have to stay merrily on my
legs a long time. In the evening, however, there will
be dancing in my cave."
Thus spoke Zarathustra.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, THE SHADOW
,#NFDB
968:THE LEECH
And thoughtfully Zarathustra went farther and
deeper, through woods and past swampy valleys; but
as happens to everybody who reflects on grave matters,
he stepped on a man unwittingly. And behold, all at
once a cry of pain and two curses and twenty bad insults splashed into his face and startled him so that he
raised his stick and beat the man on whom he had
stepped. A moment later, however, he recovered his
senses, and his heart laughed at the folly he had just
committed.
"Forgive me," he said to the man he had stepped on,
who had angrily risen and sat down; "forgive me
and, above all, listen to a parable first. As a wanderer
who dreams of distant matters will unwittingly stumble
over a sleeping dog on a lonely road-a dog lying in
the sun-and both start and let fly at each other like
mortal enemies, because both are mortally frightened:
thus it happened to us. And yet-and yet, how little
was lacking, and they might have caressed each other,
249
this dog and this lonely man. For after all they were
both lonely."
"Whoever you may be," said the man he had stepped
on, still angry, "your parable too offends me, and not
only your foot. After all, am I a dog?" And at that the
seated man got up and pulled his bare arm out of the
swamp. For at first he had been lying stretched out on
the ground, concealed and unrecognizable, as one lying
in wait for some swamp animal.
"But what are you doing?" cried Zarathustra, startled,
for he saw that much blood was flowing down the bare
arm. 'What has happened to you? Did a bad animal
bite you, you poor wretch?"
The bleeding man laughed, still angry. 'What is that
to you?" he said and wanted to go on. "Here I am at
home and in my realm. Let whoever wants to, ask me;
but I certainly won't answer a bumpkin."
"You are wrong," said Zarathustra, full of pity, and
he held him back. "You are wrong. This is not your
realm but mine, and here nobody shall come to grief.
Call me whatever you like; I am who I must be. I call
myself Zarathustra. Well! Up there runs the path to
Zarathustra's cave, which is not far. Do you not want
to look after your wounds in my place? Things have
gone badly for you in this life, you poor wretch; first
the beast bit you and then man stepped on you."
When the man who had been stepped on heard
Zarathustra's name he changed completely. "What is
happening to me?" he cried out. "Who else matters to
me any more in this life but this one man, Zarathustra,
and that one beast which lives on blood, the leech?
For the leech's sake I lay here beside this swamp like
a fisherman, and my arm, which I had cast, had already
been bitten ten times when a still more beautiful leech
250
bit, seeking my blood, Zarathustra himself. 0 happiness!
o miracle Praised be this day that lured me into this
swamp! Praised be the best, the most alive cupper
living today, praised be the great leech of the conscience, Zarathustral"
Thus spoke the man who had been stepped on; and
Zarathustra enjoyed his words and their fine, respectful
manner. "Who are you?" he asked and offered him his
hand. "There is much between us that remains to be
cleared up and cheered up; but even now, it seems to
me, the day dawns pure and bright."
"I am the conscientious in spirit," replied the man;
"and in matters of the spirit there may well be none
stricter, narrower, and harder than I, except he from
whom I have learned it, Zarathustra himself.
"Rather know nothing than half-know much Rather
be a fool on one's own than a sage according to the
opinion of others I go to the ground-what does it
matter whether it be great or small? whether it be
called swamp or sky? A hand's breadth of ground
suffices me, provided it is really ground and foundation.
A hand's breadth of ground-on that one can stand.
In the conscience of science there is nothing great and
nothing small."
"Then perhaps you are the man who knows the
leech?" Zarathustra asked. "And do you pursue the
leech to its ultimate grounds, my conscientious friend?"
"O Zarathustra," replied the man who had been
stepped on, "that would be an immensity; how could I
presume so much That of which I am the master and
expert is the brain of the leech: that is my world. And
it really is a world too. Forgive me that here my pride
speaks up, for I have no equal here. That is why I said,
'Here is my home.' How long have I been pursuing this
one thing, the brain of the leech, lest the slippery truth
251
slip away from me here again Here is my realm. For
its sake I have thrown away everything else; for its
sake everything else has become indifferent to me; and
close to my knowledge lies my black ignorance.
"The conscience of my spirit demands of me that I
know one thing and nothing else: I loa the all the half
in spirit, all the vaporous that hover and rave.
"Where my honesty ceases, I am blind and I also
want to be blind. But where I want to know, I also
want to be honest-that is, hard, strict, narrow, cruel,
and inexorable.
"That you, 0 Zarathustra, once said, 'Spirit is the life
that itself cuts into life,' that introduced and seduced
me to your doctrine. And verily, with my own blood I
increased my own knowledge."
"As is quite apparent," Zarathustra interrupted, for
the blood still flowed down the bare arm of the conscientious man, ten leeches having bitten deep into it.
"O you strange fellow, how much I learn from what is
apparent here, namely from you. And perhaps I had
better not pour all of it into your strict ears. Well! Here
we part. But I should like to find you again. Up there
goes the path to my cave: tonight you shall be my dear
guest there. To your body too, I should like to make
up for Zarathustra's having stepped on you with his
feet: I shall reflect on that. Now, however, a cry of
distress urgently calls me away from you."
Thus spoke Zarathustra.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, THE LEECH
,#NFDB
969:If this were a world
in which there were no such thing
as false promises,
how great would be my delight
as I listen to your words!
Like (0) 3
The Epic of Gilgamesh Tablet V
They stood at the forest's edge,
gazing at the top of the Cedar Tree,
gazing at the entrance to the forest.
Where Humbaba would walk there was a trail,
the roads led straight on, the path was excellent.
Then they saw the Cedar Mountain, the Dwelling of the Gods, the
throne dais of Imini.
Across the face of the mountain the Cedar brought forth luxurious
foliage,
its shade was good, extremely pleasant.
The thornbushes were matted together, the woods(?) were a thicket
among the Cedars, the boxwood,
the forest was surrounded by a ravine two leagues long,
and again for two-thirds (of that distance),
Suddenly the swords,
and after the sheaths,
the axes were smeared
dagger and sword
alone
Humbaba spoke to Gilgamesh saying:"He does not come (?)
Enlil.. ."
Enkidu spoke to Humbaba, saying:
"Humbaba'One alone..
'Strangers
'A slippery path is not feared by two people who help each other.
'Twice three times
'A three-ply rope cannot be cut.
'The mighty liontwo cubs can roll him over."'
Humbaba spoke to Gilgamesh, saying:
..An idiot' and a moron should give advice to each other,
but you, Gilgamesh, why have you come to me!
Give advice, Enkidu, you 'son of a fish,' who does not even
know his own father,
to the large and small turtles which do not suck their mother's milk!
When you were still young I saw you but did not go over to you;
you, in my belly.
,you have brought Gilgamesh into my presence,
you stand.., an enemy, a stranger.
Gilgamesh, throat and neck,
I would feed your flesh to the screeching vulture, the eagle, and
the vulture!"
Gilgamerh spoke to Enkidu, saying: "My Friend, Humbaba's face keeps changing!
Enkddu spoke to Gilgamesh, saying:'
"Why, my friend, are you whining so pitiably, hiding behind your whimpering?
Now there, my friend,
in the cuppersmith's channel,
again to blow (the bellows) for an hour, the glowing (metal)(?)
for an hour.
To send the Flood, to crack the Whip."
Do not snatch your feet away, do not turn your back,
strike even harder!"
may they be expelled. head fell and it/he confronted him
The ground split open with the heels of their feet,
as they whirled around in circles Mt. Hermon and Lebanon split.
The white clouds darkened,
death rained down on them like fog.
Shamash raised up against Humbaba mighty tempests'
Southwind, Northwind, Eastwind, Westwind, Whistling Wind, Piercing Wind, Blizzard, Bad Wind, Wind of Simurru,
Demon Wind, Ice Wind, Storm, Sandstorm
thirteen winds rose up against him and covered Humbaba's face.
He could nor butt through the front, and could not scramble out
the back,
so that Gilgamesh'a weapons were in reach of Humbaba.
Humbaba begged for his life, saying to Gilgamesh:
"You are young yet, Gilgamesh, your mother gave birth to you,
and you are the offspring of Rimnt-Nlnsun (?)
(It was) at the word of Shamash, Lord of the Mountain,
that you were roused (to this expedition).
O scion of the heart of Uruk, King Gilgamesh!
Gilgamesh
Gilgamesh, let me go (?), I will dwell with you as your servant (?)
As many trees as you command me I will cut down for you,
I will guard for you myrtle wood,
wood fine enough for your palace!"
Enkidu addressed Gilgamesh, saying:
"My friend, do not listen to Humbaba,
[io lines are misring Apparently Humbaba sees thar Gilgamrsh is influenced by Enkidu, and moves to dissuade Enkidu.]
"You understand the rules of my forest, the rules,
further, you are aware of all the things so ordered (by Enlil)."
I should have carried you up, and killed you
at the very entrance to the branches of my forest.
I should have fed your flesh to the screeching vulture, the eagle,
and the vulture.
So now, Enkidu, clemency is up to you.
Speak to Gilgamesh to spare my life!"
Enkidu addressed Gilgamesh, saying:
My friend, Humbaba, Guardian of the Cedar Forest,
grind up, kill, pulverize(?), and destroy him!
Humbaba, Guardian of the Forest, grind up, kill, pulverize(?),
and destroy him!
Before the Preeminent God Enlil hears
and thegods be filled with rage against us.
Enlil is in Nippur, Shamash is in Sippar.
Erect an eternal monument proclaiming
how Gilgamesh killed(?) Humbaba."
When Humbaba heard
[Abour l0 linrs are misiing.]
the forest.
and denunciations(?) have been made.
But you are sitting there like a shepherd
and like a 'hireling of his mouth.'
Now, Enkidu, clemency is up to you.
Speak to Gilgamesh that he spare my life!"
Enkidu spoke to Gilgamesh, saying:
"My friend, Humbaba, Guardian of the Forest,
grind up, kill, pulverize(?), and destroy him!
Before the Preeminent God Enlil hears,
and the gods are full of rage at us.
Enlil is in Nippur, Shamash is in Sippar.
Erect an eternal monument proclaiming
how Gilgamesh killed(?) Humbaba."
Humbaba heard
[About 10 lines are missing.]
"May he not live the longer of the two,
may Enkidu not have any 'share'(?) more than his friend
Gilgamesh!"
Enkidu spoke to Gilgamesh, saying:
"My friend, 1 have been talking to you but you have not been
listening to me,"
You have been listening to the curse of Humbaba!"
his friend
by his side
.. they pulled out his insides including his tongue.
he jumped(?).
abundance fell over the mountain,
abundance fell over the mountain.
They cut through the Cedar,
While Gilgamesh cuts down the trees, Enkidu searches through
the urmazallu.
Enkidu addressed Gilgamesh, saying:
"My friend, we have cut down the towering Cedar whose top
scrapes the sky.
Make from it a door 72 cubits high, 24 cubits wide,
one cubit thick, its fixture, its lower and upper pivots will be out of one piece.
Let them carry it to Nippur, the Euphrates will carry it down, Nippur will rejoice.
"
They tied together a raft
Enkidu steered it
while Gilgamesh held the head of Humbaba.
~ Anonymous, If this were a world
,#NFDB
970:THE
ASS FESTIVAL
1
At this point of the litany Zarathustra could no longer
control himself and himself shouted Yea-Yuh, even
louder than the ass, and he jumped right into the middle
of his guests, who had gone mad. "But what are you
doing there, children of men?" he cried as he pulled the
praying men up from the floor. "Alas, if someone other
than Zarathustra had watched youth Everyone would
judge that with your new faith you were the worst
blasphemers or the most foolish of all little old women.
"And you too, old pope, how do you reconcile this
with yourself that you adore an ass in this way as a
god?"
"O Zarathustra," replied the pope, "forgive me, but
314
in what pertains to God I am even more enlightened
than you. And that is proper. Better to adore God in
this form than in no form at all! Think about this maxim,
my noble friend: you will quickly see that there is
wisdom in such a maxim.
"He who said, 'God is a spirit,' took the biggest step
and leap to disbelief that anybody has yet taken on
earth: such a saying can hardly be redressed on earth.
My old heart leaps and jumps that there is still something on earth to adore. Forgive, 0 Zarathustra, an old
pious pope's heart!"
"And you," Zarathustra said to the wanderer and
shadow, "you call and consider yourself a free spirit?
And you go in for such idolatry and popery? You are
behaving even more wickedly, verily, than with your
wicked brown girls, you wicked new believer."
"Wickedly enough," replied the wanderer and
shadow; "you are right: but is it my fault? The old god
lives again, Zarathustra, you may say what you will. It
is all the fault of the ugliest man: he has awakened him
again. And when he says that he once killed him-in
the case of gods death is always a mere prejudice."
"And you," said Zarathustra, "you wicked old magician, what have you done? Who should henceforth believe in you in this free age, if you believe in such theoasininities? It was a stupidity that you committed; how
could you, you clever one, commit such a stupidity?"
"O Zarathustra," replied the clever magician, "you are
right, it was a stupidity; and it was hard enough for me
too."
"And you of all people," said Zarathustra to the conscientious in spirit, "consider with a finger alongside
your nose: doesn't anything here go against your con-
science? Is your spirit not too clean for such praying
and the haze of these canters?"
315
"There is something in this," replied the conscientious
man, placing a finger alongside his nose; "there is something in this spectacle that even pleases my conscience.
Perhaps I may not believe in God; but it is certain
that God seems relatively most credible to me in this
form. God is supposed to be eternal, according to the
witness of the most pious: whoever has that much time,
takes his time. As slowly and as stupidly as possible:
in this way, one like that can still get very far.
"And whoever has too much spirit might well grow
foolishly fond of stupidity and folly itself. Think about
yourself, 0 Zarathustral You yourself-verily, overabundance and wisdom could easily turn you too into
an ass. Is not the perfect sage fond of walking on the
most crooked ways? The evidence shows this, 0 Zarathustra-and you are the evidence."
"And you yourself, finally," said Zarathustra, turning to the ugliest man, who still lay on the ground, and
raising his arm toward the ass (for he was offering him
wine to drink). "Speak, you inexpressible one, what
have you done? You seem changed to me, your eyes are
glowing, the cloak of the sublime lies over your ugliness: what have you done? Is it true what they say, that
you have wakened him again? And why? Had he not
been killed and finished for a reason? You yourself seem
awakened to me: what have you done? Why did you
revert? Why did you convert yourself? Speak, you inexpressible onel"
"O Zarathustra," replied the ugliest man, "you are a
roguel Whether that one still lives or lives again or is
thoroughly dead-which of the two of us knows that
best? I ask you. But one thing I do know; it was from
you yourself that I learned it once, 0 Zarathustra: whoever would kill most thoroughly, laughs.
"'Not by wrath does one kill, but by laughter'-thus
you once spoke. 0 Zarathustra, you hidden one, you
annihilator without wrath, you dangerous saint-you
are a rogue!"
2
But then it happened that Zarathustra, amazed at all
these roguish answers, jumped back toward the door of
his cave and, turning against all his guests, cried out
with a strong voice:
"O you roguish fools, all of you, you jestersl Why do
you dissemble and hide before me? How all your hearts
wriggled with pleasure and malice that at last you had
become again as little children, that is, pious; that at
last you did again what children do, namely, prayed,
folded your hands, and said, 'Dear God!' But now leave
this nursery, my own cave, where all childishness is at
home today! Cool your hot children's prankishness and
the noise of your hearts out there!
"To be sure: except ye become as little children, ye
shall not enter into that kingdom of heaven. (And Zarathustra pointed upward with his hands.) But we have
no wish whatever to enter into the kingdom of heaven:
we have become men-so we want the earth."
3
And yet once more Zarathustra began to speak. "O
my new friends," he said, "you strange higher men, how
well I like you now since you have become gay again.
Verily, you have all blossomed; it seems to me such
flowers as you are require new festivals, a little brave
nonsense, some divine service and ass festival, some old
gay fool of a Zarathustra, a roaring wind that blows your
souls bright.
"Do not forget this night and this ass festival, you
higher men. This you invented when you were with me
317
and I take that for a good sign: such things are invented only by convalescents.
"And when you celebrate it again, this ass festival,
do it for your own sakes, and also do it for my sake. And
in remembrance of me."
Thus spoke Zarathustra.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, THE ASS FESTIVAL
,#NFDB
971:THE CRY OF DISTRESS
The next day Zarathustra again sat on his stone before his cave, while the animals were roaming through
the outside world to find new nourishment-also new
241
honey, for Zarathustra had spent and squandered the
old honey down to the last drop. But as he was sitting
there, a stick in his hand, tracing his shadow on the
ground, thinking-and verily, not about himself and his
shadow-he was suddenly frightened, and he started:
for beside his own shadow he saw another shadow. And
as he looked around quickly and got up, behold, the
soothsayer stood beside him-the same he had once
feted at his table, the proclaimer of the great weariness
who taught, "All is the same, nothing is worth while,
the world is without meaning, knowledge strangles."
But his face had changed meanwhile; and when Zarathustra looked into his eyes, his heart was frightened
again: so many ill tidings and ashen lightning bolts ran
over this face.
The soothsayer, who had noticed what went on in
Zarathustra's soul, wiped his hand over his face as if he
wanted to wipe it away; and Zarathustra did likewise.
And when both had thus silently composed and
streng thened themselves, they shook hands as a sign
that they wanted to recognize each other.
"Welcome," said Zarathustra, "you soothsayer of the
great weariness; not for nothing were you once my
guest. Eat and drink with me again today, and forgive
a cheerful old man for sitting at the table with you."
"A cheerful old man?" tle soothsayer replied, shaking
his head; "but whatever you may be or want to be,
Zarathustra, you shall not be up here much longer: soon
your bark shall not be stranded any more."
"But am I stranded?" Zarathustra asked, laughing.
"The waves around your mountain," replied the
soothsayer, "are climbing and climbing, the waves of
great distress and melancholy; soon they will lift up
your bark too, and carry you off."
242
Zarathustra fell silent at that and was surprised.
"Do you not hear anything yet?" continued the soothsayer. "Does it not rush and roar up from the depth?"
Zarathustra remained silent and listened, and he
heard a long, long cry, which the abysses threw to each
other and handed on, for none wanted to keep it: so
evil did it sound.
"You proclaimer of ill tidings," Zarathustra said
finally, "this is a cry of distress and the cry of a man; it
might well come out of a black sea. But what is human
distress to me? My final sin, which has been saved up
for me-do you know what it is?"
"Pity!" answered the soothsayer from an overflowing
heart, and he raised both hands. "O Zarathustra, I have
come to seduce you to your final sin."
And no sooner had these words been spoken than the
cry resounded again, and longer and more anxious than
before; also much closer now.
"Do you hear? Do you hear, 0 Zarathustra?" the
soothsayer shouted. "The cry is for you. It calls you:
Come, come, come! It is time It is high time!"
Then Zarathustra remained silent, confused and
shaken. At last he asked, as one hesitant in his own
mind, "And who is it that calls me?"
"But you know that," replied the soothsayer violently;
"why do you conceal yourself? It is the higher man that
cries for youl"
"The higher man?" cried Zarathustra, seized with
horror. "What does he want? What does he want? The
higher manl What does he want here?" And his skin
was covered with perspiration.
The soothsayer, however, made no reply to Zarathustra's dread, but listened and listened toward the
depth. But when there was silence for a long time, he
turned his glance back and saw Zarathustra standing
243
there trembling. "O Zarathustra," he began in a sad
tone of voice, "you are not standing there as one made
giddy by his happiness: you had better dance lest you
fall. But even if you would dance before me, leaping all
your side-leaps, no one could say to me, 'Behold, here
dances the last gay man' Anybody coming to this
height, looking for that man, would come in vain: caves
he would find, and caves behind caves, hiding-places
for those addicted to hiding, but no mines of happiness
or treasure rooms or new gold veins of happiness. Happiness-how should one find happiness among hermits
and those buried like this? Must I still seek the last
happiness on blessed isles and far away between forgotten seas? But all is the same, nothing is worth while,
no seeking avails, nor are there any blessed isles any
more.'
Thus sighed the soothsayer. At his last sigh, however,
Zarathustra grew bright and sure again, like one emerging into the light out of a deep gorge. "Nol Nol Three
times no!" he shouted with a strong voice and stroked
his beard. "That I know better: there still are blessed
isles. Be quiet about that, you sighing bag of sadness
Stop splashing about that, you raincloud in the morning
Do I not stand here even now, wet from your melancholy and drenched like a dog? Now I shake myself and
run away from you to dry again; you must not be surprised at that. Do I strike you as discourteous? But this
is my court. As for your higher man-well then, I shall
look for him at once in those woods: thence came his
cry. Perhaps an evil beast troubles him there. He is in
my realm: there he shall not come to grief. And verily,
there are many evil beasts around me."
With these words Zarathustra turned to leave. Then
the soothsayer said, "O Zarathustra, you are a roguel I
know it: you want to get rid of me. You would sooner
244
run into the woods and look for evil beasts. But what
will it avail you? In the evening you will have me back
anyway; in your own cave I shall be sitting, patient and
heavy as a block-waiting for you."
"So be itl" Zarathustra shouted back as he was walking away. "And whatever is mine in my cave belongs to
you too, my guest. And if you should find honey in
there-well, then, lick it up, you growling bear, and
sweeten your soul. For in the evening we should both
be cheerful-cheerful and gay that this day has come
to an end. And you yourself shall dance to my songs as
my dancing bear. You do not believe it? You shake your
head? Well then, old bear! But I too am a soothsayer."
Thus spoke Zarathustra.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, THE CRY OF DISTRESS
,#NFDB
972:AMONG
DAUGHTERS OF THE WILDERNESS
1
"Do not go away!" said the wanderer who called
himself Zarathustra's shadow. "Stay with us. Else our
old musty depression might seize us again. Even now
that old magician has given us a sample of his worst;
and behold, that good pious pope there has tears in his
eyes and has again embarked on the sea of melancholy.
These kings may still put up a bold front, for of all of
us here today they have learned this best. But if they
had no witness, I wager that for them too the evil routine would resume-the evil routine of drifting clouds,
of moist melancholy, of overcast skies, of stolen suns, of
howling autumn winds-the evil routine of our own
howling and cries of distress. Stay with us, 0 Zarathustra! There is much hidden misery here that desires to
speak, much evening, much cloud, much musty air. You
have nourished us with strong virile food and forceful
maxims: do not let the feeble feminine spirits seize us
again after dinner! You alone make the air around you
strong and clear. Have I ever found such good air anywhere on earth as here in your cave? Many countries
have I seen; my nose has learned to test and estimate
many kinds of air: but in your cave my nostrils are
tasting their greatest pleasure.
"Unless it were-unless it were-oh, forgive an old
reminiscence! Forgive me an old afterdinner song that
I once composed among daughters of the wilderness:
for near them the air was equally good, bright, and
oriental; never was I farther away from cloudy, moist,
melancholy old Europe. In those days I loved such
Oriental girls and other blue skies over which no clouds
and thoughts hang. You would not believe how nicely
305
they sat there when they were not dancing, deep but
without thoughts, like little secrets, like beribboned riddles, like afterdinner nuts-colorful and strange, to be
sure, but without clouds; riddles that let themselves be
guessed: for such girls I then thought out an afterdinner psalm."
Thus spoke the wanderer and shadow; and before
anyone answered him he had already seized the harp
of the old magician, crossed his legs, and looked around,
composed and wise. But with his nostrils he drew in
the air slowly and questioningly, as one tastes the new
foreign air in a new country. Then he began to sing
with a kind of roar,
2
Wilderness grows: woe unto him that harbors wildernesses!
Hah! Solemnl
Indeed solemnly
A worthy beginning.
African solemnity.
Worthy of a lion
Or of a moral howling monkeyBut nothing for you,
My most charming friends
At whose feet I,
As the first
European under palm trees,
Am allowed to sit. Selah.
Wonderful surely!
There I sit now,
Near the wilderness and already
So far from the wilderness again,
306
And in no way wild or wantonMerely swallowed
By this smallest oasis:
It just opened, yawning,
Its lovely orifice,
The most fragrant of all little mouthsAnd I fell in
And down and through-among you,
My most charming friends. Selah.
Hail, hail to that whale
If he let his guest be that
Well off! You do understand
My scholarly allusion?
Hail to his belly
If it was as
Lovely an oasis belly
As this-which, however, I should certainly doubt;
After all, I come from Europe
Which is more doubt-addicted than all
Elderly married women.
May God improve it!
Amen.
There I sit now,
In this smallest oasis,
Just like a date,
Brown, sweet through, oozing gold, lusting
For the round mouth of a girl,
But even more for girlish,
Ice-cold, snow-white, cutting
Incisors: for after these
Pants the heart of all hot dates. Selah.
Similar, all-too-similar
307
To the aforementioned fruit,
I lie here, sniffed at
And played about
By little winged bugsAlso by still smaller,
More foolish, more sinful
Wishes and notionsEnveloped by you,
Silent and foreboding
Girl-cats,
Dudu and SuleikaEnsphinxed, to crowd many
Feelings into one word
(May God forgive me
This linguistic sin!)I sit here, sniffing the best air,
Verily, paradise air,
Bright, light air, golden-striped,
As good air as ever
Fell down from the moonWhe ther by chance
Or did it happen from prankishness?
As the old poets relate.
I, being a doubter, however, should
Doubt it; after all, I come
From Europe
Which is more doubt-addicted than all
Elderly married women.
May God improve it!
Amen.
Drinking this most beautiful air,
My nostrils distended like cups,
Without future, without reminiscences,
Thus I sit here, 0
308
My most charming friends,
And am watching the palm tree
As, like a dancer, she curves
And swerves and sways above her hipsOne does it too, if one watches long.
Like a dancer who, as it would seem to me,
Has stood too long, dangerously long
Always, always only on one little leg.
She has forgotten, it would seem to me,
The other leg.
In vain, at least,
I looked for the missed
Twin jewelNamely, the other leg In the holy proximity
Of her most lovely, most delicate
Flimsy little fan-, flutter-, and tinsel-skirt.
Yes, if you would, my beautiful friends,
Believe me wholly:
She has lost itl
It is gone!
Forever gone
The other leg!
What a shame about that lovely other legal
Where may it be staying and mourning, forsaken?
The lonely leg?
Perhaps afraid of a
Grim, blond, curly
Lion monster? Or even now
Gnawed away, nibbled awayMisery, alas! alasl Nibbled awayl Selah.
Oh do not weep,
Soft hearts
Do not weep, you
309
Date hearts Milk bosomsl
You little licorice
Heart-sacsl
Weep no more,
Pale Dudu!
Be a man, Suleikal Couragel Couragel
Or should
Something invigorating, heart-invigorating
Be appropriate here?
An unctuous maxim?
A solemn exhortation?
Hahl Come up, dignity!
Virtuous dignity! European dignity!
Blow, blow again,
Bellows of virtue
Hah!
Once more roar,
Roar morally
As a moral lion
Roar before the daughters of the wilderness!
For virtuous howling,
My most charming girls,
Is more than anything else
European fervor, European ravenous hunger.
And there I stand even now
As a European;
I cannot do else; God help mel
Amen.
Wilderness grows: woe unto him that harbors wildernesses!
310
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, AMONG DAUGHTERS OF THE WILDERNESS
,#NFDB
973:THE RETURN HOME
o solitude 0 my home, solitude! Too long have I
lived wildly in wild strange places not to return home
to you in tears. Now you may threaten me with your
finger, as mothers threaten; now you may smile at me,
as mothers smile; now you may say to me:
"And who was it that, like a storm, once stormed
away from me? Who shouted in parting, 'Too long I
have sat with solitude; I have forgotten how to be
silent!' That, I suppose, you have learned again now? 0
Zarathustra, I know everything. Also that you were
more forsaken among the many, being one, than ever
with me. To be forsaken is one thing, to be lonely, another: that you have learned now. And that among men
you will always seem wild and strange-wild and
strange even when they love you; for above all things
they want consideration.
"Here, however, you are in your own home and
house; here you can talk freely about everything and
pour out all the reasons; nothing here is ashamed of
obscure, obdurate feelings. Here all things come caressingly to your discourse and flatter you, for they want to
ride on your back. On every parable you ride to every
truth. Here you may talk fairly and frankly to all things:
and verily, it rings in their ears like praise when somebody talks straight to all things.
"To be forsaken, however, is another matter. Fordo you still remember, Zarathustra? When your bird
cried high above you, when you stood in the forest, undecided where to turn, ignorant, near a corpse-when
you said, 'May my animals lead mel I found it more
dangerous to be among men than among animals'-
then you were forsaken And do you still remember,
Zarathustra? When you sat on your island, a well of
wine among empty pails, spending and expending, bestowing and flowing among the thirsty, until finally you
sat thirsty among drunks and complained by night, 'Is
it not more blessed to receive than to give, and to steal
still more blessed than to receive?'-then you were forsaken! And do you still remember, Zarathustra? When
your stillest hour came and drove you away from yourself, speaking in an evil whisper, 'Speak and break!'when it made you repent all your waiting and silence
and discouraged your humble courage-then you were
forsaken."
0 solitude! 0 my home, solitude! How happily and
tenderly your voice speaks to mel We do not question
each other, we do not complain to each other, we often
walk together through open doors. For where you are,
things are open and bright; and the hours too walk on
lighter feet here. For in darkness, time weighs more
heavily on us than in the light. Here the words and
word-shrines of all being open up before me: here all
being wishes to become word, all becoming wishes to
learn from me how to speak.
Down there, however, all 'speech is in vain. There,
forgetting and passing by are the best wisdom: that I
have learned now. He who would grasp everything
human would have to grapple with everything. But for
that my hands are too clean. I do not even want to inhale their breath; alas, that I lived so long among their
noises and vile breath!
O happy silence around me! 0 clean smells around
me! Oh, how this silence draws deep breaths of clean
air! Oh, how it listens, this happy silence
But down there everyone talks and no one listens.
185
You could ring in your wisdom with bells: the shopkeepers in the market place would outjingle it with
pennies.
Everyone among them talks; no one knows how to
understand any more. Everything falls into the water,
nothing falls into deep wells any longer.
Everyone among them talks; nothing turns out well
any more and is finished. Everyone cackles; but who
still wants to sit quietly in the nest and hatch eggs?
Everyone among them talks; everything is talked to
pieces. And what even yesterday was still too hard for
time itself and its tooth, today hangs, spoiled by scraping and gnawing, out of the mouths of the men of
today.
Everyone among them talks; everything is betrayed.
And what was once called the secret and the secrecy of
deep souls today belongs to the street trumpeters and
other butterflies.
Oh, everything human is strange, a noise on dark
streets But now it lies behind me again: my greatest
danger lies behind me!
Consideration and pity have ever been my greatest
dangers, and everything human wants consideration and
pity. With concealed truths, with a fool's hands and a
fond, foolish heart and a wealth of the little lies of pity:
thus I always lived among men. Disguised I sat among
them, ready to mistake myself that I might endure
them, and willingly urging myself, 'You fool, you do
not know men."
One forgets about men when one lives among men;
there is too much foreground in all men: what good are
far-sighted, far-seeking eyes there? And whenever they
mistook me, I, fool that I am, showed them more consideration than myself, being used to hardness against
186
myself, and often I even took revenge on myself for
being too considerate. Covered with the bites of poisonous flies and hollowed out like a stone by many drops
of malice, thus I sat among them, and I still reminded
myself, "Everything small is innocent of its smallness."
Especially those who call themselves "the good" I
found to be the most poisonous flies: they bite in all
innocence, they lie in all innocence; how could they
possibly be just to me? Pity teaches all who live among
the good to lie. Pity surrounds all free souls with musty
air. For the stupidity of the good is unfathomable.
To conceal myself and my wealth, that I learned
down there; for I have found everyone poor in spirit.
The lie of my pity was this, that I knew I could see and
smell in everyone what was spirit enough for him and
what was too much spirit for him. Their stiff sages-I
called them sagacious, not stiff; thus I learned to swallow words. Their gravediggers-I called them researchers and testers; thus I learned to change words. The
gravediggers dig themselves sick; under old rubbish lie
noxious odors. One should not stir up the morass. One
should live on mountains.
With happy nostrils I again brea the mountain freedom. At last my nose is delivered from the smell of
everything human. Tickled by the sharp air as by
sparkling wines, my soul sneezes-sneezes and jubilates
to itself: Gesundheit!
Thus spoke Zarathustra.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, THE RETURN HOME
,#NFDB
974:THE SOOTHSAYER
"-And I saw a great sadness descend upon mankind.
The best grew weary of their works. A doctrine appeared, accompanied by a faith: 'All is empty, all is the
same, all has been!' And from all the hills it echoed:
'All is empty, all is the same, all has been' Indeed we
have harvested: but why did all our fruit turn rotten
and brown? What fell down from the evil moon last
night? In vain was all our work; our wine has turned to
poison; an evil eye has seared our fields and hearts. We
have all become dry; and if fire should descend on us,
we should turn to ashes; indeed, we have wearied the
fire itself. All our wells have dried up; even the sea
has withdrawn. All the soil would crack, but the depth
refuses to devour. 'Alas, where is there still a sea in
which one might drown?' thus are we wailing across
shallow swamps. Verily, we have become too weary
even to die. We are still waking and living on-in
tombs."
Thus Zarathustra heard a soothsayer speak, and the
134
prophecy touched his heart and changed him. He
walked about sad and weary; and he became like those
of whom the soothsayer had spoken.
"Verily," he said to his disciples, "little is lacking and
this long twilight will come. Alas, how shall I save my
light through it? It must not suffocate in this sadness.
For it shall be a light for distant worlds and even more
distant nights."
Thus grieved in his heart, Zarathustra walked about;
and for three days he took neither food nor drink, had
no rest, and lost his speech. At last he fell into a deep
sleep. But his disciples sat around him in long night
watches and waited with great concern for him to wake
and speak again and recover from his melancholy.
And this is the speech of Zarathustra when he awoke;
but his voice came to his disciples as if from a great
distance:
"Listen to the dream which I dreamed, my friends,
and help me guess its meaning. This dream is still a
riddle to me; its meaning is concealed in it and imprisoned and does not yet soar above it with unfettered
wings.
"I had turned my back on all life, thus I dreamed. I
had become a night watchman and a guardian of tombs
upon the lonely mountain castle of death. Up there I
guarded his coffins: the musty vaults were full of such
marks of triumph. Life that had been overcome, looked
at me out of glass coffins. I breathed the odor of dusty
eternities: sultry and dusty lay my soul. And who could
have aired his soul there?
"The brightness of midnight was always about me;
loneliness crouched next to it; and as a third, death-rattle silence, the worst of my friends. I had keys, the
rustiest of all keys; and I knew how to use them to
open the most creaking of all gates. Like a wickedly
135
angry croaking, the sound ran through the long corridors
when the gate's wings moved: fiendishly cried this bird,
ferocious at being awakened. Yet still more terrible and
heart-constricting was the moment when silence returned and it grew quiet about me, and I sat alone in
this treacherous silence.
"Thus time passed and crawled, if time still existedhow should I know? But eventually that happened
which awakened me. Thrice, strokes struck at the gate
like thunder; the vaults echoed and howled thrice; then
I went to the gate. 'Alpa,' I cried, 'who is carrying his
ashes up the mountain? Alpal Alpal Who is carrying his
ashes up the mountain?' And I pressed the key and
tried to lift the gate and exerted myself; but still it did
not give an inch. Then a roaring wind tore its wings
apart; whistling, shrilling, and piercing, it cast up a
black coffin before me.
"And amid the roaring and whistling and shrilling the
coffin burst and spewed out a thousandfold laughter.
And from a thousand grimaces of children, angels, owls,
fools, and butterflies as big as children, it laughed and
mocked and roared at me. Then I was terribly frightened; it threw me to the ground. And I cried in horror
as I have never cried. And my own cry awakened meand I came to my senses."
Thus Zarathustra told his dream and then became
silent; for as yet he did not know the interpretation of
his dream. But the disciple whom he loved most rose
quickly, took Zarathustra's hand, and said:
"Your life itself interprets this dream for us, 0 Zarathustra. Are you not yourself the wind with the shrill
whistling that tears open the gates of the castles of
death? Are you not yourself the coffin full of colorful
sarcasms and the angelic grimaces of life? Verily, like
a thousandfold children's laughter Zarathustra enters
136
all death chambers, laughing at all the night watchmen
and guardians of tombs and at whoever else is rattling
with gloomy keys. You will frighten and prostrate them
with your laughter; and your power over them will
make them faint and wake them. And even when the
long twilight and the weariness of death come, you will
not set in our sky, you advocate of life. New stars you
have let us see, and new wonders of the night; verily,
laughter itself you have spread over us like a colorful
tent. Henceforth children's laughter will well forth from
all coffins; henceforth a strong wind will come triumphantly to all weariness of death: of this you yourself
are our surety and soothsayer. Verily, this is what you
dreamed of: your enemies. That was your hardest
dream. But as you woke from them and came to your
senses, thus they shall awaken from themselves-and
come to you."
Thus spoke the disciple; and all the others crowded
around Zarathustra and took hold of his hands and
wanted to persuade him to leave his bed and his sadness
and to return to them. But Zarathustra sat erect on his
resting place with a strange look in his eyes. Like one
coming home from a long sojourn in strange lands, he
looked at his disciples and examined their faces; and
as yet he did not recognize them. But when they lifted
him up and put him on his feet, behold, his eyes suddenly changed; he comprehended all that had happened, stroked his beard, and said in a strong voice:
"Now then, there is a time for this too. But see to it,
my disciples, that we shall have a good meal, and soon.
Thus I plan to atone for bad dreams. The soothsayer,
however, shall eat and drink by my side; and verily, I
shall show him a sea in which he can drown."
Thus spoke Zarathustra. But then he looked a long
137
time into the face of the disciple who had played the
dream interpreter and he shook his head.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, THE SOOTHSAYER
,#NFDB
975:ON GREAT
EVENTS
There is an island in the sea-not far from Zarathustra's blessed isles-on which a fire-spewing mountain smokes continually; and the people say of it, and
especially the old women among the people say, that
it has been placed like a huge rock before the gate to
the underworld, and that the narrow path that leads to
this gate to the underworld goes through the fire-spewing mountain.
Now it was during the time when Zarathustra was
staying on the blessed isles that a ship anchored at the
island with the smoking mountain and the crew went
130
ashore to shoot rabbits. Around noon, however, when
the captain and his men were together again, they suddenly saw a man approach through the air, and a voice
said distinctly, "It is time It is high time!" And when
the shape had come closest to them-and it flew by
swiftly as a shadow in the direction of the fire-spewing
mountain-they realized with a great sense of shock
that it was Zarathustra; for all of them had seen him
before, except the captain, and they loved him as the
people love-with a love that is mixed with an equal
amount of awe. "Look there" said the old helmsman.
"There is Zarathustra descending to hell!"
At the time these seamen landed at the isle of fire
there was a rumor abroad that Zarathustra had disappeared; and when his friends were asked, they
said that he had embarked by night without saying
where he intended to go. Thus uneasiness arose; and
after three days the story of the seamen was added to
this uneasiness; and now all the people said that the
devil had taken Zarathustra. His disciples laughed at
such talk to be sure, and one of them even said, "Sooner
would I believe that Zarathustra has taken the devil."
But deep in their souls they were all of them full of
worry and longing; thus their joy was great when on the
fifth day Zarathustra appeared among them.
And this is the story of Zarathustra's conversation
with the fire hound:
"The earth," he said, "has a skin, and this skin has
diseases. One of these diseases, for example, is called
'man.' And another one of these diseases is called 'fire
hound': about him men have told each other, and believed, many lies. To get to the bottom of this mystery
I went over the sea, and I have seen truth nakedverily, barefoot up to the throat. Now I am informed
concerning the fire hound, and also concerning all scum-
and overthrow devils, of whom not only old women
are afraid.
"'Out with you, fire houndl Out from your depth!' I
cried. 'And confess how deep this depth is! Whence
comes what you are snorting up here? You drink copiously from the sea: your salty eloquence shows that.
Indeed, for a hound of the depth you take your nourishment too much from the surface. At most, I take you for
the earth's ventriloquist; and whenever I have heard
overthrow- and scum-devils talking, I found them like
you: salty, mendacious, and superficial. You know how
to bellow and to darken with ashes. You are the best
braggarts and great experts in the art of making mud
seethe. Wherever you are, mud must always be nearby,
and much that is spongy, cavernous, compressed-and
wants freedom. Freedom is what all of you like best
to bellow; but I have outgrown the belief in "great
events" wherever there is much bellowing and smoke.
"'Believe me, friend Hellishnoise: the greatest events
-they are not our loudest but our stillest hours. Not
around the inventors of new noise, but around the
inventors of new values does the world revolve; it
revolves inaudibly.
"'Admit it! Whenever your noise and smoke were
gone, very little had happened. What does it matter if
a town became a mummy and a statue lies in the mud?
And this word I shall add for those who overthrow
statues: nothing is more foolish than casting salt into the
sea and statues into the mud. The statue lay in the mud
of your contempt; but precisely this is its law, that out
of contempt life and living beauty come back to it. It
rises again with more godlike features, seductive
through suffering; and verily, it will yet thank you for
having overthrown it, 0 you overthrowers. This counsel,
however, I give to kings and churches and everything
132
that is weak with age and weak in virtue: let yourselves
be overthrown-so that you may return to life, and
virtue return to you.'
"Thus I spoke before the fire hound; then he interrupted me crossly and asked, 'Church? What is that?'
"'Church?' I answered. 'That is a kind of state-the
most mendacious kind. But be still, you hypocritical
houndl You know your own kind best! Like you, the
state is a hypocritical hound; like you, it likes to talk
with smoke and bellowing-to make himself believe,
like you, that he is talking out of the belly of reality.
For he wants to be by all means the most important
beast on earth, the state; and they believe him too.'
"When I had said that, the fire hound carried on as
if crazy with envy. 'What?' he cried, 'the most important
beast on earth? And they believe him too?' And so much
steam and so many revolting voices came out of his
throat that I thought he would suffocate with anger and
envy.
"At last, he grew calmer and his gasping eased; and
as soon as he was calm I said, laughing, 'You are angry,
fire hound; so I am right about you! And that I may
continue to be right, let me tell you about another fire
hound. He really speaks out of the heart of the earth.
He exhales gold and golden rain; thus his heart wants
it. What are ashes and smoke and hot slime to him?
Laughter flutters out of him like colorful clouds; nor is
he well disposed toward your gurgling and spewing
and intestinal rumblings. This gold, however, and this
laughter he takes from the heart of the earth; forknow this-the heart of the earth is of gold.'
'When the fire hound heard this he could no longer
bear listening to me. Shamed, he drew in his tail, in a
cowed manner said 'bow-wow,' and crawled down into
his cave."
133
Thus related Zarathustra. But his disciples barely
listened, so great was their desire to tell him of the seamen, the rabbits, and the flying man.
"What shall I think of that?" said Zarathustra; "am I
a ghost then? But it must have been my shadow. I suppose you have heard of the wanderer and his shadow?
This, however, is clear: I must watch it more closelyelse it may yet spoil my reputation."
And once more Zarathustra shook his head and wondered. "What shall I think of that?" he said once more.
"Why did the ghost cry, 'It is time! It is high time!'
High time for what?"
Thus spoke Zarathustra.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, ON GREAT EVENTS
,#NFDB
976:CONVERSATION
WITH
THE KINGS
1.
Zarathustra had not yet walked an hour in his mountains and woods when he suddenly saw a strange procession. On the very path he wanted to follow down,
two kings were approaching, adorned with crowns and
crimson belts and colorful as flamingos; and they were
driving a laden ass before them. "What do these kings
want in my realm?" Zarathustra said in his heart, surprised, and quickly he hid behind a bush. But when the
kings came close he said half aloud, as if talking to himself, "Strangel Strangel How does this fit together? Two
kings I see-and only one assl"
The two kings stopped, smiled, looked in the direction from which the voice had come, and then looked
at each other. "Something of the sort may have occurred
to one of us too," said the king at the right; "but one
does not say it." The king at the left, however, shrugged
his shoulders and replied, "It inay well be a goatherd.
245
Or a hermit who has lived too long among rocks and
trees. For no society at all also spoils good manners."
"Good manners?" the other king retorted angrily and
bitterly; "then what is it that we are trying to get away
from? Is it not 'good manners'? Our 'good society'? It is
indeed better to live among hermits and goatherds than
among our gilded, false, painted mob-even if they
call themselves 'good society,' even if they call themselves 'nobility.' They are false and foul through and
through, beginning with the blood, thanks to bad old
diseases and worse quacks. Best and dearest to me today is a healthy peasant, coarse, cunning, stubborn,
enduring: that is the noblest species today. The peasant
is the best type today, and the peasant type should be
master. But it is the realm of the mob; I shall not be
deceived any more. Mob, however, means hodgepodge.
Mob-hodgepodge: there everything is mixed up in every
way, saint and scamp and Junker and Jew and every
kind of beast out of Noah's ark. Good manners Everything among us is false and foul. Nobody knows how to
revere any longer: we are trying to get away from precisely that. They are saccharine, obtrusive curs; they
gild palm leaves.
"This nausea suffocates me: we kings ourselves have
become false, overhung and disguised with ancient yellowed grandfa thers' pomp, showpieces for the most
stupid and clever and anyone who haggles for power
today. We are not the first and yet must represent them:
it is this deception that has come to disgust and nauseate us. We have tried to get away from the rabble, all
these scream-throats and scribbling bluebottles, the
shopkeepers' stench, the ambitious wriggling, the foul
breath-phew for living among the rabble! Phew for
representing the first among the rabble! Nauseal
Nauseal Nauseal What do we kings matter now?"
246
"Your old illness is upon you," the king at the left
said at this point; "nausea is seizing you, my poor
brother. But you know that somebody is listening to us."
Immediately Zarathustra, who had opened his ears
and eyes wide at this talk, rose from his hiding-place,
walked toward the kings, and began, "He who is listening to you, he who likes to listen to you, 0 kings, is
called Zarathustra. I am Zarathustra, who once said,
'What do kings matter now?' Forgive me, I was delighted when you said to each other, 'What do we kings
matter now?' Here, however, is my realm and my
dominion: what might you be seeking in my realm?
But perhaps you found on your way what I am looking
for: the higher man.'
When the kings heard this, they beat their breasts
and said as with one voice, 'We have been found out.
With the sword of this word you cut through our hearts'
thickest darkness. You have discovered our distress, for
behold, we are on our way to find the higher man-the
man who is higher than we, though we are kings. To
him we are leading this ass. For the highest man shall
also be the highest lord on earth. Man's fate knows no
harsher misfortune than when those who have power
on earth are not also the first men. That makes everything false and crooked and monstrous. And when they
are even the last, and more beast than man, then the
price of the mob rises and rises, and eventually the
virtue of the mob even says, 'Behold, I alone am virtuel'
"What did I just hear?" replied Zarathustra. "What
wisdom in kings I am delighted and, verily, even
feel the desire to make a rhyme on this-even if it
should be a rhyme which is not fit for everybody's ears.
I have long become unaccustomed to any consideration
for long ears. Well then" (But at this point it happened
247
that the ass too got in a word; but he said clearly and
with evil intent, Yea-Yuh.)
"Once-in the year of grace number one, I thinkThe Sibyl said, drunken without any drink,
'Now everything goes wrong! Oh, woel
Decayl The world has never sunk so lowl
Rome sank to whoredom and became a stew,
The Caesars became beasts, and God-a Jewl'"
2
These rhymes of Zarathustra delighted the kings; but
the king at the right said, "O Zarathustra, how well we
did to go forth to see youl For your enemies showed us
your image in their mirror: there you had the mocking
grimace of a devil, so that we were afraid of you. But
what could we do? Again and again you pierced our
ears and hearts with your maxims. So we said at last:
what difference does it make how he looks? We must
hear him who teaches: 'You shall love peace as a means
to new wars, and the short peace more than the long!'
Nobody ever spoke such warlike words: 'What is good?
To be brave is good. It is the good war that hallows
any cause.' Zarathustra, the blood of our fathers stirred
in our bodies at such words: it was like the speech of
spring to old wine barrels. When the swords ran wild
like snakes with red spots, our fathers grew fond of
life; the sun of all peace struck them as languid and
lukewarm, and any long peace caused shame. How our
fathers sighed when they saw flashing dried-up swords
on the wall! Like them, they thirsted for war. For a
sword wants to drink blood and glistens with desire."
When the kings talked thus and chatted eagerly of
the happiness of their fathers, Zarathustra was overcome
248
with no small temptation to mock their eagerness: for
obviously they were very peaceful kings with old and
fine faces. But he restrained himself. "Well!" he said,
"that is where the path leads; there lies Zarathustra's
cave; and this day shall yet have a long evening. Now,
however, a cry of distress calls me away from you
urgently. My cave is honored if kings want to sit in it
and wait: only, you will have to wait long. But what
does it matter? Where does one now learn better how
to wait than at court? And all the virtue left to kings
today-is it not called: being able to wait?"
Thus spoke Zarathustra.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, CONVERSATION WITH THE KINGS
,#NFDB
977:ON APOSTATES
I
Alas, all lies withered and gray that but recently
stood green and colorful on this meadow. And how
much honey of hope I carried from here to my beehivesl
These young hearts have all become old already-and
not even old; only weary, ordinary, and comfortable.
They put it, "We have become pious again."
179
Only recently I saw them run out in the morning on
bold feet: but the feet of their thirst for knowledge have
grown weary, and now they even slander the courage
they had in the morning. Verily, many among them
once lifted their legs like dancers, cheered by the
laughter in my wisdom; then they thought better of it.
Just now I saw one groveling-crawling back to the
cross. Around light and freedom they once fluttered like
mosquitoes and young poets. A little older, a little
colder-and already they are musty mystifiers and
hearth-squatters.
Did their hearts perhaps grow faint because solitude
swallowed me like a whale? Did their ears perhaps
listen longingly long, in vain, for me and my trumpet
and herald's calls? Alas, there are always only a few
whose hearts long retain their courageous bearing and
overbearing prankishness, and whose spirits also remain
patient. The rest, however, are cowards. The restthose are always by far the most, the commonplace, the
superfluous, the all-too-many: all these are cowards.
Whoever is of my kind will also encounter the experiences of my kind: so his first companions will have
to be corpses and jesters. His second companions, however, will call themselves his believers: a living swarm,
much love, much folly, much beardless veneration. To
these believers, whoever is of my kind among men
should not tie his heart; those who know the changeful,
cowardly nature of mankind should not believe in these
springtimes and colorful meadows.
Were their ability different, their will would be different too. Those who are half-and-half spoil all that is
whole. That leaves wilt-what is there to wail about?
Let them fly and fall, 0 Zarathustra, and do not wall
It is better to blow among them with rustling winds-
180
blow among these leaves, 0 Zarathustra, that everything
wilted may run away from you even faster
2
"We have become pious again"-so these apostates
confess; and some among them are even too cowardly to
confess it.
Those I look in the eye, and then I say it to their
faces and to their blushing cheeks: you are such as pray
again.
But it is a disgrace to prayl Not for everybody, but
for you and me and whoever else has a conscience in
his head too. For you it is a disgrace to prayl
You know it well: your cowardly devil within you,
who would like to fold his hands and rest his hands in
his lap and be more comfortable-this cowardly devil
urges you, "There is a God." With this, however, you
belong to the light-shunning kind who cannot rest where
there is light; now you must daily bury your head
deeper in night and haze.
And verily, you chose the hour well, for just now the
nocturnal birds are flying again. The hour has come for
all light-shunning folk, the hour of evening and rest,
when they do not rest. I hear and smell it: their hour
for chase and procession has come-not indeed for a
wild chase, but for a tame, lame, snooping, pussyfooting, prayer-muttering chase-for a chase after soulful
sneaks: all the heart's mousetraps have now been set
again. And wherever I lift a curtain a little night moth
rushes out. Did it perhaps squat there together with
another little night moth? For everywhere I smell little
hidden communities; and wherever there are closets,
there are new canters praying inside and the fog of
canters.
They sit together long evenings and say, "Let us be-
181
come as little children again and say 'dear Godl' "-their
mouths and stomachs upset by pious confectioners.
Or they spend long evenings watching a cunning,
ambushing, cross-marked spider, which preaches cleverness to the other spiders and teaches thus: "Under
crosses one can spin well."
Or they spend the day sitting at swamps with fishing
rods, thinking themselves profound; but whoever fishes
where there are no fish, I would not even call superficial.
Or they learn to play the harp with pious pleasurefrom a composer of songs who would like to harp himself right into the hearts of young females; for he has
grown weary of old females and their praise.
Or they learn to shudder from a scholarly half-madman who waits in dark rooms for the spirits to come to
him-so his spirit will flee completely.
Or they listen to an old traveling, caviling zany who
has learned the sadness of tones from sad winds; now he
whistles after the wind and preaches sadness in sad
tones.
And some of them have even become night watchmen: now they know how to blow horns and to walk
about at night and to awaken old things that had long
gone to sleep. I heard five sayings about old things last
night at the garden wall: they came from such old,
saddened, dried-up night watchmen.
"For a father, he does not care enough about his
children: human fathers do this better."
"He is too old. He does not care about his children
at all any more"-thus the other night watchman replied.
"But does he have any children? Nobody can prove
it, if he does not prove it himself. I have long wished
he would for once prove it thoroughly."
"Prove? As if he had ever proved anything! Proof is
difficult for him; he considers it terribly important that
one should have faith in him."
"Sure! Surely Faith makes him blessed, faith in him.
That is the way of old people. We are no different ourselves."
Thus the two old night watchmen and scarelights
spoke to each other and then tooted sadly on their
horns: so it happened last night at the garden wall. In
me, however, my heart twisted with laughter and
wanted to break and did not know whither, and sank
into my diaphragm. Verily, this will yet be my death,
that I shall suffocate with laughter when I see asses
drunk and hear night watchmen thus doubting God. Is
not the time long past for all such doubts too? Who may
still awaken such old sleeping, light-shunning things?
For the old gods, after all, things came to an end long
ago; and verily, they had a good gay godlike end. They
did not end in a "twilight," though this lie is told. Instead: one day they laughed themselves to death. That
happened when the most godless word issued from one
of the gods themselves-the word: "There is one god.
Thou shalt have no other god before me!" An old grimbeard of a god, a jealous one, thus forgot himself. And
then all the gods laughed and rocked on their chairs and
cried, "Is not just this godlike that there are gods but
no God?"
He that has ears to hear, let him hear
Thus Zarathustra discoursed in the town which he
loved and which is also called The Motley Cow. For
from here he had only two more days to go to reach
his cave and his animals again; but his soul jubilated
continually because of the nearness of his return home.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, ON APOSTATES
,#NFDB
978:THE VOLUNTARY BEGGAR
When Zarathustra had left the ugliest man, he felt
frozen and lonely: for much that was cold and lonely
passed through his mind and made his limbs too feel
colder. But as he climbed on and on, up and down, now
past green pastures, then again over wild stony places
where an impatient brook might once have made its
bed, all at once he felt warmer and more cheerful again.
"What happened to me?" he asked himself. "Something warm and alive refreshes me, something that
must be near me. Even now I am less alone; unknown
companions and brothers roam about me; their warm
breath touches my soul."
But when he looked around to find those who had
comforted his loneliness, behold, they were cows, standing together on a knoll; their proximity and smell had
warmed his heart. These cows, however, seemed to be
listening eagerly to a speaker and did not heed him
that was approaching. But when Zarathustra had come
quite close to them, he heard distinctly that a human
voice was speaking in the middle of the herd; and they
had evidently all turned their heads toward the speaker.
Thereupon Zarathustra jumped up eagerly and
pushed the animals apart, for he was afraid that somebody had suffered some harm here, which the pity of
cows could scarcely cure. But he was wrong, for behold, there sat a man on the ground, and he seemed to
be urging the animals to have no fear of him, a peaceful man and sermonizer on the mount out of whose
eyes goodness itself was preaching. "What do you seek
here?" shouted Zarathustra, amazed.
"What do I seek here?" he replied. "The same thing
269
you are seeking, you disturber of the peace: happiness
on earth. But I want to learn that from these cows. For,
you know, I have already been urging them half the
morning, and just now they wanted to tell me. Why do
you disturb them?
"Except we turn back and become as cows, we shall
not enter the kingdom of heaven. For we ought to learn
one thing from them: chewing the cud. And verily,
what would it profit a man if he gained the whole
world and did not learn this one thing: chewing the
cudl He would not get rid of his melancholy-Lhis great
melancholy; but today that is called nausea. Who today
does not have his heart, mouth, and eyes full of nausea?
You tool You tool But behold these cowsl"
Thus spoke the sermonizer on the mount, and then
he turned his own eyes toward Zarathustra, for until
then they had dwelt lovingly on the cows. But then his
eyes changed. "Who is this to whom I am talking?" he
cried, startled, and jumped up from the ground. "This
is the man without nausea, this is Zarathustra himself,
the man who overcame the great nausea; this is the
eye, this is the mouth, this is the heart of Zarathustra
himself." And as he spoke thus, he kissed the hands of
the man to whom he was talking, and his eyes welled
over, and he behaved exactly as one to whom a precious
gift and treasure falls unexpectedly from the sky. But
the cows watched all this with amazement.
"Do not speak of me, you who are so strange, so
lovely" Zarathustra said and restrained his tender affection. "First speak to me of yourself. Are you not the
voluntary beggar who once threw away great riches?
Who was ashamed of his riches and of the rich, and
fled to the poorest to give them his fullness and his
heart? But they did not accept him."
270
"But they did not accept me," said the voluntary
beggar; "you know it. So I finally went to the animals
and to these cows."
"There you have learned," Zarathustra interrupted
the speaker, "how right giving is harder than right
receiving, and that to give presents well is an art and
the ultimate and most cunning master-art of graciousness.
"Especially today," answered the voluntary beggar;
"today, I mean, when everything base has become rebellious and shy and, in its own way, arrogant-I mean,
in the way of the mob. For the hour has come, you
know it, for the great, bad, long, slow revolt of the
mob and slaves: it grows and grows. Now the base are
outraged by any charity and any little giving away; and
the overrich should beware. Whoever drips today, like
bulging bottles out of all-too-narrow necks-such bottles they like to seize today to break their necks.
Lascivious greed, galled envy, aggrieved vengefulness,
mob pride: all that leaped into my face. It is no longer
true that the poor are blessed. But the kingdom of
heaven is among the cows."
"And why is it not among the rich?" asked Zarathustra temptingly as he warded off the cows, which
were breathing trustingly on the peaceful man.
"Why do you tempt me?" he replied. "You yourself
know it even better than I. What was it after all that
drove me to the poorest, 0 Zarathustra? Was it not that
I was nauseated by our richest men? By the convicts of
riches, who pick up their advantage out of any rubbish,
with cold eyes, lewd thoughts; by this rabble that
stinks to high heaven; by this gilded, false mob whose
fathers have been pickpockets or carrion birds or
ragpickers-with women, obliging, lascivious, and for-
271
getful: for none of them is too far from the whoresmob above and mob below What do 'poor' and 'rich'
matter today? This difference I have forgotten. I fled,
farther, ever farther, till I came to these cows."
Thus spoke the peaceful man, and he himself
breathed hard and sweated as he spoke, so that the
cows were amazed again. But Zarathustra kept looking
into his face, smiling as he spoke so harshly, and
silently he shook his head. "You do yourself violence,
you sermonizer on the mount, when you use such harsh
words. Your mouth was not formed for such harshness,
nor your eyes. Nor, it seems to me, your stomach either:
it is offended by all such wrath and hatred and frothing.
Your stomach wants gentler things: you are no butcher.
You seem much more like a plant-and-root man to me.
Perhaps you gnash grain. Certainly, however, you are
averse to the joys of the flesh and you love honey."
"You have unriddled me well," answered the voluntary beggar, his heart relieved. "I love honey; I also
gnash grain, for I sought what tastes lovely and gives
a pure breath; also what takes a long time, a day's and
a mouth's work for gentle idlers and loafers. Nobody,
to be sure, has achieved more than these cows: they
invented for themselves chewing the cud and lying in
the sun. And they abstain from all grave thoughts,
which bloat the heart."
"Well then!" said Zarathustra. "You should also see
my animals, my eagle and my serpent: their like is not
to be found on earth today. Behold, there goes the way
to my cave: be its guest tonight. And talk with my animals of the happiness of animals-till I myself return
home. For now a cry of distress urgently calls me away
from you. You will also find new honey in my cave, icefresh golden comb honey: eat that But now quickly
272
take leave from your cows, you who are so strange, so
lovelyl-though it may be hard for you. For they are
your warmest friends and teachers."
"Excepting one whom I love still more," answered the
voluntary beggar. "You yourself are good, and even
better than a cow, 0 Zarathustra."
"Away, away with you, you wicked flatterer!" Zarathustra cried with malice. "Why do you corrupt me with
such praise and honeyed flattery? Away, away from
me!" he cried once more and brandished his stick at
the affectionate beggar, who ran away quickly.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, THE VOLUNTARY BEGGAR
,#NFDB
979:RETIRED
Not long, however, after Zarathustra had got away
from the magician, he again saw somebody sitting by
the side of his path: a tall man in black, with a gaunt
pale face; and this man displeased him exceedingly.
"Alas!" he said to his heart, "there sits muffled-up
melancholy, looking like the tribe of priests: what do
they want in my realm? How now? I have scarcely
escaped that magician; must another black artist cross
259
my way so soon-some wizard with laying-on of hands,
some dark miracle worker by the grace of God, some
anointed world-slanderer whom the devil should fetch?
But the devil is never where he should be: he always
comes too late, this damned dwarf and clubfoot!"
Thus cursed Zarathustra, impatient in his heart, and
he wondered how he might sneak past the black man,
looking the other way. But behold, it happened otherwise. For at the same moment the seated man had
already spotted him; and not unlike one on whom unexpected good fortune has been thrust, he jumped up
and walked toward Zarathustra.
"Whoever you may be, you wanderer," he said, "help
one who has lost his way, a seeker, an old man who
might easily come to grief here. This region is remote
and strange to me, and I have heard wild animals
howling; and he who might have offered me protection
no longer exists himself. I sought the last pious man, a
saint and hermit who, alone in his forest, had not yet
heard what all the world knows today."
"What does all the world know today?" asked Zarathustra. "Perhaps this, that the old god in whom all
the world once believed no longer lives?"
"As you say," replied the old man sadly. "And I
served that old god until his last hour. But now I am
retired, without a master, and yet not free, nor ever
cheerful except in my memories. That is why I climbed
these mountains, that I might again have a festival at
last, as is fitting for an old pope and church father-for
behold, I am the last pope-a festival of pious memories
and divine services. But now he himself is dead, the
most pious man, that saint in the forest who constantly
praised his god with singing and humming. I did not
find him when I found his cave; but there were two
wolves inside, howling over his death, for all animals
260
loved him. So I ran away. Had I then come to these
woods and mountains in vain? Then my heart decided
that I should seek another man, the most pious of all
those who do not believe in God-that I should seek
Zarathustral"
Thus spoke the old man, and he looked with sharp
eyes at the man standing before him; but Zarathustra
seized the hand of the old pope and long contemplated
it with admiration. "Behold, venerable one!" he said
then; "what a beautiful long hand! That is the hand of
one who has always dispensed blessings. But now it
holds him whom you seek, me, Zarathustra. It is I, the
godless Zarathustra, who speaks: who is more godless
than I, that I may enjoy his instruction?"
Thus spoke Zarathustra, and with his glances he
pierced the thoughts and the thoughts behind the
thoughts of the old pope. At last the pope began, "He
who loved and possessed him most has also lost him
most now; behold, now I myself am probably the more
godless of the two of us. But who could rejoice in that?"
"You served him to the last?" Zarathustra asked
thoughtfully after a long silence. "You know how he
died? Is it true what they say, that pity strangled him,
that he saw how man hung on the cross and that he
could not bear it, that love of man became his hell, and
in the end his death?"
The old pope, however, did not answer but looked
aside, shy, with a pained and gloomy expression. "Let
him go!" Zarathustra said after prolonged reflection,
still looking the old man straight in the eye. "Let him
gol He is gone. And although it does you credit that
you say only good things about him who is now dead,
you know as well as I who he was, and that his ways
were queer.
"Speaking in the confidence of three eyes," the old
261
pope said cheerfully (for he was blind in one eye), "in
what pertains to God, I am-and have the right to be
-more enlightened than Zarathustra himself. My love
served him many years, my will followed his will in
everything. A good servant, however, knows everything,
including even things that his master conceals from
himself. He was a concealed god, addicted to secrecy.
Verily, even a son he got himself in a sneaky way. At
the door of his faith stands adultery.
"Whoever praises him as a god of love does not have
a high enough opinion of love itself. Did this god not
want to be a judge too? But the lover loves beyond
reward and retri bution.
"When he was young, this god out of the Orient, he
was harsh and vengeful and he built himself a hell to
amuse his favorites. Eventually, however, he became
old and soft and mellow and pitying, more like a grandfa ther than a father, but most like a shaky old grandmo ther. Then he sat in his nook by the hearth, wilted,
grieving over his weak legs, weary of the world, weary
of willing, and one day he choked on his all-too-great
pity."
"You old pope," Zarathustra interrupted at this point,
"did you see that with your own eyes? Surely it might
have happened that way-that way, and also in some
other way. When gods die, they always die several
kinds of death. But-well then! This way or that, this
way and that-he is gone! He offended the taste of my
ears and eyes; I do not want to say anything worse
about him now that he is dead.
"I love all that looks bright and speaks honestly. But
he-you know it, you old priest, there was something
of your manner about him, of the priests manner: he
was equivocal. He was also indistinct. How angry he
got with us, this wrath-snorter, because we understood
262
him badly! But why did he not speak more cleanly?
And if it was the fault of our ears, why did he give us
ears that heard him badly? If there was mud in our
ears-well, who put it there? He bungled too much, this
potter who had never finished his apprenticeship. But
that he wreaked revenge on his pots and creations for
having bungled them himself, that was a sin against
good taste. There is good taste in piety too; and it was
this that said in the end, 'Away with such a god! Rather
no god, rather make destiny on one's own, rather be a
fool, rather be a god oneselfl"
"What is this I hear?" said the old pope at this
point, pricking up his ears. "0 Zarathustra, with such
disbelief you are more pious than you believe. Some
god in you must have converted you to your godlessness.
Is it not your piety itself that no longer lets you believe
in a god? And your overgreat honesty will yet lead you
beyond good and evil too. Behold, what remains to you?
You have eyes and hands and mouth, predestined for
blessing from all eternity. One does not bless with the
hand alone. Near you, although you want to be the
most godless, I scent a secret, sacred, pleasant scent of
long blessings: it gives me gladness and grief. Let me
be your guest, 0 Zarathustra, for one single night! Nowhere on earth shall I now feel better than with you."
"Amen! So be it!" said Zarathustra in great astonishment. "Up there goes the way, there lies Zarathustra's
cave. I should indeed like to accompany you there myself, you venerable one, for I love all who are pious. But
now a cry of distress urgently calls me away from you.
In my realm no one shall come to grief; my cave is a
good haven. And I wish that I could put everyone who
is sad back on firm land and firm legs.
"But who could take your melancholy off your shoulders? For that I am too weak. Verily, we might wait
263
long before someone awakens your god again. For this
old god lives no more: he is thoroughly dead."
Thus spoke Zarathustra.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, RETIRED
,#NFDB
980:Less profitable
than writing on the waters
of a flowing stream
such is the futility
of unrequited passion.
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The Epic of Gilgamesh Tablet VI
He washed out his marred hair and cleaned up his equipment(?),
shaking out his locks down over his back,
throwing off his dirty clothes and putting on clean ones.
He wrapped himself in regal garments and fastened the sash.
When Gilgamesh placed his crown on his head,
a princess Ishtar raised her eyes to the beauty of Gilgamesh.
"Come along, Gilgamesh, be you my husband,
to me grant your lusciousness.'
Be you my husband, and I will be your wife.
I will have harnessed for you a chariot of lapis lazuli and gold,
with wheels of gold and 'horns' of electrum(?).
It will he harnessed with great storming mountain mules!
Come into our house, with the fragrance of cedar.
And when you come into our house the doorpost(?) and throne dais(?)'will kiss your feet.
Bowed down beneath you will be kings, lords, and princes.
The Lullubu people' will bring you the produce of the mountains and countryside as tribute.
Your she-goats will bear triplets, your ewes twins,
your donkey under burden will overtake the mule,
your steed at the chariot will be bristling to gallop,
your ax at the yoke will have no match."
Gilgamesh addressed Princess Ishtar saying:
"What would I have to give you if I married you!
Do you need oil or garments for your body! Do you lack anything for food or drink!
I would gladly feed you food fit far a god,
I would gladly give you wine fit for a king,
may the street(?) be your home(?), may you be clothed in a garment,
and may any lusting man (?) marry you!
an oven who ice,
a half-door that keeps out neither breeze nor blast,
a palace that crushes down valiant warriors,
an elephant who devours its own covering,
pitch that blackens the hands of its bearer,
a waterskin that soaks its bearer through,
limestone that buckles out the stone wall,
a battering ram that attracts the enemy land,
a shoe that bites its owner's feet!
Where are your bridegrooms that you keep forever'
Where is your 'Little Shepherd' bird that went up over you!
See here now, I will recite the list of your lovers.
Of the shoulder (?) his hand,
Tammuz, the lover of your earliest youth,
for him you have ordained lamentations year upon year!
You loved the colorful 'Little Shepherd' bird
and then hit him, breaking his wing, so
now he stands in the forest crying 'My Wing'!
You loved the supremely mighty lion,
yet you dug for him seven and again seven pits.
You loved the stallion, famed in battle,
yet you ordained for him the whip, the goad, and the lash,
ordained for him to gallop for seven and seven hours,
ordained for him drinking from muddled waters,'
you ordained far his mother Silili to wail continually.
You loved the Shepherd, the Master Herder,
who continually presented you with bread baked in embers,
and who daily slaughtered for you a kid.
Yet you struck him, and turned him into a wolf,
so his own shepherds now chase him
and his own dogs snap at his shins.
You loved Ishullanu, your father's date gardener,
who continually brought you baskets of dates,
and brightened your table daily.
You raised your eyes to him, and you went to him:
'Oh my Ishullanu, let us taste of your strength,
stretch out your hand to me, and touch our vulva.
Ishullanu said to you:
'Me! What is it you want from me!
Has my mother not baked, and have I not eaten
that I should now eat food under contempt and curses
and that alfalfa grass should be my only cover against
the cold?
As you listened to these his words
you struck him, turning him into a dwarf(?),
and made him live in the middle of his (garden of) labors,
where the mihhu do not go up, nor the bucket of dates (?) down.
And now me! It is me you love, and you will ordain for me as
for them!"
When Ishtar heard this, in a fury she went up to the heavens,
going to Anu, her father, and crying,
going to Anrum, her mother, and weeping:
"Father, Gilgamesh has insulted me over and over,
Gilgamesh has recounted despicable deeds about me,
despicable deeds and curses!"
Anu addressed Princess Ishtar, saying: "What is the matter?
Was it not you who provoked King Gilgamesh?
So Gilgamesh recounted despicable deeds about you,
despicable deeds and curses!"
Ishtar spoke to her father, Anu, saying:
"Father, give me the Bull of Heaven,
so he can kill Gilgamesh in his dwelling.
If you do not give me the Bull of Heaven,
I will knock down the Gates of the Netherworld,
I will smash the door posts, and leave the doors flat down,
and will let the dead go up to eat the living!
And the dead will outnumber the living!"
Anu addressed princess Ishtar, saying:
"If you demand the Bull of Heaven from me,
there will be seven years of empty husks for the land of Uruk.
Have you collected grain for the people!
Have you made grasses grow for the animals?"
Ishtar addressed Anu, her father, saying:
"I have heaped grain in the granaries for the people,
I made grasses grow for the animals,
in order that they might eat in the seven years of empty husks.
I have collected grain for the people,
I have made grasses grow for the animals."
When Anu heard her words, he placed the noserope of the Bull of Heaven in her hand.
Ishtar led the Bull of Heaven down to the earth.
When it reached Uruk It climbed down to the Euphrates
At the snort of the Bull of Heaven a huge pit opened up,
and 100 Young Men of Uruk fell in.
At his second snort a huge pit opened up,
and 200 Young Men of Uruk fell in.
At his third snort a huge pit opened up,
and Enkidu fell in up to his waist.
Then Enkidu jumped out and seized the Bull of Heaven by its horns.
the Bull spewed his spittle in front of him,
with his thick tail he flung his dung behind him (?).
Enkidu addressed Gilgamesh, saying:
"My friend, we can be bold(?)
How shall we respond
My friend, I saw
And my strength
I will rip out
I and you, we must share (?)
I shall grasp the Bull
I will fill my hands (?) ..
In front
between the nape, the horns, and thrust your sword."
Enkidu stalked and hunted down the Bull of Heaven.
He grasped it by the thick of its tail
and held onto it with both his hands (?),
while Gilgamesh, like an expert butcher,
boldly and surely approached the Bull of Heaven.
Between the nape, the horns, and he thrust his sword.
After they had killed the Bull of Heaven,
they ripped out its heart and presented it to Shamash.
They withdrew bowing down humbly to Shamash.
Then the brothers sat down together.
Ishtar went up onto the top of the Wall of Uruk-Haven,
cast herself into the pose of mourning, and hurled her woeful curse:
"Woe unto Gilgamesh who slandered me and killed the Bull of
Heaven!"
When Enkidu heard this pronouncement of Ishtar,
he wrenched off the Bull's hindquarter and flung it in her face:
"If I could only get at you I would do the same to you!
I would drape his innards over your arms!"
Ishtar assembled the (cultic women) of lovely-locks, joy-girls, and harlots,
and set them to mourning over the hindquarter of the Bull.
Gilgamesh summoned all the artisans and craftsmen.
(All) the artisans admired the thickness of its horns,
each fashioned from 30 minas of lapis lazuli!
Two fingers thick is their casing(?).
Six vats of oil the contents of the two
he gave as ointment to his (personal) god Lugalbanda.
He brought the horns in and hung them in the bedroom of the family
head (Lugalbanda?).
They washed their hands in the Euphrates,
and proceeded hand in hand,
striding through the streets of Uruk.
The men of Uruk gathered together, staring at them.
Gilgamesh said to the palace retainers:
"Who is the bravest of the men)
Who is the boldest of the males!
Gilgamesh is the bravest of the men,
the boldest of the males!
She at whom we flung the hindquarter of the Bull of Heaven in
anger,
Ishtar has no one that pleases her in the street (?)
Gilgamesh held a celebration in his palace.
The Young Men dozed off, sleeping on the couches of the night.
Enkidu was sleeping, and had a dream.
He woke up and revealed his dream to his friend.
~ Anonymous, Less profitable
,#NFDB
981:THE UGLIEST MAN
And again Zarathustra's feet ran over mountains and
through woods, and his eyes kept seeking, but he whom
they wanted to see was nowhere to be seen: the great
distressed one who had cried out. All along the way,
however, Zarathustra jubilated in his heart and was
grateful. 'What good things," he said, "has this day
given me to make up for its bad beginning! What
strange people have I found to talk with Now I shall
long chew their words like good grains; my teeth shall
grind them and crush them small till they flow like milk
into my soul."
But when the path turned around a rock again the
scenery changed all at once, and Zarathustra entered a
realm of death. Black and red cliffs rose rigidly: no
grass, no tree, no bird's voice. For it was a valley that
all animals avoided, even the beasts of prey; only a
species of ugly fat green snakes came here to die when
they grew old. Therefore the shepherds called this
valley Snakes' Death.
Zarathustra, however, sank into a black reminiscence,
for he felt as if he had stood in this valley once before.
And much that was grave weighed on his mind; he
walked slowly, and still more slowly, and finally stood
still. But when he opened his eyes he saw something
sitting by the way, shaped like a human being, yet
scarcely like a human being-something inexpressible.
And all at once a profound sense of shame overcame
Zarathustra for having laid eyes on such a thing:
blushing right up to his white hair, he averted his eyes
and raised his feet to leave this dreadful place. But at
that moment the dead waste land was filled with a
noise, for something welled up from the ground, gurgling and rattling, as water gurgles and rattles by night
in clogged waterpipes; and at last it became a human
voice and human speech-thus:
"Zarathustra! Zarathustral Guess my riddle! Speak,
speak! What is the revenge against the witness? I lure
you back, here is slippery ice. Take care, take care that
your pride does not break its legs here! You think yourself wise, proud Zarathustra. Then guess the riddle, you
cracker of hard nuts-the riddle that I am. Speak then:
who am I?"
But when Zarathustra had heard these words-what
do you suppose happened to his soul? Pity seized him;
and he sank down all at once, like an oak tree that has
long resisted many woodcutters-heavily, suddenly,
terrifying even those who had wanted to fell it. But immediately he rose from the ground again, and his face
became hard.
"I recognize you well," he said in a voice of bronze;
'you are the murderer of God! Let me go. You could
not bear him who saw you-who always saw you
through and through, you ugliest man! You took revenge on this witness!"
Thus spoke Zarathustra, and he wanted to leave; but
the inexpressible one seized a corner of his garment and
began again to gurgle and seek for words. "Stayl" he
said finally. "Stay! Do not pass by! I have guessed what
ax struck you to the ground: hail to you, 0 Zarathustra,
that you stand again! You have guessed, I know it
well, how he who killed him feels-the murderer of
God. Stay! Sit down here with me! It is not for nothing.
Whom did I want to reach, if not you? Stay! Sit down!
But do not look at me! In that way honor my ugliness
265
They persecute me; now you are my last refuge. Not
with their hatred, not with their catchpoles: I would
mock such persecution and be proud and glad of itl
"Has not all success hitherto been with the wellpersecuted? And whoever persecutes well, learns readily
how to follow; for he is used to going after somebody
else. But it is their pity-it is their pity that I flee,
fleeing to you. 0 Zarathustra, protect me, you my last
refuge, the only one who has solved my riddle: you
guessed how he who killed him feels. Stay! And if you
would go, you impatient one, do not go the way I
came. That way is bad. Are you angry with me that I
have even now stammered too long-and even advise
you? But know, it is I, the ugliest man, who also has
the largest and heaviest feet. Where I have gone, the
way is bad. I tread all ways till they are dead and
ruined.
"But that you passed me by, silent; that you blushed,
I saw it well: that is how I recognized you as Zarathustra. Everyone else would have thrown his alms to
me, his pity, with his eyes and words. But for that I
am not beggar enough, as you guessed; for that I am
too rich, rich in what is great, in what is terrible, in
what is ugliest, in what is most inexpressible. Your
shame, Zarathustra, honored me! With difficulty I
escaped the throng of the pitying, to find the only one
today who teaches, 'Pity is obtrusive'-you, 0 Zarathustra. Whether it be a god's pity or man's-pity
offends the sense of shame. And to be unwilling to help
can be nobler than that virtue which jumps to help.
"But today that is called virtue itself among all the
little people-pity. They have no respect for great misfortune, for great ugliness, for great failure. Over this
multitude I look away as a dog looks away over the
backs of teeming flocks of sheep. They are little gray
266
people, full of good wool and good will. As a heron
looks away contemptuously over shallow ponds, its
head leaning back, thus I look away over the teeming
mass of gray little waves and wills and souls. Too long
have we conceded to them that they are right, these
little people; so that in the end we have also conceded
them might. Now they teach: 'Good is only what little
people call good.'
"And today 'truth' is what the preacher said, who
himself came from among them, that queer saint and
advocate of the little people who bore witness about
himself: 'I am the truth.' This immodest fellow has long
given the little people swelled heads-he who taught
no small error when he taught, 'I am the truth.' Has an
immodest fellow ever been answered more politely?
You, however, 0 Zarathustra, passed him by and said,
'No! No! Three times no!' You warned against his error,
you, as the first, warned against pity-not all, not none,
but you and your kind.
"You are ashamed of the shame of the great sufferer;
and verily, when you say, 'From pity, a great cloud
approaches; beware, 0 men!'; when you teach, 'All
creators are hard, all great love is over and above its
pity'-O Zarathustra, how well you seem to me to understand storm signs. But you-warn yourself also
against your pity. For many are on their way to you,
many who are suffering, doubting, despairing, drowning, freezing. And I also warn you against myself. You
guessed my best, my worst riddle: myself and what I
did. I know the ax that fells you.
"But he had to die: he saw with eyes that saw everything; he saw man's depths and ultimate grounds, all
his concealed disgrace and ugliness. His pity knew no
shame: he crawled into my dirtiest nooks. This most
curious, overobtrusive, overpitying one had to die. He
267
always saw me: on such a witness I wanted to have
revenge or not live myself. The god who saw everything, even man-this god had to die! Man cannot
bear it that such a witness should live."
Thus spoke the ugliest man. But Zarathustra rose and
was about to leave, for he felt frozen down to his very
entrails. "You inexpressible one," he said, "you have
warned me against your way. In thanks I shall praise
mine to you. Behold, up there lies Zarathustra's cave.
My cave is large and deep and has many nooks; even
the most hidden can find a hiding-place there. And
close by there are a hundred dens and lodges for crawling, fluttering, and jumping beasts. You self-exiled exile,
would you not live among men and men's pity? Well
then Do as I do. Thus you also learn from me; only
the doer learns. And speak first of all to my animals.
The proudest animal and the wisest animal-they
should be the right counselors for the two of us."
Thus spoke Zarathustra, and he went his way, still
more reflectively and slowly than before; for he asked
himself much, and he did not know how to answer himself readily. "How poor man is after all," he thought in
his heart; "how ugly, how wheezing, how full of hidden
shame! I have been told that man loves himself: ah,
how great must this self-love bel How much contempt
stands against it! This fellow too loved himself, even as
he despised himself: a great lover he seems to me, and
a great despiser. None have I found yet who despised
himself more deeply: that too is a kind of height. Alas,
was he perhaps the higher man whose cry I heard? I
love the great despisers. Man, however, is something
that must be overcome."
268
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, THE UGLIEST MAN
,#NFDB
982:ON
THE VISION
AND THE
RIDDLE
1
When it got abroad among the sailors that Zarathustra was on board-for another man from the blessed
isles had embarked with him-there was much curiosity
and anticipation. But Zarathustra remained silent for
two days and was cold and deaf from sadness and answered neither glances nor questions. But on the evening of the second day he opened his ears again,
although he still remained silent, for there was much
that was strange and dangerous to be heard on this
ship, which came from far away and wanted to sail
even farther. But Zarathustra was a friend of all who
travel far and do not like to live without danger. And
behold, eventually his own tongue was loosened as he
listened, and the ice of his heart broke. Then he began
to speak thus:
To you, the bold searchers, researchers, and whoever
156
embarks with cunning sails on terrible seas-to you,
drunk with riddles, glad of the twilight, whose soul
flutes lure astray to every whirlpool, because you do not
want to grope along a thread with cowardly hand; and
where you can guess, you hate to deduce-to you
alone I tell the riddle that I saw, the vision of the
loneliest.
Not long ago I walked gloomily through the deadly
pallor of dusk-gloomy and hard, with lips pressed
together. Not only one sun had set for me. A path that
ascended defiantly through stones, malicious, lonely, not
cheered by herb or shrub-a mountain path crunched
under the defiance of my foot. Striding silently over
the mocking clatter of pebbles, crushing the rock that
made it slip, my foot forced its way upward. Upwarddefying the spirit that drew it downward toward the
abyss, the spirit of gravity, my devil and archenemy.
Upward-although he sat on me, half dwarf, half
mole, lame, making lame, dripping lead into my ear,
leaden thoughts into my brain.
"O Zarathustra," he whispered mockingly, syllable by
syllable; "you philosopher's stone You threw yourself
up high, but every stone that is thrown must fall. 0
Zarathustra, you philosopher's stone, you slingstone,
you star-crusherl You threw yourself up so high; but
every stone that is thrown must fall. Sentenced to
yourself and to your own stoning-O Zarathustra, far
indeed have you thrown the stone, but it will fall back
on yourself."
Then the dwarf fell silent, and that lasted a long
time. His silence, however, oppressed me; and such
twosomeness is surely more lonesome than being alone.
I climbed, I climbed, I dreamed, I thought; but everything oppressed me. I was like one sick whom his
wicked torture makes weary, and who as he falls asleep
157
is awakened by a still more wicked dream. But there is
something in me that I call courage; that has so far
slain my every discouragement. This courage finally
bade me stand still and speak: "Dwarf! It is you or II"
For courage is the best slayer, courage which attacks;
for in every attack there is playing and brass.
Man, however, is the most courageous animal: hence
he overcame every animal. With playing and brass he
has so far overcome every pain; but human pain is the
deepest pain.
Courage also slays dizziness at the edge of abysses:
and where does man not stand at the edge of abysses?
Is not seeing always-seeing abysses?
Courage is the best slayer: courage slays even pity.
But pity is the deepest abyss: as deeply as man sees
into life, he also sees into suffering.
Courage, however, is the best slayer-courage which
attacks: which slays even death itself, for it says, "Was
that life? Well then! Once morel"
In such words, however, there is much playing and
brass. He that has ears to hear, let him hear
2
"Stop, dwarf!" I said. "It is I or you! But I am the
stronger of us two: you do not know my abysmal
thought. That you could not bear!"
Then something happened that made me lighter, for
the dwarf jumped from my shoulder, being curious; and
he crouched on a stone before me. But there was a
gateway just where we had stopped.
"Behold this gateway, dwarfl" I continued. "It has
two faces. Two paths meet here; no one has yet followed either to its end. This long lane stretches back
for an eternity. And the long lane out there, that is
another eternity. They contradict each other, these
158
paths; they offend each other face to face; and it is
here at this gateway that they come together. The name
of the gateway is inscribed above: 'Moment.' But whoever would follow one of them, on and on, farther and
farther-do you believe, dwarf, that these paths contradict each other eternally?"
"All that is straight lies," the dwarf murmured contemptuously. "All truth is crooked; time itself is a
circle."
"You spirit of gravity," I said angrily, "do not make
things too easy for yourself Or I shall let you crouch
where you are crouching, lamefoot; and it was I that
carried you to this height.
"Behold," I continued, "this moment! From this gateway, Moment, a long, eternal lane leads backward:
behind us lies an eternity. Must not whatever can walk
have walked on this lane before? Must not whatever
can happen have happened, have been done, have
passed by before? And if everything has been there
before-what do you think, dwarf, of this moment?
Must not this gateway too have been there before? And
are not all things knotted together so firmly that this
moment draws after it all that is to come? Therefore
itself too? For whatever can walk-in this long lane out
there too, it must walk once more.
"And this slow spider, which crawls in the moonlight,
and this moonlight itself, and I and you in the gateway,
whispering together, whispering of eternal things-must
not all of us have been there before? And return and
walk in that other lane, out there, before us, in this
long dreadful lane-must we not eternally return?"
Thus I spoke, more and more softly; for I was afraid
of my own thoughts and the thoughts behind my
thoughts. Then suddenly I heard a dog howl nearby.
Had I ever heard a dog howl like this? My thoughts
159
raced back. Yes, when I was a child, in the most distant
childhood: then I heard a dog howl like this. And I saw
him too, bristling, his head up, trembling, in the stillest
midnight when even dogs believe in ghosts-and I
took pity: for just then the full moon, silent as death,
passed over the house; just then it stood still, a round
glow-still on the flat roof, as if on another's property
-that was why the dog was terrified, for dogs believe
in thieves and ghosts. And when I heard such howling
again I took pity again.
Where was the dwarf gone now? And the gateway?
And the spider? And all the whispering? Was I dreaming, then? Was I waking up?
Among wild cliffs I stood suddenly alone, bleak, in
the bleakest moonlight. But there lay a man. And there
-the dog, jumping, bristling, whining-now he saw
me coming; then he howled again, he cried. Had I ever
heard a dog cry like this for help? And verily, what I
saw-I had never seen the like. A young shepherd I
saw, writhing, gagging, in spasms, his face distorted,
and a heavy black snake hung out of his mouth. Had
I ever seen so much nausea and pale dread on one
face? He seemed to have been asleep when the snake
crawled into his throat, and there bit itself fast. My
hand tore at the snake and tore in vain; it did not tear
the snake out of his throat. Then it cried out of me:
"Bitel Bite its head offl Bitel" Thus it cried out of memy dread, my hatred, my nausea, my pity, all that is
good and wicked in me cried out of me with a single
cry.
You bold ones who surround mel You searchers, researchers, and whoever among you has embarked with
cunning sails on unexplored seas. You who are glad
of riddles Guess me this riddle that I saw then, interpret me the vision of the loneliest. For it was a vision
160
and a foreseeing. What did I see then in a parable?
And who is it who must yet come one day? Who is the
shepherd into whose throat the snake crawled thus?
Who is the man into whose throat all that is heaviest
and blackest will crawl thus?
The shepherd, however, bit as my cry counseled him;
he bit with a good bite. Far away he spewed the head
of the snake-and he jumped up. No longer shepherd,
no longer human-one changed, radiant, laughing!
Never yet on earth has a human being laughed as he
laughed! 0 my brothers, I heard a laughter that was no
human laughter; and now a thirst gnaws at me, a longing that never grows still. My longing for, this laughter
gnaws at me; oh, how do I bear to go on living And
how could I bear to die nowl
Thus spoke Zarathustra.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, ON THE VISION AND THE RIDDLE
,#NFDB
983:But little better
than the vivid dream I dreamt
was our encounter
in reality's darkness,
black as leopard-flower seeds.
Like (0) 0
This very keepsake
This very keepsake
is now a source of misery,
for were it not here
there might be fleeting moments
when I would not think of you.
Like (0) 0
The Poem of Zuhair
"Does the blackened ruin, situated in the stony ground
between Durraj and Mutathallam, which did not speak to me,
when addressed, belong to the abode of Ummi Awfa?
"And is it her dwelling at the two stony meadows, seeming
as though they were the renewed tattoo marks in the sinews
of the wrist?
"The wild cows and the white deer are wandering about
there, one herd behind the other, while their young are spring-
ing up from every lying-down place.
"I stood again near it, (the encampment of the tribe of
Awfa,) after an absence of twenty years, and with some efforts,
I know her abode again after thinking awhile.
"I recognized the three stones blackened by fire at the
place where the kettle used to be placed at night, and the
trench round the encampment, which had not burst, like the source of a pool.
"And when I recognized the encampment I said to its site,
'Now good morning, oh spot;
may you be safe from dangers.'
"Look, oh my friend! do you see any women traveling on
camels, going over the high ground above the stream of
Jurthum?
"They have covered their howdahs with coverlets of high
value, and with a thin screen, the fringes of which are red,
resembling blood.
"And they inclined toward the valley of Sooban, ascending
the center of it, and in their faces were the fascinating
looks of a soft-bodied person brought up in easy circumstances.
"They arose early in the morning and got up at dawn, and
they went straight to the valley of Rass as the hand goes
unswervingly to the mouth, when eating.
"And amongst them is a place of amusement for the farsighted one,
and a pleasant sight for the eye of the looker who
looks attentively.
"As if the pieces of dyed wool which they left in every
place in which they halted, were the seeds of night-shade
which have not been crushed.
"When they arrived at the water, the mass of which was
blue from intense purity, they laid down their walking sticks,
like the dweller who has pitched his tents.
"They kept the hill of Qanan and the rough ground about
it on their hand; while there are many, dwelling in Qanan,
the shedding of whose blood is lawful and unlawful.
"They came out from the valley of Sooban, then they
crossed it, riding in every Qainian howdah
new and widened.
"Then I swear by the temple, round which walk the men
who built it from the tribes
of Quraysh and Turhum.
"An oath, that you are verily two excellent chiefs, who
are found worthy of honor in every condition, between ease
and distress.
"The two endeavorers from the tribe of Ghaiz bin Murrah
strove in making peace after the connection between the
tribes had become broken, on account of the shedding of blood.
"You repaired with peace the condition of the tribes of
'Abs and Zubyan, after they had fought with one another, and
ground up the perfume of Manshim between them.
"And indeed you said, 'if we bring about peace perfectly by the spending
of money and the conferring of benefits, and by good words,
we shall be safe from the danger of the two tribes, destroying each other.'
"You occupied by reason of this the best of positions, and
became far from the reproach of being
undutiful and sinful.
"And you became great in the high nobility of Ma'add;
may you be guided in the right way; and he who spends his
treasure of glory will become great.
"The memory of the wounds is obliterated by the hundreds
of camels, and he, who commenced paying off the blood money
by instalments, was not guilty of it (i.e., of making war).
"One tribe pays it to another tribe as an indemnity, while
they who gave the indemnity did not shed blood sufficient for
the filling of a cupping glass.
"Then there was being driven to them from the property
you inherited, a booty of various sorts from young camels
with slit ears.
"Now, convey from me to the tribe of Zubyan and their
allies a message,--- 'verily you have sworn by every sort of
oath to keep the peace.'
"Do not conceal from God what is in your breast that it
may be hidden; whatever is concealed,
God knows all about it.
"Either it will be put off and placed recorded in a book,
and preserved there until the judgment day;
or the punishment be hastened and so he will take revenge.
"And war is not but what you have learnt it to be, and
what you have experienced, and what is said concerning it,
is not a story based on suppositions.
"When you stir it up, you will stir it up as an accursed
thing, and it will become greedy when you excite its greed
and it will rage fiercely.
"Then it will grind you as the grinding of the upper millstone
against the lower, and it will conceive immediately after
one birth and it will produce twins.
"By my life I swear, how good a tribe it is upon whom
Husain Bin Zamzam brought an injury by committing a
crime which did not please them.
"And he had concealed his hatred, and did not display it,
and did not proceed to carry out his intention until he got a
good opportunity.
"And he said, 'I will perform my object of avenging myself,
and I will guard myself from my enemy with a thousand
bridled horses behind me.'
"Then he attacked his victim from 'Abs, but did not cause
fear to the people of the many houses, near which death had
thrown down his baggage.
"They allowed their animals to graze until when the interval
between the hours of drinking was finished, they took them to the deep pool,
which is divided by weapons and by shedding of blood.
"They accomplished their object amongst themselves, then
they led the animals back to the pasture of unwholesome
indigestible grass.
"I have grown weary of the troubles of life; and he,
who lives eighty years will, may you have no father
if you doubt grow weary.
"And I know what has happened to-day and yesterday,
before it, but verily, of the knowledge of what will happen
tomorrow; I am ignorant.
"I see death is like the blundering of a blind camel;---him
whom he meets he kills, and he whom he misses lives and will
become old.
"And he who does not act with kindness in many affairs
will be torn by teeth
and trampled under foot.
"And he, who makes benevolent acts intervene before
honor, increases his honor;
and he, who does not avoid abuse, will be abused.
"He, who is possessed of plenty, and is miserly with his
great wealth toward his people, will be dispensed with,
and abused.
"He who keeps his word, will not be reviled;
and he whose heart is guided to self-satisfying benevolence
will not stammer.
"And he who dreads the causes of death, they will reach
him, even if he ascends the tracts of the heavens
with a ladder.
"And he, who shows kindness to one not deserving it, his
praise will be a reproach against him, and he will repent of
having shown kindness.
"And he who rebels against the butt ends of the spears,
then verily he will have to obey the spear points joined to
every long spear shaft.
"And he who does not repulse with his weapons from his
tank, will have it broken; and he who does not oppress the
people will be oppressed.
"And he who travels should consider his friend an enemy;
and he who does not respect himself
will not be respected.
"And he, who is always seeking to bear the burdens of
other people, and does not excuse himself from it,
will one day by reason of his abasement, repent.
"And whatever of character there is in a man, even though
he thinks it concealed from people,
it is known.
"He, who does not cease asking people to carry him, and
does not make himself independent of them even for one day
of the time, will be regarded with disgust.
"Many silent ones you see, pleasing to you,
but their excess in wisdom or deficiency
will appear at the time of talking.
"The tongue of a man is one half, and the other half is his
mind, and here is nothing besides these two, except the shape
of the blood and the flesh.
"And verily, as to the folly of an old man
there is no wisdom after it,
but the young man after his folly may become wise.
"We asked of you, and you gave, and we returned to the
asking and you returned to the giving, and he who increases
the asking, will one day be disappointed."
~ Anonymous, But little better
,#NFDB
984:THE
MAGICIAN
1
But when Zarathustra came around a rock he beheld,
not far below on the same path, a man who threw his
limbs around like a maniac and finally flopped down
252
on his belly. "Waitl" Zarathustra said to his heart; "that
must indeed be the higher man; from him came that
terrible cry of distress; let me see if he can still be
helped." But when he ran to the spot where the man lay
on the ground he found a trembling old man with
vacant eyes; and however Zarathustra exerted himself
to help the man to get up on his feet again, it was all
in vain. Nor did the unfortunate man seem to notice
that anybody was with him; rather he kept looking
around with piteous gestures, like one abandoned and
forsaken by all the world. At last, however, after many
shudders, convulsions, and contortions, he began to
moan thus:
"Who warms me, who loves me still?
Give hot hands
Give a heart as glowing coalsl
Stretched out, shuddering,
Like something half dead whose feet one warmsShaken, alas, by unknown fevers,
Shivering with piercing icy frost-arrows,
Hunted by thee, 0 thought
Unnamable, shrouded, terrible onel
Thou hunter behind clouds
Struck down by thy lightning bolt,
Thou mocking eye that stares at me from the dark:
Thus I lie
Writhing, twisting, tormented
With all eternal tortures,
Hit
By thee, cruelest hunter,
Thou unknown god!
Hit deeper
Hit once more yetl
Drive a stake through and break this heart!
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Why this torture
With blunt-toothed arrows?
Why dost thou stare again,
Not yet weary of human agony,
With gods' lightning eyes that delight in suffering?
Thou wouldst not kill,
Only torture, torture?
Why torture me,
Delighted by suffering, thou unknown god?
Hahl hah! Thou art crawling close?
In such midnightWhat dost thou want? Speakl
Thou art crowding, pressing meHah! Far too closely
Awayl Awayl
Thou art listening to me breathe,
Thou art listening to my heart,
Thou jealous one
Jealous of what?
Awayl Awayl Why the ladder?
Wouldst thou enter
The heart,
Climb in, deep into my
Most secret thoughts?
Shameless onel Unknown thief
What wouldst thou steal?
What wouldst thou gain by listening?
What wouldst thou gain by torture,
Thou torturer!
Thou hangman-godl
Or should I, doglike,
Roll before thee?
Devotedly, frantic, beside myself,
Wag love to thee?
254
In vain! Pierce on,
Cruelest thorn! No,
No dog-only thy game am I,
Cruelest hunter!
Thy proudest prisoner,
Thou robber behind clouds!
Speak at last!
What wouldst thou, waylayer, from me?
Thou lightning-shrouded onel Unknown one! Speak,
What wilt thou, unknown-god?
What? Ransom?
Why wilt thou ransom?
Demand much Thus my pride advises.
And make thy speech short! That my other pride
advises.
Hah, hahl
Me thou wilt have? Me?
Me-entirely?
Hah, hahl
And art torturing me, fool that thou art,
Torturing my pride?
Give love to me-who warms me still?
Who loves me still?-Give hot hands,
Give a heart as glowing coals,
Give me, the loneliest
Whom ice, alas, sevenfold ice
Teaches to languish for enemies,
Even for enemies,
Give, yes, give wholly,
Cruelest enemy,
Give me-thyself!
255
Awayl
He himself fled,
My last, only companion,
My great enemy,
My unknown,
My hangman-god.
Nol Do come back
With all thy tortures!
To the last of all that are lonely,
Oh, come back!
All my tear-streams run
Their course to thee;
And my heart's final flameFlares up for theel
Oh, come back,
My unknown godl My pain! My last-happiness!"
At this point, however, Zarathustra could not restrain
himself any longer, raised his stick, and started to beat
the moaning man with all his might. "Stop itl" he
shouted at him furiously. "Stop it, you actor You
counterfeiter! You liar from the bottom! I recognize you
well! I'll warm your legs for you, you wicked magician.
I know well how to make things hot for such as you."
"Leave offl" the old man said and leaped up from the
ground. "Don't strike any more, Zarathustral I did all
this only as a game. Such things belong to my art; it
was you that I wanted to try when I treated you to this
tryout. And verily, you have seen through me very well.
But you too have given me no small sample of yourself to
try out: you are hard, wise Zarathustra. Hard do you hit
with your 'truths'; your stick forces this truth out of me."
"Don't flatter!" replied Zarathustra, still excited and
angry, "you actor from the bottom! You are false; why
do you talk of truth? You peacock of peacocks, you sea
of vanity, what were you playing before me, you wicked
magician? In whom was I to believe when you were
moaning in this way?"
"The ascetic of the spirit," said the old man, "I played
him-you yourself once coined this word-the poet
and magician who at last turns his spirit against himself, the changed man who freezes to death from his
evil science and conscience. And you may as well confess it: it took a long time, 0 Zarathustra, before you
saw through my art and lie. You believed in my distress
when you held my head with both your hands; I heard
you moan, 'He has been loved too little, loved too little.'
That I deceived you to that extent made my malice
jubilate inside me."
"You may have deceived people subtler than I,"
Zarathustra said harshly. "I do not guard against
deceivers; I have to be without caution; thus my lot
wants it. You, however, have to deceive: that far I
know you. You always have to be equivocal-tri-,
quadri-, quinquevocal. And what you have now confessed, that too was not nearly true enough or false
enough to suit me. You wicked counterfeiter, how could
you do otherwise? You would rouge even your disease
when you show yourself naked to your doctor. In the
same way you have just now rouged your lie when you
said to me, 'I did all this only as a game.' There was
seriousness in it too: you are something of an ascetic
of the spirit. I solve your riddle: your magic has
enchanted everybody, but no lie or cunning is left to
you to use against yourself: you are disenchanted for
yourself. You have harvested nausea as your one truth.
Not a word of yours is genuine any more, except your
257
mouth-namely, the nausea that sticks to your mouth."
"Who are you?" cried the old magician at this point,
his voice defiant. "Who may speak thus to me, the
greatest man alive today?" And a green lightning bolt
flashed from his eye toward Zarathustra. But immediately afterward he changed and said sadly, "O Zarathustra, I am weary of it; my art nauseates me; I am
not great-why do I dissemble? But you know it too:
I sought greatness. I wanted to represent a great human
being and I persuaded many; but this lie went beyond
my strength. It is breaking me. 0 Zarathustra, everything about me is a lie; but that I am breaking-this,
my breaking, is genuine."
"It does you credit," said Zarathustra gloomily, looking aside to the ground, "it does you credit that you
sought greatness, but it also betrays you. You are not
great. You wicked old magician, this is what is best
and most honest about you, and this I honor: that you
wearied of yourself and said it outright: 'I am not
great.' In this I honor you as an ascetic of the spirit;
and even if it was only a wink and a twinkling, in this
one moment you were genuine.
"But speak, what are you seeking here in my woods
and rocks? And lying down on my path, how did you
want to try me? In what way were you seeking to test
me?' Thus spoke Zarathustra, and his eyes flashed.
The old magician remained silent for a while, then
said, "Did I seek to test you? I-merely seek. 0 Zarathustra, I seek one who is genuine, right, simple,
unequivocal, a man of all honesty, a vessel of wisdom,
a saint of knowledge, a great human being. Do you not
know it, Zarathustra? I seek Zarathustra."
And at this point there began a long silence between
the two. But Zarathustra became deeply absorbed and
258
closed his eyes. Then, however, returning to his partner
in the conversation, he seized the hand of the magician
and said, full of kindness and cunning, "Well! Up there
goes the path; there lies Zarathustra's cave. There you
may seek him whom you would find. And ask my
animals for advice, my eagle and my serpent: they shall
help you seek. But my cave is large. I myself, to be
sure-I have not yet seen a great human being. For
what is great, even the eyes of the subtlest today are
too coarse. It is the realm of the mob. Many have I seen,
swollen and straining, and the people cried, 'Behold a
great manly' But what good are all bellows? In the end,
the wind comes out. In the end, a frog which has
puffed itself up too long will burst: the wind comes out.
To stab a swollen man in the belly, I call that a fine
pastime. Hear it well, little boys
"Today belongs to the mob: who could still know
what is great and what small? Who could still successfully seek greatness? Only a fool: fools succeed. You
seek great human beings, you queer fool? Who taught
you that? Is today the time for that? 0 you wicked
seeker, why did you seek to test me?"
Thus spoke Zarathustra, his heart comforted, and he
continued on his way, laughing.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, THE MAGICIAN
,#NFDB
985:ON VIRTUE
THAT
MAKES SMALL
1
When Zarathustra was on land again he did not proceed straight to his mountain and his cave, but he undertook many ways and questions and found out this
and that; so that he said of himself, joking: "Behold
a river that flows, winding and twisting, back to its
source" For he wanted to determine what had happened to man meanwhile: whether he had become
greater or smaller. And once he saw a row of new
houses; then he was amazed and said:
"What do these houses mean? Verily, no great soul
put them up as its likeness. Might an idiotic child have
taken them out of his toy box? Would that another
child might put them back into his box! And these
rooms and chambers-can men go in and out of them?
They look to me as if made for silken dolls, or for
stealthy nibblers who probably also let themselves be
nibbled stealthily.'
And Zarathustra stood still and reflected. At last he
said sadly: "Everything has become smaller Everywhere I see lower gates: those who are of my kind
probably still go through, but they must stoop. Oh,
when shall I get back to my homeland, where I need
no longer stoop-no longer stoop before those who are
small And Zarathustra sighed and looked into the
distance. On that same day, however, he made his
speech on virtue that makes small.
168
2
I walk among this people and I keep my eyes open:
they do not forgive me that I do not envy their virtues.
They bite at me because I say to them: small people
need small virtues-and because I find it hard to accept that small people are needed.
I am still like the rooster in a strange yard, where
the hens also bite at him; but I am not angry with the
hens on that account. I am polite to them as to all
small annoyances; to be prickly to what is small strikes
me as wisdom for hedgehogs.
They all speak of me when they sit around the fire
in the evening; they speak of me, but no one thinks
of me. This is the new stillness I have learned: their
noise concerning me spreads a cloak over my thoughts.
They noise among themselves: "What would this
gloomy cloud bring us? Let us see to it that it does not
bring us a plague." And recently a woman tore back
her child when it wanted to come to me. "Take the
children awayl" she cried; "such eyes scorch children's
souls." They cough when I speak: they think that a
cough is an argument against strong winds; they guess
nothing of the roaring of my happiness. "We have no
time yet for Zarathustra," they argue; but what matters
a time that "has no time" for Zarathustra?
And when they praise me, how could I go to sleep
on their praise? Their praise is a belt of thorns to me:
it scratches me even as I shake it off. And this too I
have learned among them: he who gives praise poses
as if he were giving back; in truth, however, he wants
more gifts.
Ask my foot whether it likes their way of lauding
and luring Verily, after such a beat and ticktock it has
no wish either to dance or to stand still. They would
169
laud and lure me into a small virtue; they would persuade my foot to the ticktock of a small happiness.
I walk among this people and I keep my eyes open:
they have become smaller, and they are becoming
smaller and smaller; but this is due to their doctrine of
happiness and virtue. For they are modest in virtue,
too-because they want contentment. But only a modest
virtue gets along with contentment.
To be sure, even they learn in their way to stride
and to stride forward: I call it their hobbling. Thus they
become a stumbling block for everyone who is in a
hurry. And many among them walk forward while
looking backward with their necks stiff: I like running
into them. Foot and eye should not lie nor give the lie
to each other. But there is much lying among the small
people. Some of them will, but most of them are only
willed. Some of them are genuine, but most of them are
bad actors. There are unconscious actors among them
and involuntary actors; the genuine are always rare,
especially genuine actors.
There is little of man here; therefore their women
strive to be mannish. For only he who is man enough
will release the woman in woman.
And this hypocrisy I found to be the worst among
them, that even those who command, hypocritically
feign the virtues of those who serve. "I serve, you
serve, we serve"-thus prays even the hypocrisy of the
rulers; and woe, if the first lord is merely the first
servant!
Alas, into their hypocrisies too the curiosity of my
eyes flew astray; and well I guessed their fly-happiness
and their humming around sunny windowpanes. So
much kindness, so much weakness do I see; so much
justice and pity, so much weakness.
Round, righteous, and kind they are to each other,
170
round like grains of sand, righteous and kind with grains
of sand. Modestly to embrace a small happiness-that
they call "resignation"-and modestly they squint the
while for another small happiness. At bottom, these
simpletons want a single thing most of all: that nobody
should hurt them. Thus they try to please and gratify
everybody. This, however, is cowardice, even if it be
called virtue.
And if they once speak roughly, these small people, I
hear only their hoarseness, for every draft makes them
hoarse. They are clever, their virtues have clever fingers.
But they lack fists, their fingers do not know how to
hide behind fists. Virtue to them is that which makes
modest and tame: with that they have turned the wolf
into a dog and man himself into man's best domestic
animal.
'"e have placed our chair in the middle," your
smirking says to me; "and exactly as far from dying
fighters as from amused sows." That, however, is mediocrity, though it be called moderation.
3
I walk among this people and I let many a word
drop; but they know neither how to accept nor how to
retain.
They are amazed that I did not come to revile venery
and vice; and verily, I did not come to warn against
pickpockets either.
They are amazed that I am not prepared to teach wit
to their cleverness and to whet it-as if they did not
have enough clever boys, whose voices screech like
slate pencils
And when I shout, "Curse all cowardly devils in you
who like to whine and fold their hands and pray," they
shout, "Zarathustra is godless." And their teachers of
171
resignation shout it especially; but it is precisely into
their ears that I like to shout, "Yes, I am Zarathustra
the godless!" These teachers of resignation! Whatever
is small and sick and scabby, they crawl to like lice;
and only my nausea prevents me from squashing them.
Well then, this is my preaching for their ears: I am
Zarathustra the godless, who speaks: 'Who is more godless than I, that I may delight in his instruction?'
I am Zarathustra the godless: where shall I find my
equal? And all those are my equals who give themselves
their own will and reject all resignation.
I am Zarathustra the godless: I still cook every
chance in my pot. And only when it has been cooked
through there do I welcome it as my food. And verily,
many a chance came to me domineeringly; but my will
spoke to it still more domineeringly-and immediately
it lay imploringly on its knees, imploring that it might
find a hearth and heart in me, and urging with flattery,
"Look, Zarathustra, how only a friend comes to his
friend!"
But why do I speak where nobody has my ears? And
so let me shout it into all the winds: You are becoming
smaller and smaller, you small people You are crumbling, you comfortable ones. You will yet perish of
your many small virtues, of your many small abstentions,
of your many small resignations. Too considerate, too
yielding is your soil. But that a tree may become great,
it must strike hard roots around hard rocks.
What you abstain from too weaves at the web of all
human future; your nothing too is a spider web and a
spider, which lives on the blood of the future. And
when you receive it is like stealing, you small men of
virtue; but even among rogues, honor says, "One should
steal only where one cannot rob."
"It will give eventually"-that is another teaching of
172
resignation. But I tell you who are comfortable: it will
take and will take more and more from youl Oh, that
you would reject all halfhearted willing and would become resolute in sloth and deedl
Alas, that you would understand my word: "Do whatever you will, but first be such as are able to will.
"Do love your neighbor as yourself, but first be such
as love themselves-loving with a great love, loving
with a great contempt." Thus speaks Zarathustra the
godless.
But why do I speak where nobody has my ears? It is
still an hour too early for me here. I am my own
precursor among this people, my own cock's crow
through dark lanes. But their hour will come! And mine
will come tool Hourly, they are becoming smaller,
poorer, more sterile-poor herbs poor soil and soon
they shall stand there like dry grass and prairie
and verily, weary of themselves and languishing even
more than for water-for fire.
0 blessed hour of lightning! 0 secret before noonl I
yet hope to turn them into galloping fires and heralds
with fiery tongues-they shall yet proclaim with fiery
tongues: It is coming, it is near-the great noonl
Thus spoke Zarathustra.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, ON VIRTUE THAT MAKES SMALL
,#NFDB
986:THE WELCOME
It was only late in the afternoon that Zarathustra,
after much vain searching and roaming, returned to
his cave again. But when he was opposite it, not twenty
paces away, that which he now least expected came
about: again he heard the great cry of distress. Andamazing!-this time it came from his own cave. But
it was a long-drawn-out, manifold, strange cry, and
Zarathustra could clearly discern that it was composed
of many voices, though if heard from a distance it might
sound like a cry from a single mouth.
Then Zarathustra leaped toward his cave, and behold, what a sight awaited him after this soundly For
279
all the men whom he had passed by during the day
were sitting there together: the king at the right and
the king at the left, the old magician, the pope, the
voluntary beggar, the shadow, the conscientious in spirit,
the sad soothsayer, and the ass; and the ugliest man had
put on a crown and adorned himself with two crimson
belts, for like all who are ugly he loved to disguise
himself and pretend that he was beautiful. But in the
middle of this melancholy party stood Zarathustra's
eagle, bristling and restless, for he had been asked too
many questions for which his pride had no answer;
and the wise serpent hung around his neck.
Zarathustra beheld all this with great amazement;
then he examined every one of his guests with friendly
curiosity, read their souls, and was amazed again.
Meanwhile all those gathered had risen from their
seats and were waiting respectfully for Zarathustra
to speak. But Zarathustra spoke thus:
"You who despair You who are strange! So it was
your cry of distress that I heard? And now I also know
where to find him whom I sought in vain today: the
higher man. He sits in my own cave, the higher man.
But why should I be amazed? Have I not lured him to
myself with honey sacrifices and the cunning siren calls
of my happiness?
"Yet it seems to me that you are poor company; you
who utter cries of distress upset each other's hearts as
you sit here together. First someone must come-someone to make you laugh again, a good gay clown, a
dancer and wind and wildcat, some old fool. What do
you think?
"Forgive me, you who despair, that I speak to you
with such little words, unworthy, verily, of such guests.
But you do not guess what makes me so prankish: it is
you yourselves who do it, and the sight of you; forgive
280
me! For everyone becomes brave when he observes one
who despairs. To encourage one who despairs-for
that everyone feels strong enough. Even to me you gave
this strength: a good gift, my honored guests A proper
present to ensure hospitality! Well then, do not be
angry if I also offer you something of what is mine.
"This is my realm and my dominion; but whatever is
mine shall be yours for this evening and this night. My
animals shall serve you, my cave shall be your place
of rest. In my home and house nobody shall despair; in
my region I protect everybody from his wild animals.
And this is the first thing I offer you: security. The
second thing, however, is my little finger. And once
you have that, by all means take the whole hand; well,
and my heart tool Be welcome here, welcome, my
guests!"
Thus spoke Zarathustra, and he laughed from love
and malice. After this welcome his guests bowed again
and were respectfully silent; but the king at the right
hand answered him in their name: "From the manner,
o Zarathustra, in which you offered us hand and welcome, we recognize you as Zarathustra. You humbled
yourself before us; you almost wounded our reverence.
But who would know as you do, how to humble himself
with such pride? That in itself uplifts us; it is refreshing for our eyes and hearts. Merely to see this one thing,
we would gladly climb mountains higher than this one.
For we came, eager to see; we wanted to behold what
makes dim eyes bright. And behold, even now we are
done with all our cries of distress. Even now our minds
and hearts are opened up and delighted. Little is lacking, and our spirits will become sportive.
"Nothing more delightful grows on earth, 0 Zarathustra, than a lofty, strong will: that is the earth's most
beautiful plant. A whole landscape is refreshed by one
281
such tree. Whoever grows up high like you, 0 Zarathustra, I compare to the pine: long, silent, hard, alone,
of the best and most resilient wood, magnificent-and
in the end reaching out with strong green branches for
his own dominion, questioning wind and weather and
whatever else is at home on the heights with forceful
questions, and answering yet more forcefully, a commander, triumphant: oh, who would not climb high
mountains to see such plants? Your tree here, 0 Zarathustra, refreshes even the gloomy ones, the failures;
your sight reassures and heals the heart even of the
restless. And verily, toward your mountain and tree
many eyes are directed today; a great longing has arisen,
and many have learned to ask, 'Who is Zarathustra?'
"And those into whose ears you have once dripped
your song and your honey, all the hidden, the lonesome,
the twosome, have all at once said to their hearts, 'Does
Zarathustra still live? Life is no longer worth while, all
is the same, all is in vain, or-we must live with Zarathustra.'
"'Why does he not come who has so long announced
himself?' ask many. 'Has solitude swallowed him up? Or
are we perhaps supposed to come to him?'
"Now it happens that solitude itself grows weary
and breaks, like a tomb that breaks and can no longer
hold its dead. Everywhere one sees the resurrected.
Now the waves are climbing and climbing around your
mountain, 0 Zarathustra. And however high your height
may be, many must come up to you: your bark shall not
be stranded much longer. And that we who were despairing have now come to your cave and no longer
despair-that is but a sign and symbol that those better
than we are on their way to you; for this is what is on
its way to you: the last remnant of God among men that is, all the men of great longing, of great nausea,
282
of great disgust, all who do not want to live unless they
learn to hope again, unless they learn from you, 0 Zarathustra, the great hope."
Thus spoke the king at the right, and he seized Zarathustra's hand to kiss it; but Zarathustra resisted his
veneration and stepped back, startled, silent, and as if
he were suddenly fleeing into remote distances. But
after a little while he was back with his guests again,
looking at them with bright, examining eyes, and he
said: "My guests, you higher men, let me speak to you
in plain and clear German. It was not for you that I
waited in these mountains."
("Plain and clear German? Good God!" the king at
the left said at this point, in an aside. "One can see that
he does not know our dear Germans, this wise man from
the Eastl But what he means is 'coarse German'; well,
these days that is not the worst of tastes.")
"You may indeed all be higher men," continued Zarathustra, "but for me you are not high and strong enough.
For me-that means, for the inexorable in me that is
silent but will not always remain silent. And if you
do belong to me, it is not as my right arm. For whoever
stands on sick and weak legs himself, as you do, wants
consideration above all, whether he knows it or hides
it from himself. To my arms and my legs, however, I
show no consideration; I show my warriorsno consideration: how then could you be fit for my war? With you I
should spoil my every victory. And some among you
would collapse as soon as they heard the loud roll of
my drums.
"Nor are you beautiful and wellborn enough for me.
I need clean, smooth mirrors for my doctrines; on your
surface even my own image is distorted. Many a burden,
many a reminiscence press on your shoulders; many a
wicked dwarf crouches in your nooks. There is hidden
283
mob in you too. And even though you may be high and
of a higher kind, much in you is crooked and misshapen.
There is no smith in the world who could hammer you
right and straight for me.
"You are mere bridges: may men higher than you
stride over you. You signify steps: therefore do not be
angry with him who climbs over you to his height. A
genuine son and perfect heir may yet grow from your
seed, even for me: but that is distant. You yourselves
are not those to whom my heritage and name belong.
"It is not for you that I wait in these mountains; it is
not with you that I am to go down for the last time.
Only as signs have you come to me, that those higher
than you are even now on their way to me: not the men
of great longing, of great nausea, of great disgust, and
that which you called the remnant of God; no, no,
three times nol It is for others that I wait here in these
mountains, and I will not lift my feet from here without
them; it is for those who are higher, stronger, more
triumphant, and more cheerful, such as are built perpendicular in body and soul: laughing lions must come
"O my strange guests Have you not yet heard anything of my children? And that they are on their way to
me? Speak to me of my gardens, of my blessed isles, of
my new beauty-why do you not speak to me of that?
This present I beseech from your love, that you speak
to me of my children. For this I am rich, for this I grew
poor; what did I not give, what would I not give to
have one thing: these children, this living plantation,
these life-trees of my will and my highest hope!"
Thus spoke Zarathustra, and suddenly he stopped in
his speech, for a longing came over him, and he closed
his eyes and mouth as his heart was moved. And all his
guests too fell silent and stood still in dismay; only the
old soothsayer made signs and gestures with his hands.
284
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, THE WELCOME
,#NFDB
987:THE CONVALESCENT
1
One morning, not long after his return to the cave,
Zarathustra jumped up from his resting place like a
madman, roared in a terrible voice, and acted as if
somebody else were still lying on his resting place who
refused to get up. And Zarathustra's voice resounded so
that his animals approached in a fright, while out of all
the caves and nooks that were near Zarathustra's cave
all animals fled-flying, fluttering, crawling, jumping,
according to the kind of feet or wings that were givert
to them. Zarathustra, however, spoke these words:
Up, abysmal thought, out of my depth! I am your
cock and dawn, sleepy worm. Up! Up! My voice shall
yet crow you awakel Unfasten the fetters of your ears:
listen For I want to hear you. Up! Up! Here is thunder
enough to make even tombs learn to listen. And wipe
sleep and all that is purblind and blind out of your eyes
Listen to me even with your eyes: my voice cures even
those born blind. And once you are awake, you shall
remain awake eternally. It is not my way to awaken
great-grandmo thers from their sleep to bid them sleep
on!
You are stirring, stretching, wheezing? Up! Up! You
shall not wheeze but speak to me. Zarathustra, the god-
216
less, summons youl I, Zarathustra, the advocate of life,
the advocate of suffering, the advocate of the circle; I
summon you, my most abysmal thought!
Hail to mel You are coming, I hear you. My abyss
speaks, I have turned my ultimate depth inside out into
the light. Hail to mel Come here Give me your handle
Huhl Let gol Huhhuhl Nausea, nausea, nausea-woe
unto mel
2
No sooner had Zarathustra spoken these words than
he fell down as one dead and long remained as one
dead. But when he regained his senses he was pale, and
he trembled and remained lying there, and for a long
time he wanted neither food nor drink. This behavior
lasted seven days; but his animals did not leave him by
day or night, except that the eagle flew off to get food.
And whatever prey he got together, he laid on Zarathustra's resting place; and eventually Zarathustra lay
among yellow and red berries, grapes, rose apples,
fragrant herbs, and pine cones. But at his feet two
lambs lay spread out, which the eagle had with difficulty robbed from their shepherds.
At last, after seven days, Zarathustra raised himself
on his resting place, took a rose apple into his hand,
smelled it, and found its fragrance lovely. Then his
animals thought that the time had come to speak to him.
"O Zarathustra," they said, 'it is now seven days that
you have been lying like this with heavy eyes; won't
you at last get up on your feet again? Step out of your
cave: the world awaits you like a garden. The wind is
playing with heavy fragrances that want to get to you,
and all the brooks would run after you. All things have
been longing for you, while you have remained alone foi
seven days. Step out of your cavel All things would be
your physicians. Has perhaps some new knowledge
come to you, bitter and hard? Like leavened dough you
have been lying; your soul rose and swelled over all its
rims."
"O my animals," replied Zarathustra, "chatter on like
this and let me listen. It is so refreshing for me to hear
you chattering: where there is chattering, there the
world lies before me like a garden. How lovely it is that
there are words and sounds Are not words and sounds
rainbows and illusive bridges between things which are
eternally apart?
"To every soul there belongs another world; for every
soul, every other soul is an afterworld. Precisely between what is most similar, illusion lies most beautifully; for the smallest cleft is the hardest to bridge.
"For me-how should there be any outside-myself?
There is no outside. But all sounds make us forget this;
how lovely it is that we forget. Have not names and
sounds been given to things that man might find things
refreshing? Speaking is a beautiful folly: with that man
dances over all things. How lovely is all talking, and all
the deception of sounds With sounds our love dances
on many-hued rainbows."
"O Zarathustra," the animals said, "to those who
think as we do, all things themselves are dancing: they
come and offer their hands and laugh and flee-and
come back. Everything goes, everything comes back;
eternally rolls the wheel of being. Everything dies,
everything blossoms again; eternally runs the year of
being. Everything breaks, everything is joined anew;
eternally the same house of being is built. Everything
parts, everything greets every other thing again; eternally the ring of being remains faithful to itself. In
218
every Now, being begins; round every Here rolls the
sphere There. The center is everywhere. Bent is the
path of eternity."
"O you buffoons and barrel organs" Zarathustra replied and smiled again. "How well you know what had
to be fulfilled in seven days, and how that monster
crawled down my throat and suffocated me. But I bit
off its head and spewed it out. And you, have you already made a hurdy-gurdy song of this? But now I lie
here, still weary of this biting and spewing, still sick
from my own redemption. And you watched all this? 0
my animals, are even you cruel? Did you want to watch
my great pain as men do? For man is the cruelest
animal.
"At tragedies, bullfights, and crucifixions he has so
far felt best on earth; and when he invented hell for
himself, behold, that was his heaven on earth.
"When the great man screams, the small man comes
running with his tongue hanging from lasciviousness.
But he calls it his 'pity.'
"The small man, especially the poet-how eagerly he
accuses life with words Hear him, but do not fail to
hear the delight that is in all accusation. Such accusers
of life-life overcomes with a wink. 'Do you love me?'
she says impudently. 'Wait a little while, just yet I
have no time for you.'
"Man is the cruelest animal against himself; and
whenever he calls himself 'sinner' and 'cross-bearer' and
'penitent,' do not fail to hear the voluptuous delight
that is in all such lamentation and accusation.
'And I myself-do I thus want to be man's accuser?
Alas, my animals, only this have I learned so far, that
man needs what is most evil in him for what is best in
him-that whatever is most evil is his best power and
219
the hardest stone for the highest creator; and that man
must become better and more evil.
"My torture was not the knowledge that man is evil
-but I cried as no one has yet cried: 'Alas, that his
greatest evil is so very small! Alas, that his best is so
very small'
"The great disgust with man-this choked me and
had crawled into my throat; and what the soothsayer
said: 'All is the same, nothing is worth while, knowledge chokes.' A long twilight limped before me, a sadness, weary to death, drunken with death, speaking
with a yawning mouth. 'Eternally recurs the man of
whom you are weary, the small man'-thus yawned my
sadness and dragged its feet and could not go to sleep.
Man's earth turned into a cave for me, its chest sunken;
all that is living became human mold and bones and
musty past to me. My sighing sat on all human tombs
and could no longer get up; my sighing and questioning
croaked and gagged and gnawed and wailed by day
and night: 'Alas, man recurs eternally! The small man
recurs eternally!
"Naked I had once seen both, the greatest man and
the smallest man: all-too-similar to each other, even the
greatest all-too-human. All-too-small, the greatestl-that
was my disgust with man. And the eternal recurrence
even of the smallest-that was my disgust with all
existence. Alasl Nausea! Nauseal Nauseal"
Thus spoke Zarathustra and sighed and shuddered,
for he remembered his sickness. But then his animals
would not let him go on.
"Do not speak on, 0 convalescent" thus his animals
answered him; "but go out where the world awaits you
like a garden. Go out to the roses and bees and dovecots. But especially to the songbirds, that you may learn
220
from them how to single For singing is for the convalescent; the healthy can speak. And when the healthy man
also wants songs, he wants different songs from the
convalescent."
"O you buffoons and barrel organs, be silent!" Zarathustra replied and smiled at his animals. "How well
you know what comfort I invented for myself in seven
days! That I must sing again, this comfort and convalescence I invented for myself. Must you immediately turn
this too into a hurdy-gurdy song?"
"Do not speak on!" his animals answered him again;
"rather even, 0 convalescent, fashion yourself a lyre
first, a new lyrel For behold, Zarathustra, new lyres are
needed for your new songs. Sing and overflow, 0 Zarathustra; cure your soul with new songs that you may
bear your great destiny, which has never yet been any
man's destiny. For your animals know well, 0 Zarathustra, who you are and must become: behold, you
are the teacher of the eternal recurrence-thatis your
destiny! That you as the first must teach this doctrinehow could this great destiny not be your greatest danger
and sickness too?
"Behold, we know what you teach: that all things
recur eternally, and we ourselves too; and that we have
already existed an eternal number of times, and all
things with us. You teach that there is a great year of
becoming, a monster of a great year, which must, like
an hourglass, turn over again and again so that it may
run down and run out again; and all these years are
alike in what is greatest as in what is smallest; and we
ourselves are alike in every great year, in what is greatest as in what is smallest.
"And if you wanted to die now, 0 Zarathustra, behold, we also know how you would then speak to yourself. But your animals beg you not to die yet. You
221
would speak, without trembling but breathing deeply
with happiness, for a great weight and sultriness would
be taken from you who are most patient.
"'Now I die and vanish,' you would say, 'and all at
once I am nothing. The soul is as mortal as the body.
But the knot of causes in which I am entangled recurs
and will create me again. I myself belong to the causes
of the eternal recurrence. I come again, with this sun,
with this earth, with this eagle, with this serpent-not
to a new life or a better life or a similar life: I come
back eternally to this same, selfsame life, in what is
greatest as in what is smallest, to teach again the eternal
recurrence of all things, to speak again the word of the
great noon of earth and man, to proclaim the overman
again to men. I spoke my word, I break of my word:
thus my eternal lot wants it; as a proclaimer I perish.
The hour has now come when he who goes under should
bless himself. Thus ends Zarathustra's going under.'"
When the animals had spoken these words they were
silent and waited for Zarathustra to say something to
them; but Zarathustra did not hear that they were silent.
Rather he lay still with his eyes closed, like one sleeping, although he was not asleep; for he was conversing
with his soul. The serpent, however, and the eagle,
when they found him thus silent, honored the great
stillness around him and cautiously stole away.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, THE CONVALESCENT
,#NFDB
988:THE
DRUNKEN SONG
1
Meanwhile one after the other had stepped out
into the open and into the cool reflective night; but
Zarathustra himself led the ugliest man by the hand to
show him his night-world and the big round moon and
the silvery waterfalls near his cave. There they stood together at last in silence, old people all of them, but with
comforted brave hearts and secretly amazed at feeling
so well on this earth; but the secrecy of the night came
closer and closer to their hearts. And again Zarathustra
thought to himself: "How well I like them now, these
higher men!" But he did not say it out loud, for he
respected their happiness and their silence.
But then that happened which, on that whole long
amazing day, was the most amazing thing of all: the
ugliest man began once more and for the last time to
gurgle and snort, and when he found words, behold, a
question jumped out of his mouth, round and clean, a
good, deep, clear question, which moved the hearts of
all who were listening to him.
"My friends, all of you," said the ugliest man, "what
do you think? For the sake of this day, I am for the
first time satisfied that I have lived my whole life. And
that I attest so much is still not enough for me. Living
on earth is worth while: one day, one festival with
Zarathustra, taught me to love the earth.
318
'Was that life?' I want to say to death. 'Well then!
Once more!'
"My friends, what do you think? Do you not want to
say to death as I do: Was that life? For Zarathustra's
sakel Well then! Once morel"
Thus spoke the ugliest man; but it was not long before midnight. And what do you suppose happened
then? As soon as the higher men had heard his question
they all at once became conscious of how they had
changed and convalesced and to whom they owed this:
then they jumped toward Zarathustra to thank, revere,
caress him, and kiss his hands, each according to his
own manner; and some were laughing and some were
crying. But the old soothsayer was dancing with joy; and
even if, as some of the chroniclers think, he was full of
sweet wine, he was certainly still fuller of the sweetness
of life and he had renounced all weariness. There are
even some who relate that the ass danced too, and that
it had not been for nothing that the ugliest man had
given him wine to drink before. Now it may have been
so or otherwise; and if the ass really did not dance that
night, yet greater and stranger wonders occurred than
the dancing of an ass would have been. In short, as the
proverb of Zarathustra says: "What does it matter?"
2
But when this happened to the ugliest man, Zarathustra stood there like a drunkard: his eyes grew dim,
his tongue failed, his feet stumbled. And who could
guess what thoughts were then running over Zarathustra's soul? But his spirit fled visibly and flew ahead
and was in remote distances and, as it were, "on a high
ridge," as it is written, "between two seas, wandering
like a heavy cloud between past and future." But as
319
the higher men held him in their arms, he gradually
recovered his senses to some extent and with his hands
warded off the throng of the revering and worried; yet
he did not speak. All at once, however, he turned his
head quickly, for he seemed to be hearing something.
Then he put one finger to his mouth and said, "Comel"
And presently it became quiet and secret around; but
from the depth the sound of a bell came up slowly.
Zarathustra and the higher men listened for it; but then
he put one finger to his mouth another time and said
again, "Comel Come! Midnight approaches." And his
voice had changed. But still he did not stir from his
place. Then it grew still more quiet and secret, and
everything listened, even the ass and Zarathustra's animals of honor, the eagle and the serpent, as well as
Zarathustra's cave and the big cool moon and the night
itself. But Zarathustra put his hand to his mouth, for
the third time and said, "Comel Comel Let us wander
now! The hour has come: let us wander into the night!"
3
You higher men, midnight approaches: I want to
whisper something to you as that old bell whispers it
into my ears-as secretly, as terribly, as cordially as that
midnight bell, which has experienced more than any
man, says it to me. It has counted the beats even of
your fathers' hearts and smarts. Alas! Alasl How it
sighsl How it laughs in a dream! Old deep, deep midnightl
Still! Still Here things are heard that by day may not
become loud; but now in the cool air, when all the
noise of your hearts too has become still-now it speaks,
now it is heard, now it steals into nocturnal, overawake
souls. Alasl Alasl How it sighsl How it laughs in a dreamt
320
Do you not hear how it speaks secretly, terribly, cordially to you-the old deep, deep midnight?
0 man, take care
4
Woe unto mel Where is time gone? Have I not sunk
into deep wells? The world sleeps. Alasl Alasl The dog
howls, the moon shines. Sooner would I die, die rather
than tell you what my midnight heart thinks now.
Now I have died. It is gone. Spider, what do you spin
around me? Do you want blood? Alasl Alasl The dew
falls, the hour approaches-the hour when I shiver and
freeze, which asks and asks and asks, "Who has heart
enough for it? Who shall be the lord of the earth? Who
will say: thus shall you run, you big and little rivers"
The hour approaches: 0 man, you higher man, take
care! This speech is for delicate ears, for your ears:
What does the deep midnight declare?
5
I am carried away, my soul dances. Day's work Day's
work! Who shall be the lord of the earth?
The moon is cool, the wind is silent. Alas! Alas! Have
you flown high enough yet? You have danced: but a leg
is no wing. You good dancers, now all pleasure is gone:
wine has become lees, every cup has become brittle,
the tombs stammer. You did not fly high enough: now
the tombs stammer, "Redeem the dead! Why does the
night last so long? Does not the moon make us
drunken?"
You higher men, redeem the tombs, awaken the
corpses! Alas, why does the worm still burrow? The
hour approaches, approaches; the bell hums, the heart
still rattles, the deathwatch, the heart-worm still burrows. Alas! Alasl The world is deep.
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6
Sweet lyrel Sweet lyre! I love your sound, your
drunken ranunculus' croaking. From how long ago, from
how far away your sound comes to me, from the distant
ponds of lovely You old bell, you sweet lyre! Every pain
has torn into your heart, father-pain, fathers' pain, fore-
fathers' pain; your speech grew ripe-ripe as golden
autumn and afternoon, as my hermit's heart; now you
say: the world itself has grown ripe, the grape is turning brown, now it would die, die of happiness. You
higher men, do you not smell it? A smell is secretly
welling up, a fragrance and smell of eternity, a roseblessed, brown gold-wine fragrance of old happiness, of
the drunken happiness of dying at midnight, that
sings. the world is deep, deeper than day had been
aware.
7
Leave me! Leave mel I am too pure for you. Do not
touch mel Did not my world become perfect just now?
My skin is too pure for your hands. Leave me, you stupid,
boorish, dumb dayl Is not the midnight brighter? The
purest shall be the lords of the earth-the most unknown, the strongest, the midnight souls who are
brighter and deeper than any day.
0 day, you grope for me? You seek my happiness? I
seem rich to you, lonely, a treasure pit, a gold-chamber?
0 world, you want me? Am I worldly to you? Am I
spiritual to you? Am I godlike to you? But day and
world, you are too ponderous; have cleverer hands, reach
for deeper happiness, for deeper unhappiness, reach for
any god, do not reach for me: my unhappiness, my
happiness is deep, you strange day, but I am yet no god,
no god's hell: deep is its woe.
322
8
God's woe is deeper, you strange world Reach for
God's woe, not for me! What am I? a drunken sweet
lyre-a midnight lyre, an ominous bell-frog that nobody
understands but that must speak, before the deaf, you
higher men. For you do not understand mel
Gone! Gonel 0 youth! 0 noonl 0 afternoon! Now
evening has come and night and midnight-the dog
howls, the wind: is not the wind a dog? It whines, it
yelps, it howls. Alasl Alasl How the midnight sighsl
How it laughs, how it rattles and wheezesl
How she speaks soberly now, this drunken poetessl
Perhaps she overdrank her drunkenness? She became
overawake? She ruminates? Her woe she ruminates in
a dream, the old deep midnight, and even more her joy.
For joy, even if woe is deep, joy is deeper yet than
agony.
9
You vinel Why do you praise me? Did I not cut you?
I am cruel, you bleed; what does your praise of my
drunken cruelty mean?
"What has become perfect, all that is ripe-wants to
die"-thus you speak. Blessed, blessed be the vintager's
knife But all that is unripe wants to live: woel
Woe entreats: Gol Away, woel But all that suffers
wants to live, that it may become ripe and joyous and
longing-longing for what is farther, higher, brighter.
"I want heirs"-thus speaks all that suffers; "I want
children, I do not want myself."
Joy, however, does not want heirs, or children-joy
wants itself, wants eternity, wants recurrence, wants
everything eternally the same.
Woe says, "Break, bleed, heart! Wander, legal Wing,
323
flyl Get onl Up! Pain!" Well then, old heart: Woe implores, "Gor'
10
You higher men, what do you think? Am I a
soothsayer? A dreamer? A drunkard? An interpreter of
dreams? A midnight bell? A drop of dew? A haze and
fragrance of eternity? Do you not hear it? Do you not
smell it? Just now my world became perfect; midnight
too is noon; pain too is a joy; curses too are a blessing;
night too is a sun-go away or you will learn: a sage
too is a fool.
Have you ever said Yes to a single joy? 0 my friends,
then you said Yes too to all woe. All things are entangled, ensnared, enamored; if ever you wanted one
thing twice, if ever you said, "You please me, happiness!
Abide, moment!" then you wanted all back. All anew,
all eternally, all entangled, ensnared, enamored-oh,
then you loved the world. Eternal ones, Jove it eternally
and evermore; and to woe too, you say: go, but return!
For all joy wants-eternity.
11
All joy wants the eternity of all things, wants honey,
wants lees, wants drunken midnight, wants tombs, wants
tomb-tears' comfort, wants gilded evening glow.
What does joy not want? It is thirstier, more cordial,
hungrier, more terrible, more secret than all woe; it
wants itself, it bites into itself, the ring's will strives in
it; it wants love, it wants hatred, it is overrich, gives,
throws away, begs that one might take it, thanks the
taker, it would like to be hated; so rich is joy that it
thirsts for woe, for hell, for hatred, for disgrace, for
the cripple, for world-this world, oh, you know itl
You higher men, for you it longs, joy, the intractable
324
blessed one-for your woe, you failures. All eternal joy
longs for failures. For all joy wants itself, hence it also
wants agony. 0 happiness, 0 pain! Oh, break, heart!
You higher men, do learn this, joy wants eternity. Joy
wants the eternity of all things, wants deep, wants deep
eternity.
12
Have you now learned my song? Have you guessed its
intent? Well then, you higher men, sing me now my
round. Now you yourselves sing me the song whose
name is "Once More" and whose meaning is "into all
eternity"-sing, you higher men, Zarathustra's round!
O man, take care!
What does the deep midnight declare?
"I was asleepFrom a deep dream I woke and swear:
The world is deep,
Deeper than day had been aware.
Deep is its woe;
Joy-deeper yet than agony:
Woe implores: Gol
But all joy wants eternityWants deep, wants deep eternity."
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, THE DRUNKEN SONG
,#NFDB
989:The Shadow
1.
A vision haunts me, love, when thou art near,
Chilling my heart as frost nips April flowers;
A covering cloud, when all is fair and clear,
That takes the sweetness from our happiest hours.
2.
It steals the colour from our brightest sky;
It mars my soul's content when all seems well;
It quenches laughter in a shuddering sigh —
In thoughts that thrill me like a tolling bell.
3.
It numbs my passion when I love thee most;
It dims my eyes — it veils thy face; it slips,
An unseen shadow, like a creeping ghost,
Betwixt thy kisses and my hungering lips.
4.
What, amid richest plenty, starves me thus?
What is it draws my trustful hand from thine?
That sits a guest at marriage feast with us,
And mixes poison with the food and wine?
5.
In broad noonday — in dark hours long and lone —
252
A small green mound, a lettered name, I see.
There love is symboled in a graven stone —
There I lie dead, worth nothing more to thee.
6.
There weep the dews, and winds of winter blow;
The soft breeze rustles in the bending grass;
The cold rain falls there, and the drifting snow —
But tears fall not, nor lovers' footsteps pass.
7.
Bees hum all day amid the young spring leaves;
The rooks caw loud from every elm- tree bough;
The sparrows twitter in the old church eaves —
But no voice cries for me or calls me now.
8.
Bright beams of morn encompass me about;
The stars shine o'er me, and the pale moonlight;
But I, that lit and warmed thee, am gone out,
Like a burnt candle, in eternal night.
9.
Earth to the earth upon this churchyard slope.
We made no tryst for happier time and place;
And in thy sky gleams no immortal hope,
No distant radiance from my vanished face.
10.
253
And still the sands between thy fingers run —
Desires, delights, ambitions — days and years,
Rich hours of life for thee, though mine are done —
Too full for vain regrets, too brief for tears.
11.
I have lost all, but thou dost hold and save,
Adding new treasure to thy rifled store,
While weeds grow long on the neglected grave
Where sleeps thy mate who may be thine no more.
12.
This is the fate I feel, the ghost I see,
The dream I dream at night, the thought I dread —
That thus 'twill be some day with thee and me,
Thou fain to live while I am doubly dead.
13.
Thou still defiant of our common foe;
I vanquished quite — the once- resplendent crown
Of all thy joys become a dragging woe,
To be lopped off, lest it should weigh thee down.
14.
I, once thy sap of life, a wasteful drain
On thy green vigour, like a rotten branch;
I, once thy health, a paralyzing pain,
A bleeding wound that thou must haste to stanch.
254
15.
Because the dead are dead — the past is gone;
Because dear life is sweet and time is brief,
And some must fall, and some must still press on,
Nor waste scant strength in unavailing grief.
16.
I blame thee not. I know what must be must.
Nor shall I suffer when apart from thee.
I shall not care, when I am mouldering dust,
That once quick love is in the grave with me.
17.
Cast me away — thou knowest I shall not fret;
Take thy due joys — I shall not bear the cost.
I, that am thus forgotten, shall forget,
Nor shed one tear for all that I have lost.
18.
Not then, not then shall sting of death and dole,
The penal curse of life and love, befall;
'Tis now I wear the sackcloth on my soul,
Bereaved and lonely, while possessed of all.
19.
0, wert thou dead, should I, beloved, turn
Deaf heart to memory when of thee she spake?
Should I, when this pure fire had ceased to burn,
255
Seek other hearths, for sordid comfort's sake?
20.
No — no! Yet I am mortal — I am weak —
In need of warmth when wintry winds are cold;
And fateful years and circumstance will wreak
Their own stern will on mine, when all is told.
21.
How can I keep thee? Day and night I grope
In Nature's book, and in all books beside,
For but one touch of a substantial hope.
But all is vague and void on every side.
22.
Whence did we come? And is it there we go?
We look behind — night hides our place of birth;
The blank before hides heaven, for aught we know.
But what is heaven to us, whose home is earth?
23.
Flesh may be gross — the husk that holds the seed —
And gold and gems worth more than common bread;
But flesh is us, and bread is what we need,
And, changed and glorious, we should still be dead.
24.
What is the infinite universe to him
Who has no home? Eternal Future seems,
256
Like the Eternal Past, unreal and dim —
The airy region of a poet's dreams.
25.
What spirit essence, howsoe'er divine,
Can our lost selves restore from dusty grave?
Thy mortal mind and body — thine and mine —
Make all the joys I know, and all I crave.
26.
No fair romance of transcendental bliss,
No tale of palms and crowns my dull heart stirs,
That only hungers for a woman's kiss,
And asks no life that is not one with hers.
27.
Not such Hereafter can I wish to see;
Not this pale hope my sinking soul exalts;
I want no sexless angel — only thee,
My human love, with all thy human faults.
28.
Just as thou art — not beautiful or wise,
But prone to simple sins and sad unrest;
With thy warm lips and arms, and thy sweet eyes —
Sweeter for tears they weep upon my breast.
29.
257
Just as thou art — with thy soft household ways,
Thy noble failures and thy poor success,
Thy love that fits me for my strenuous days —
A mortal woman — neither more nor less.
30.
And thou must pass with these too rapid hours
To that great deep from whence we both were brought;
Thy sentient flesh must turn to grass and flowers,
To birds and beasts, to dust — to air — to naught.
31.
I know the parable. The great oaks grow
To their vast stature from an acorn grain,
And mightiest man was once an embryo.
But how can nothing bring thee forth again?
32.
And is the new oak tree the old oak tree?
And is the son the father? And wouldst thou,
If thou couldst rise from nothing, be to me
Thy present self, that satisfies me now?
33.
Words — words! A dream that fades in Faith's embrace,
And melts in Reason's all- refining fires;
The cherished hope of every age and race;
Born of man's fancy and his own desires.
258
34.
Here in our little island- home we bide
Our few brief years — 'tis all that we possess.
The Infinite lies around on every side,
But what it holds no mortal mind may guess.
35.
Say we remain — a lasting miracle —
As well we may; for this small world is rife
With mystic wonders that no tongue may tell,
And all things teem and travail with new life.
36.
Say we awake — ineffably alive,
Divinely perfect — in some higher sphere!
'Twill not be we — the we who strain and strive,
And love and learn, and joy and suffer, here.
37.
What is our hope, if any hope there be?
'Tis for some bliss uncared for and unknown,
That some strange beings, yet unborn, shall see.
Alas! And all we cry for is our own!
38.
Only to be ourselves — not cast abroad
In space and time, for either bliss or woe —
Only to keep the treasures we have stored!
And they must pass away. And we must go.
259
39.
How can we bear it? How can we submit?
Like a wild beast imprisoned, in our pain
We rave and rage for some way out of it,
But bruise and bleed against the bars in vain.
40.
All — all is dark. Beyond our birth and death —
At either end — the same unyielding door.
We live, we love, while we draw human breath.
This much we know — but we can know no more.
41.
The stars shine down upon the minster spires,
Silent, and pale, and still, like watching eyes.
Think of the tumult of those spinning fires —
Think of the vastness of those midnight skies!
42.
Think of our world in the immense unknown —
Only a grain of stellar dust; and man,
Wanting a God, a Saviour, all his own —
Wanting to break the universal plan!
43.
He but a phase of planetary change,
260
That once was not, and will give place anon
To other forms, more beautiful and strange —
To pass in turn — till earth herself is gone.
44.
Earth, that is next to nothing in the sum
Of things created — a brief mote in space,
With all her aeons past and yet to come.
Ah, think of it! How we forget our place!
45.
Casual atoms in the mighty scheme
That needs us not, we dimly wax and wane,
Dissolving ever like a passing dream —
A breath breathed forth and then drawn back again.
46.
Lone in these infinite realms, perchance unseen —
Unheard. And yet not lost. And not so small,
So feebly futile, pitifully mean,
As our poor creeds would make us, after all.
47.
Still are we details of the great design,
Set to our course, like circling sun and star;
Mortal, infinitesimal — yet divine,
Like Him — or It — that made us what we are.
48.
261
Let manhood, God- begotten, have its due.
'Tis God — whate'er He be — hath made us thus,
Ourselves as gods to know the right and true.
Shall He not, then, be justified in us?
49.
The warm sap runs; the tender leaves unfold;
Ant helps his brother ant; birds build in spring;
The patient earthworm sifts the crumbled mould; —
A sacred instinct guides each living thing.
50.
Shall we, its born interpreters, not heed?
Shall we confess us failures, whom He lifts
So high above these creatures that succeed?
Or prove us worthy of our nobler gifts?
51.
Shall we not prove us worthy? Ay, we will
Because we can, we must — through peace and strife,
Bright hope and black despair, come good, come ill.
'Tis man's sole title to his place in life.
52.
To stand upright in all the winds that blow,
Unbeaten as a tree in driving rain;
In all our doubts, to do the best we know,
From no base fear of loss or hope of gain.
262
53.
To still the cry of self — give listening ears
To stern Truth's message, whatsoe'er it be;
To share our brother's toil and dry his tears —
This is the task set forth for thee and me.
54.
This is the lesson that we live to learn,
And, by brave thought, by word and deed, to teach;
These are the heights our lifted eyes discern
Through cloud and darkness, that our souls must reach.
55.
Not less am I in wisdom and in will
Than ants and worms. I am full- furnished too
My arduous errand hither to fulfil.
I know my work, and what a man can do.
56.
My God, I ask Thee nothing. Thou hast given
This conscious mind, this brain without a flaw;
And I will strive, as I have humbly striven,
To make them serve their purpose and Thy law.
57.
But thee, my soul's companion — thee I seek
For daily courage to support my lot.
In thee hath Nature made me strong or weak.
My human comforter, forsake me not!
263
58.
My nobler self, in whom I live my best,
Strengthen me! Raise me! Help me to the last!
Lay thy dear head upon my throbbing breast —
Give me thy hands, that I may hold thee fast!
59.
Come close — come closer! Let me feel thy heart,
Thy pulsing heart, thy breathing lips, on mine.
O love, let only death and graveyard part —
If they must part — my flesh and soul from thine!
60.
Let no mistrust, no doubt, no poor caprice
Darken for me in thy transparent gaze;
Let no self- wrought estrangement wreck our peace,
Nor vain dissension waste our precious days.
61.
Be thou my purer eyes, my keener ears,
My finer conscience, steadfast, unafraid —
Till these few, swift, inexorable years
Have borne us both beyond the reach of aid.
62.
Be thou my staff upon this lonely way.
Be thou my lamp till need of light is past —
Till the dark shadow, lengthening day by day,
264
Spreads over all and quenches us at last.
63.
Keep me from falling! Keep me from despair!
Keep me true man, if only man I be,
Faithful and brave to bear what I must bear.
For what else have I, if I have not thee?
~ Ada Cambridge,#NFDB
990:THE STILLEST HOUR
What happened to me, my friends? You see me distracted, driven away, unwillingly obedient, prepared to
go-alas, to go away from you. Indeed, Zarathustra
must return once more to his solitude; but this time
the bear goes back to his cave without joy. What happened to me? Who ordered this? Alas, my angry mistress wants it, she spoke to me; have I ever yet
mentioned her name to you? Yesterday, toward evening,
there spoke to me my stillest hour: that is the name of
my awesome mistress. And thus it happened; for I must
tell you everything lest your hearts harden against me
for departing suddenly.
Do you know the fright of him who falls asleep? He
is frightened down to his very toes because the ground
gives under him and the dream begins. This I say to
you as a parable. Yesterday, in the stillest hour, the
ground gave under me, the dream began. The hand
moved, the clock of my life drew a breath; never had
I heard such stillness around me: my heart took fright.
Then it spoke to me without voice: "You know it,
Zarathustra?" And I cried with fright at this whispering,
and the blood left my face; but I remained silent.
Then it spoke to me again without voice: "You know
it, Zarathustra, but you do not say itl" And at last I
answered defiantly: "Yes, I know it, but I do not want
to say itl"
Then it spoke to me again without voice: "You do
not want to, Zarathustra? Is this really true? Do not
hide in your defiance." And I cried and trembled like
a child and spoke: "Alas, I would like to, but how can
I? Let me off from this! It is beyond my strength!"
Then it spoke to me again without voice: "What do
146
you matter, Zarathustra? Speak your word and break"
And I answered: "Alas, is it my word? Who am l?
I await the worthier one; I am not worthy even of being
broken by it."
Then it spoke to me again without voice: "What do
you matter? You are not yet humble enough for me.
Humility has the toughest hide." And I answered:
'
at the foot of my height. How high are my peaks? No
one has told me yet. But my valleys I know well."
Then it spoke to me again without voice: "O Zarathustra, he who has to move mountains also moves
valleys and hollows." And I answered: "As yet my
words have not moved mountains, and what I said did
not reach men. Indeed, I have gone to men, but as yet
I have not arrived."
Then it spoke to me again without voice: "What do
you know of that? The dew falls on the grass when the
night is most silent." And I answered: "They mocked
me when I found and went my own way; and in truth
my feet were trembling then. And thus they spoke to
me: 'You have forgotten the way, now you have also
forgotten how to walk.'"
Then it spoke to me again without voice: "What
matters their mockery? You are one who has forgotten
how to obey: now you shall command. Do you not
know who is most needed by all? He that commands
great things. To do great things is difficult; but to
comm and great things is more difficult. This is what
is most unforgivable in you: you have the power, and
you do not want to rule." And I answered: "I lack the
lion's voice for commanding."
Then it spoke to me again as a whisper: "It is the
stillest words that bring on the storm. Thoughts that
come on doves' feet guide the world. 0 Zarathustra, you
147
shall go as a shadow of that which must come: thus you
will comm and and, commanding, lead the way." And I
answered: "I am ashamed."
Then it spoke to me again without voice: "You must
yet become as a child and without shame. The pride of
youth is still upon you; you have become young late;
but whoever would become as a child must overcome
his youth too." And I reflected for a long time and
trembled. But at last I said what I had said at first; "I
do not want to."
Then laughter surrounded me. Alas, how this laughter tore my entrails and slit open my heart! And it
spoke to me for the last time: "O Zarathustra, your
fruit is ripe, but you are not ripe for your fruit. Thus
you must return to your solitude again; for you must
yet become mellow." And again it laughed and fled;
then it became still around me as with a double stillness. But I lay on the ground and sweat poured from
my limbs.
Now you have heard all, and why I must return to
my solitude. Nothing have I kept from you, my friends.
But this too you have heard from me, who is still the
most taciturn of all men-and wants to be. Alas, my
friends, I still could tell you something, I still could
give you something. Why do I not give it? Am I stingy?
But when Zarathustra had spoken these words he was
overcome by the force of his pain and the nearness of
his parting from his friends, and he wept loudly; and
no one knew how to comfort him. At night, however,
he went away alone and left his friends.
148
Thus Spoke Zarathustra: Third Part
You look up when you feel the need for elevation.
And I look down because I am elevated. Who
among you can laugh and be elevated at the same
time? Whoever climbs the highest mountains
laughs at all tragic plays and tragic seriousness.
(Zarathustra, "On Reading and Writing," I, p.
40)
TRANSLATOR S NOTES
1. The Wanderer: The contrast between Zarathustra's sentimentality and his praise of hardness remains characteristic
of the rest of the book.
2. On the Vision and the Riddle: Zarathustra's first account
of the eternal recurrence (see my Nietzsche, .i, II) is
followed by a proto-surrealistic vision of a triumph over
nausea.
3. On Involuntary Bliss: Zarathustra still cannot face the
thought of the eternal recurrence.
4. Before Sunrise: An ode to the sky. Another quotation
from Zweig's essay on Nietzsche seems pertinent: "His
nerves immediately register every meter of height and
every pressure of the weather as a pain in his organs, and
they react rebelliously to every revolt in nature. Rain or
gloomy skies lower his vitality ('overcast skies depress me
deeply'), the weight of low clouds he feels down into his
very intestines, rain 'lowers the potential,' humidity debilitates, dryness vivifies, sunshine is salvation, winter is a kind
of paralysis and death. The quivering barometer needle of
his April-like, changeable nerves never stands still-most
nearly perhaps in cloudless landscapes, on the windless tablelands of the Engadine." In this chapter the phrase "beyond
good and evil" is introduced; also one line, slightly varied,
of the "Drunken Song" (see below). Another important
149
theme in Nietzsche's thought: the praise of chance and "a
little reason" as opposed to any divine purpose.
5. On Virtue That Makes Small: "Do whatever you will,
but . . .": What Nietzsche is concerned with is not casuistry but character, not a code of morals but a kind of man,
not a syllabus of behavior but a state of being.
6. Upon the Mount of Olives: "'The ice of knowledge will
yet freeze him to death!' they moan." Compare Stefan
George's poem on the occasion of Nietzsche's death (my
Nietzsche, Prologue, II): "He came too late who said to thee
imploring: There is no way left over icy cliffs."
7. On Passing By: Zarathustra's ape, or "grunting swine,"
unintentionally parodies Zarathustra's attitude and style.
His denunciations are born of wounded vanity and vengefulness, while Zarathustra's contempt is begotten by love;
and "where one can no longer love, there one should pass
by."
8. On Apostates: Stylistically, Zarathustra is now often little
better than his ape. But occasional epigrams show his old
power: the third paragraph in section 2, for instance.
9. The Return Home: "Among men you will always seem
wild and strange," his solitude says to Zarathustra. But
"here all things come caressingly to your discourse and flatter
you, for they want to ride on your back. On every parable
you ride to every truth." The discipline of communication might have served the philosopher better than the
indiscriminate flattery of his solitude. But in this respect
too, it was not given to Nietzsche to live in blissful
ignorance: compare, for example, "The Song of Melancholy" in Part Four.
io. On the Three Evils: The praise of so-called evil as an
ingredient of greatness is central in Nietzsche's thought,
from his early fragment, Homer's Contest, to his Antichrist.
There are few problems the self-styled immoralist pursued
so persistently. Whether he calls attention to the element
of cruelty in the Greek agon or denounces Christianity for
vilifying sex, whether he contrasts sublimation and extirpation or the egoism of the creative and the vengeful: all
these are variations of one theme. In German, the three
evils in this chapter are Wollust, Herrschsucht, Selbstsucht.
For the first there is no exact equivalent in English. In
this chapter, "lust" might do in some sentences, "voluptuousness" in others, but each would be quite inaccurate
half the time, and the context makes it imperative that
the same word be used throughout. There is only one
word in English that renders Nietzsche's meaning perfectly
in every single sentence: sex. Its only disadvantage: it is,
to put it mildly, a far less poetic word than Wollust, and
hence modifies the tone though not Nietzsche's meaning.
But if we reflect on the three things which, according to
Nietzsche, had been maligned most, under the influence of
Christianity, and which he sought to rehabilitate or revaluate-were they not selfishness, the will to power, and sex?
Nietzsche's early impact was in some ways comparable to
that of Freud or Havelock Ellis. But prudery was for him
at most one of three great evils, one kind of hypocrisy, one
aspect of man's betrayal of the earth and of himself.
i1. On the Spirit of Gravity: It is not only the metaphor
of the camel that points back to the first chapter of Part
One: the dead weight of convention is a prime instance of
what is meant by the spirit of gravity; and the bird that
outsoars tradition is, like the child and the self-propelled
wheel at the beginning of the book, a symbol of creativity.
The creator, however, is neither an "evil beast" nor an
"evil tamer of beasts"-neither a profligate nor an ascetic:
he integrates what is in him, perfects and lavishes himself, and says, "This is my way; where is yours?" Michelangelo and Mozart do not offer us "the way" but a challenge and a promise of what is possible.
12. On Old and New Tablets: Attempt at a grand summary,
full of allusions to, and quotations from, previous chapters
Its unevenness is nowhere more striking than in section 12,
with its puns on "crusades." Such sections as 5, 7, and 8,
on the other hand, certainly deserve attention. The despot
in section ii, who has all history rewritten, seems to point
forward in time to Hitler, of whose racial legislation it
151
could indeed be said: "with the grandfa ther, however,
time ends." Section 15 points back to Luther. Section zo
exposes in advance Stefan George's misconception when he
ended his second poem on Nietzsche (my Nietzsche, p.
iil):
"The warner went-the wheel that downward rolls /
To emptiness no arm now tackles in the spokes." The
penultimate paragraph of this section is more "playful"
in the original: Ein Vorspiel bin ich besserer Spieler, oh
meine Braiderl Ein Beispiell In section 25 the key word is
Versuch, one of Nietzsche's favorite words, which means
experiment, attempt, trial. Sometimes he associates it with
suchen, searching. (In Chapter 2, "On the Vision and
the Riddle," Sucher, Versucher has been rendered "searchers, researchers.") Section 29, finally, is used again, with
minute changes, to conclude Twilight of the Idols.
13. The Convalescent: Zarathustra still cannot face the
thought of the eternal recurrence but speaks about human
speech and cruelty. In the end, his animals expound the
eternal recurrence.
14 On the Great Longing: Hymn to his soul: Zarathustra
and his soul wonder which of them should be grateful to
the other.
15. The Other Dancing Song: Life and wisdom as women
again; but in this dancing song, life is in complete control,
and when Zarathustra's imagination runs away with him
he gets his face slapped. What he whispers into the ear
of life at the end of section 2 is, no doubt, that after his
death he will yet recur eternally. The song at the end,
punctuated by the twelve strokes of the bell, is interpreted
in "The Drunken Song" in Part Four.
i6. The Seven Seals: The eternal recurrence of the small
man no longer nauseates Zarathustra. His affirmation now is
boundless and without reservation: "For I love you, 0
eternity."
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, THE STILLEST HOUR
,#NFDB
991:Others have told me
quiet pools are to be found
in the swiftest stream.
Why, then, is this love of mine
all unrelieved turbulence?
Like (0) 3
The Epic of Gilgamesh Tablet I
He who has seen everything, I will make known (?) to the lands.
I will teach (?) about him who experienced all things,
alike,
Anu granted him the totality of knowledge of all.
He saw the Secret, discovered the Hidden,
he brought information of (the time) before the Flood.
He went on a distant journey, pushing himself to exhaustion,
but then was brought to peace.
He carved on a stone stela all of his toils,
and built the wall of Uruk-Haven,
the wall of the sacred Eanna Temple, the holy sanctuary.
Look at its wall which gleams like copper(?),
inspect its inner wall, the likes of which no one can equal!
Take hold of the threshold stoneit dates from ancient times!
Go close to the Eanna Temple, the residence of Ishtar,
such as no later king or man ever equaled!
Go up on the wall of Uruk and walk around,
examine its foundation, inspect its brickwork thoroughly.
Is not (even the core of) the brick structure made of kiln-fired brick,
and did not the Seven Sages themselves lay out its plans?
One league city, one league palm gardens, one league lowlands, the open area(?) of the Ishtar Temple,
three leagues and the open area(?) of Uruk it (the wall) encloses.
Find the copper tablet box,
open the of its lock of bronze,
undo the fastening of its secret opening.
Take and read out from the lapis lazuli tablet
how Gilgamesh went through every hardship.
Supreme over other kings, lordly in appearance,
he is the hero, born of Uruk, the goring wild bull.
He walks our in front, the leader,
and walks at the rear, trusted by his companions.
Mighty net, protector of his people,
raging flood-wave who destroys even walls of stone!
Offspring of Lugalbanda, Gilgamesh is strong to perfection,
son of the august cow, Rimat-Ninsun; Gilgamesh is awesome to perfection.
It was he who opened the mountain passes,
who dug wells on the flank of the mountain.
It was he who crossed the ocean, the vast seas, to the rising sun,
who explored the world regions, seeking life.
It was he who reached by his own sheer strength Utanapishtim, the Faraway,
who restored the sanctuaries (or: cities) that the Flood had destroyed!
for teeming mankind.
Who can compare with him in kingliness?
Who can say like Gilgamesh: "I am King!"?
Whose name, from the day of his birth, was called "Gilgamesh"?
Two-thirds of him is god, one-third of him is human.
The Great Goddess [Aruru] designed(?) the model for his body,
she prepared his form
beautiful, handsomest of men,
perfect
He walks around in the enclosure of Uruk,
Like a wild bull he makes himself mighty, head raised (over others).
There is no rival who can raise his weapon against him.
His fellows stand (at the alert), attentive to his (orders ?),
and the men of Uruk become anxious in
Gilgamesh does not leave a son to his father,
day and night he arrogant[y(?)
[The following lines are interpreted as rhetorical, perhaps spoken by the oppressed citizens of Uruk.]
Is Gilgamesh the shepherd of Uruk-Haven,
is he the shepherd.
bold, eminent, knowing, and wise!
Gilgamesh does not leave a girl to her mother(?)
The daughter of the warrior, the bride of the young man,
the gods kept hearing their complaints, so
the gods of the heavens implored the Lord of Uruk [Anu]
"You have indeed brought into being a mighty wild bull, head raised!
"There is no rival who can raise a weapon against him.
"His fellows stand (at the alert), attentive to his (orders !),
"Gilgamesh does not leave a son to his father,
"day and night he arrogantly
"Is he the shepherd of Uruk-Haven,
"is he their shepherd
"bold, eminent, knowing, and wise,
"Gilgamesh does not leave a girl to her mother(?)!"
The daughter of the warrior, the bride of the young man,
Anu listened to their complaints,
and (the gods) called out to Aruru:
"it was you, Aruru, who created mankind(?),
now create a zikru to it/him.
Let him be equal to his (Gilgamesh's) stormy heart,
let them be a match for each other so that Uruk may find peace!"
When Aruru heard this she created within herself the zikrtt of Anu.
Aruru washed her hands, she pinched off some clay, and threw it into the wilderness.
In the wildness(?) she created valiant Enkidu,
born of Silence, endowed with strength by Ninurta.
His whole body was shaggy with hair,
he had a full head of hair like a woman,
his locks billowed in profusion like Ashnan.
He knew neither people nor settled living,
but wore a garment like Sumukan."
He ate grasses with the gazelles,
and jostled at the watering hole with the animals;
as with animals, his thirst was slaked with (mere) water.
A notorious trapper came face-to-face with him opposite the watering hole.
A first, a second, and a third day
he came face-to-face with him opposite the watering hole.
On seeing him the trapper's face went stark with fear,
and he (Enkidu?) and his animals drew back home.
He was rigid with fear; though stock-still
his heart pounded and his face drained of color.
He was miserable to the core,
and his face looked like one who had made a long journey.
The trapper addressed his father saying:"
"Father, a certain fellow has come from the mountains.
He is the mightiest in the land,
his strength is as mighty as the meteorite(?) of Anu!
He continually goes over the mountains,
he continually jostles at the watering place with the animals,
he continually plants his feet opposite the watering place.
I was afraid, so I did not go up to him.
He filled in the pits that I had dug,
wrenched out my traps that I had spread,
released from my grasp the wild animals.
He does not let me make my rounds in the wilderness!"
The trapper's father spoke to him saying:
"My son, there lives in Uruk a certain Gilgamesh.
There is no one stronger than he,
he is as strong as the meteorite(?) of Anu.
Go, set off to Uruk,
tell Gilgamesh of this Man of Might.
He will give you the harlot Shamhat, take her with you.
The woman will overcome the fellow (?) as if she were strong.
When the animals are drinking at the watering place
have her take off her robe and expose her sex.
When he sees her he will draw near to her,
and his animals, who grew up in his wilderness, will be alien to him."
He heeded his father's advice.
The trapper went off to Uruk,
he made the journey, stood inside of Uruk,
and declared to Gilgamesh:
"There is a certain fellow who has come from the mountains
he is the mightiest in the land,
his strength is as mighty as the meteorite(?) of Anu!
He continually goes over the mountains,
he continually jostles at the watering place with the animals,
he continually plants his feet opposite the watering place.
I was afraid, so I did not go up to him.
He filled in the pits that I had dug,
wrenched out my traps that I had spread,
released from my grasp the wild animals.
He does not let me make my rounds in the wilderness!"
Gilgamesh said to the trapper:
"Go, trapper, bring the harlot, Shamhat, with you.
When the animals are drinking at the watering place
have her take off her robe and expose her sex.
When he sees her he will draw near to her,
and his animals, who grew up in his wilderness, will be alien to him."
The trapper went, bringing the harlot, Shamhat, with him.
They set off on the journey, making direct way.
On the third day they arrived at the appointed place,
and the trapper and the harlot sat down at their posts(?).
A first day and a second they sat opposite the watering hole.
The animals arrived and drank at the watering hole,
the wild beasts arrived and slaked their thirst with water.
Then he, Enkidu, offspring of the mountains,
who eats grasses with the gazelles,
came to drink at the watering hole with the animals,
with the wild beasts he slaked his thirst with water.
Then Shamhat saw hima primitive,
a savage fellow from the depths of the wilderness!
"That is he, Shamhat! Release your clenched arms,
expose your sex so he can take in your voluptuousness.
Do not be restrainedtake his energy!
When he sees you he will draw near to you.
Spread out your robe so he can lie upon you,
and perform for this primitive the task of womankind!
His animals, who grew up in his wilderness, will become alien to him,
and his lust will groan over you."
Shamhat unclutched her bosom, exposed her sex, and he took in her voluptuousness.
She was not restrained, but took his energy.
She spread out her robe and he lay upon her,
she performed for the primitive the task of womankind.
His lust groaned over her;
for six days and seven nights Enkidu stayed aroused,
and had intercourse with the harlot
until he was sated with her charms.
But when he turned his attention to his animals,
the gazelles saw Enkidu and darted off,
the wild animals distanced themselves from his body.
Enkidu his utterly depleted(?) body,
his knees that wanted to go off with his animals went rigid;
Enkidu was diminished, his running was not as before.
But then he drew himself up, for his understanding had broadened.
Turning around, he sat down at the harlot's feet,
gazing into her face, his ears attentive as the harlot spoke.
The harlot said to Enkidu:
"You are beautiful," Enkidu, you are become like a god.
Why do you gallop around the wilderness with the wild beasts?
Come, let me bring you into Uruk-Haven,
to the Holy Temple, the residence of Anu and Ishtar,
the place of Gilgamesh, who is wise to perfection,
but who struts his power over the people like a wild bull."
What she kept saying found favor with him.
Becoming aware of himself, he sought a friend.
Enkidu spoke to the harlot:
"Come, Shamhat, take me away with you
to the sacred Holy Temple, the residence of Anu and Ishtar,
the place of Gilgamesh, who is wise to perfection,
but who struts his power over the people like a wild bull.
I will challenge him
Let me shout out in Uruk: I am the mighty one!'
Lead me in and I will change the order of things;
he whose strength is mightiest is the one born in the wilderness!"
[Shamhat to Enkidu:]
"Come, let us go, so he may see your face.
I will lead you to GilgameshI know where he will be.
Look about, Enkidu, inside Uruk-Haven,
where the people show off in skirted finery,
where every day is a day for some festival,
where the lyre(?) and drum play continually,
where harlots stand about prettily,
exuding voluptuousness, full of laughter
and on the couch of night the sheets are spread (!)."
Enkidu, you who do not know, how to live,
I will show you Gilgamesh, a man of extreme feelings (!).
Look at him, gaze at his face
he is a handsome youth, with freshness(!),
his entire body exudes voluptuousness
He has mightier strength than you,
without sleeping day or night!
Enkidu, it is your wrong thoughts you must change!
It is Gilgamesh whom Shamhat loves,
and Anu, Enlil, and La have enlarged his mind."
Even before you came from the mountain
Gilgamesh in Uruk had dreams about you.""
Gilgamesh got up and revealed the dream, saying to his mother:
"Mother, I had a dream last night.
Stars of the sky appeared,
and some kind of meteorite(?) of Anu fell next to me.
I tried to lift it but it was too mighty for me,
I tried to turn it over but I could not budge it.
The Land of Uruk was standing around it,
the whole land had assembled about it,
the populace was thronging around it,
the Men clustered about it,
and kissed its feet as if it were a little baby (!).
I loved it and embraced it as a wife.
I laid it down at your feet,
and you made it compete with me."
The mother of Gilgamesh, the wise, all-knowing, said to her Lord;
Rimat-Ninsun, the wise, all-knowing, said to Gilgamesh:
"As for the stars of the sky that appeared
and the meteorite(?) of Anu which fell next to you,
you tried to lift but it was too mighty for you,
you tried to turn it over but were unable to budge it,
you laid it down at my feet,
and I made it compete with you,
and you loved and embraced it as a wife."
"There will come to you a mighty man, a comrade who saves his friend
he is the mightiest in the land, he is strongest,
his strength is mighty as the meteorite(!) of Anu!
You loved him and embraced him as a wife;
and it is he who will repeatedly save you.
Your dream is good and propitious!"
A second time Gilgamesh said to his mother: "Mother, I have had another dream:
"At the gate of my marital chamber there lay an axe,
"and people had collected about it.
"The Land of Uruk was standing around it,
"the whole land had assembled about it,
"the populace was thronging around it.
"I laid it down at your feet,
"I loved it and embraced it as a wife,
"and you made it compete with me."
The mother of Gilgamesh, the wise, all-knowing, said to her son;
Rimat-Ninsun, the wise, all-knowing, said to Gilgamesh:
""The axe that you saw (is) a man.
" (that) you love him and embrace as a wife,
"but (that) I have compete with you."
"" There will come to you a mighty man,
"" a comrade who saves his friend
"he is the mightiest in the land, he is strongest,
"he is as mighty as the meteorite(!) of Anu!"
Gilgamesh spoke to his mother saying:
""By the command of Enlil, the Great Counselor, so may it to pass!
"May I have a friend and adviser, a friend and adviser may I have!
"You have interpreted for me the dreams about him!"
After the harlot recounted the dreams of Gilgamesh to Enkidu
the two of them made love.
~ Anonymous, Others have told me
,#NFDB
992:The Kalevala - Rune Xxvii
THE UNWELCOME GUEST.
I have brought young Kaukomieli,
Brought the Islander and hero,
Also known as Lemminkainen,
Through the jaws of death and ruin,
Through the darkling deeps of Kalma,
To the homesteads of Pohyola,
To the dismal courts of Louhi;
Now must I relate his doings,
Must relate to all my bearers,
How the merry Lemminkainen,
Handsome hero, Kaukomieli,
Wandered through Pohyola's chambers,
Through the halls of Sariola,
How the hero went unbidden
To the feasting and carousal,
Uninvited to the banquet.
Lemminkainen full of courage,
Full of life, and strength, and magic.
Stepped across the ancient threshold,
To the centre of the court-room,
And the floors of linwood trembled,
Walls and ceilings creaked and murmured.
Spake the reckless Lemminkainen,
These the words that Ahti uttered:
'Be ye greeted on my coming,
Ye that greet, be likewise greeted!
Listen, all ye hosts of Pohya;
Is there food about this homestead,
Barley for my hungry courser,
Beer to give a thirsty stranger?
Sat the host of Sariola
At the east end of the table,
Gave this answer to the questions:
'Surely is there in this homestead,
For thy steed an open stable,
Never will this host refuse thee,
459
Shouldst thou act a part becoming,
Worthy, coming to these portals,
Waiting near the birchen rafters,
In the spaces by the kettles,
By the triple hooks of iron.'
Then the reckless Lemminkainen
Shook his sable locks and answered:
'Lempo may perchance come hither,
Let him fill this lowly station,
Let him stand between the kettles,
That with soot he may be blackened.
Never has my ancient father,
Never has the dear old hero,
Stood upon a spot unworthy,
At the portals near the rafters;
For his steed the best of stables,
Food and shelter gladly furnished,
And a room for his attendants,
Corners furnished for his mittens,
Hooks provided for his snow-shoes,
Halls in waiting for his helmet.
Wherefore then should I not find here
What my father found before me?'
To the centre walked the hero,
Walked around the dining table,
Sat upon a bench and waited,
On a bench of polished fir-wood,
And the kettle creaked beneath him.
Spake the reckless Lemminkainen:
'As a guest am I unwelcome,
Since the waiters bring no viands,
Bring no dishes to the stranger?'
Ilpotar, the Northland hostess,
Then addressed the words that follow:
'Lemminkainen, thou art evil,
Thou art here, but not invited,
Thou hast not the look of kindness,
Thou wilt give me throbbing temples,
Thou art bringing pain and sorrow.
All our beer is in the barley,
All the malt is in the kernel,
All our grain is still ungarnered,
460
And our dinner has been eaten;
Yesterday thou shouldst have been here,
Come again some future season.'
Whereupon wild Lemminkainen
Pulled his mouth awry in anger,
Shook his coal-black locks and answered:
'All the tables here are empty,
And the feasting-time is over;
All the beer has left the goblets,
Empty too are all the pitchers,
Empty are the larger vessels.
O thou hostess of Pohyola,
Toothless dame of dismal Northland,
Badly managed is thy wedding,
And thy feast is ill-conducted,
Like the dogs hast thou invited;
Thou hast baked the honey-biscuit,
Wheaten loaves of greatest virtue,
Brewed thy beer from hops and barley,
Sent abroad thine invitations,
Six the hamlets thou hast honored,
Nine the villages invited
By thy merry wedding-callers.
Thou hast asked the poor and lowly,
Asked the hosts of common people,
Asked the blind, and deaf, and crippled,
Asked a multitude of beggars,
Toilers by the day, and hirelings;
Asked the men of evil habits,
Asked the maids with braided tresses,
I alone was not invited.
How could such a slight be given,
Since I sent thee kegs of barley?
Others sent thee grain in cupfuls,
Brought it sparingly in dippers,
While I sent thee fullest measure,
Sent the half of all my garners,
Of the richest of my harvest,
Of the grain that I had gathered.
Even now young Lemminkainen,
Though a guest of name and station
Has no beer, no food, no welcome,
461
Naught for him art thou preparing,
Nothing cooking in thy kettles,
Nothing brewing in thy cellars
For the hero of the Islands,
At the closing of his journey.'
Ilpotar, the ancient hostess,
Gave this order to her servants:
'Come, my pretty maiden-waiter,
Servant-girl to me belonging,
Lay some salmon to the broiling,
Bring some beer to give the stranger!'
Small of stature was the maiden,
Washer of the banquet-platters,
Rinser of the dinner-ladles,
Polisher of spoons of silver,
And she laid some food in kettles,
Only bones and beads of whiting,
Turnip-stalks and withered cabbage,
Crusts of bread and bits of biscuit.
Then she brought some beer in pitchers,
Brought of common drink the vilest,
That the stranger, Lemminkainen,
Might have drink, and meat in welcome,
Thus to still his thirst and hunger.
Then the maiden spake as follows:
'Thou art sure a mighty hero,
Here to drink the beer of Pohya,
Here to empty all our vessels!'
Then the minstrel, Lemminkainen,
Closely handled all the pitchers,
Looking to the very bottoms;
There beheld he writhing serpents,
In the centre adders swimming,
On the borders worms and lizards.
Then the hero, Lemminkainen,
Filled with anger, spake as follows:
Get ye hence, ye things of evil,
Get ye hence to Tuonela,
With the bearer of these pitchers,
With the maid that brought ye hither,
Ere the evening moon has risen,
Ere the day-star seeks the ocean!
462
0 thou wretched beer of barley,
Thou hast met with great dishonor,
Into disrepute hast fallen,
But I'll drink thee, notwithstanding,
And the rubbish cast far from me.'
Then the hero to his pockets
Thrust his first and unnamed finger,
Searching in his pouch of leather;
Quick withdraws a hook for fishing,
Drops it to the pitcher's bottom,
Through the worthless beer of barley;
On his fish-book hang the serpents,
Catches many hissing adders,
Catches frogs in magic numbers,
Catches blackened worms in thousands,
Casts them to the floor before him,
Quickly draws his heavy broad sword,
And decapitates the serpents.
Now he drinks the beer remaining,
When the wizard speaks as follows:
'As a guest am I unwelcome,
Since no beer to me is given
That is worthy of a hero;
Neither has a ram been butchered,
Nor a fattened calf been slaughtered,
Worthy food for Lemminkainen.'
Then the landlord of Pohyola
Answered thus the Island-minstrel:
'Wherefore hast thou journeyed hither,
Who has asked thee for thy presence?
Spake in answer Lemminkainen:
'Happy is the guest invited,
Happier when not expected;
Listen, son of Pohylander,
Host of Sariola, listen:
Give me beer for ready payment,
Give me worthy drink for money!'
Then the landlord of Pohyola,
In bad humor, full of anger,
Conjured in the earth a lakelet,
At the feet of Kaukomieli,
Thus addressed the Island-hero:
463
'Quench thy thirst from yonder lakelet,
There, the beer that thou deservest!'
Little heeding, Lemminkainen
To this insolence made answer:
'I am neither bear nor roebuck,
That should drink this filthy water,
Drink the water of this lakelet.'
Ahti then began to conjure,
Conjured he a bull before him,
Bull with horns of gold and silver,
And the bull drank from the lakelet,
Drank he from the pool in pleasure.
Then the landlord of Pohyola
There a savage wolf created,
Set him on the floor before him
To destroy the bull of magic,
Lemminkainen, full of courage,
Conjured up a snow-white rabbit,
Set him on the floor before him
To attract the wolf's attention.
Then the landlord of Pohyola
Conjured there a dog of Lempo,
Set him on the floor before him
To destroy the magic rabbit.
Lemminkainen, full of mischief,
Conjured on the roof a squirrel,
That by jumping on the rafters
He might catch the dog's attention.
But the master of the Northland
Conjured there a golden marten,
And he drove the magic squirrel
From his seat upon the rafters.
Lemminkainen, full of mischief,
Made a fox of scarlet color,
And it ate the golden marten.
Then the master of Pohyola
Conjured there a hen to flutter
Near the fox of scarlet color.
Lemminkainen, full of mischief,
Thereupon a hawk created,
That with beak and crooked talons
He might tear the hen to pieces.
464
Spake the landlord of Pohyola,
These the words the tall man uttered:
'Never will this feast be bettered
Till the guests are less in number;
I must do my work as landlord,
Get thee hence, thou evil stranger,
Cease thy conjurings of evil,
Leave this banquet of my people,
Haste away, thou wicked wizard,
To thine Island-home and people!
Spake the reckless Lemminkainen:
'Thus no hero will be driven,
Not a son of any courage
Will be frightened by thy presence,
Will be driven from thy banquet.'
Then the landlord of Pohyola
Snatched his broadsword from the rafters,
Drew it rashly from the scabbard,
Thus addressing Lemminkainen:
'Ahti, Islander of evil,
Thou the handsome Kaukomieli,
Let us measure then our broadswords,
Let our skill be fully tested;
Surely is my broadsword better
Than the blade within thy scabbard.'
Spake the hero, Lemminkainen.
'That my blade is good and trusty,
Has been proved on heads of heroes,
Has on many bones been tested;
Be that as it may, my fellow,
Since thine order is commanding,
Let our swords be fully tested,
Let us see whose blade is better.
Long ago my hero-father
Tested well this sword in battle,
Never failing in a conflict.
Should his son be found less worthy?'
Then he grasped his mighty broadsword,
Drew the fire-blade from the scabbard
Hanging from his belt of copper.
Standing on their hilts their broadswords,
Carefully their blades were measured,
465
Found the sword of Northland's master
Longer than the sword of Ahti
By the half-link of a finger.
Spake the reckless Lemminkainen.
'Since thou hast the longer broadsword,
Thou shalt make the first advances,
I am ready for thy weapon.'
Thereupon Pohyola's landlord
With the wondrous strength of anger,
Tried in vain to slay the hero,
Strike the crown of Lemminkainen;
Chipped the splinters from the rafters,
Cut the ceiling into fragments,
Could not touch the Island-hero.
Thereupon brave Kaukomieli,
Thus addressed Pohyola's master:
'Have the rafters thee offended?
What the crimes they have committed,
Since thou hewest them in pieces?
Listen now, thou host of Northland,
Reckless landlord of Pohyola,
Little room there is for swordsmen
In these chambers filled with women;
We shall stain these painted rafters,
Stain with blood these floors and ceilings;
Let us go without the mansion,
In the field is room for combat,
On the plain is space sufficient;
Blood looks fairer in the court-yard,
Better in the open spaces,
Let it dye the snow-fields scarlet.'
To the yard the heroes hasten,
There they find a monstrous ox-skin,
Spread it on the field of battle;
On the ox-skin stand the swordsmen.
Spake the hero, Lemminkainen:
'Listen well, thou host of Northland,
Though thy broadsword is the longer,
Though thy blade is full of horror,
Thou shalt have the first advantage;
Use with skill thy boasted broadsword
Ere the final bout is given,
466
Ere thy head be chopped in pieces;
Strike with skill, or thou wilt perish,
Strike, and do thy best for Northland.'
Thereupon Pohyola's landlord
Raised on high his blade of battle,
Struck a heavy blow in anger,
Struck a second, then a third time,
But he could not touch his rival,
Could Dot draw a single blood-drop
From the veins of Lemminkainen,
Skillful Islander and hero.
Spake the handsome Kaukomieli:
'Let me try my skill at fencing,
Let me swing my father's broadsword,
Let my honored blade be tested!'
But the landlord of Pohyola,
Does not heed the words of Ahti,
Strikes in fury, strikes unceasing,
Ever aiming, ever missing.
When the skillful Lemminkainen
Swings his mighty blade of magic,
Fire disports along his weapon,
Flashes from his sword of honor,
Glistens from the hero's broadsword,
Balls of fire disporting, dancing,
On the blade of mighty Ahti,
Overflow upon the shoulders
Of the landlord of Pohyola.
Spake the hero, Lemminkainen:
'O thou son of Sariola,
See! indeed thy neck is glowing
Like the dawning of the morning,
Like the rising Sun in ocean!'
Quickly turned Pohyola's landlord,
Thoughtless host of darksome Northland,
To behold the fiery splendor
Playing on his neck and shoulders.
Quick as lightning, Lemminkainen,
With his father's blade of battle,
With a single blow of broadsword,
With united skill and power,
Lopped the head of Pohya's master;
467
As one cleaves the stalks of turnips,
As the ear falls from the corn-stalk,
As one strikes the fins from salmon,
Thus the head rolled from the shoulders
Of the landlord of Pohyola,
Like a ball it rolled and circled.
In the yard were pickets standing,
Hundreds were the sharpened pillars,
And a head on every picket,
Only one was left un-headed.
Quick the victor, Lemminkainen,
Took the head of Pohya's landlord,
Spiked it on the empty picket.
Then the Islander, rejoicing,
Handsome hero, Kaukomieli,
Quick returning to the chambers,
Crave this order to the hostess:
'Evil maiden, bring me water,
Wherewithal to cleanse my fingers
From the blood of Northland's master,
Wicked host of Sariola.'
Ilpotar, the Northland hostess,
Fired with anger, threatened vengeance,
Conjured men with heavy broadswords,
Heroes clad in copper-armor,
Hundred warriors with their javelins,
And a thousand bearing cross-bows,
To destroy the Island-hero,
For the death of Lemminkainen.
Kaukomieli soon discovered
That the time had come for leaving,
That his presence was unwelcome
At the feasting of Pohyola,
At the banquet of her people.
~ Elias Lönnrot,#NFDB
993:The Kalevala - Rune Xxvii
THE UNWELCOME GUEST.
I have brought young Kaukomieli,
Brought the Islander and hero,
Also known as Lemminkainen,
Through the jaws of death and ruin,
Through the darkling deeps of Kalma,
To the homesteads of Pohyola,
To the dismal courts of Louhi;
Now must I relate his doings,
Must relate to all my bearers,
How the merry Lemminkainen,
Handsome hero, Kaukomieli,
Wandered through Pohyola's chambers,
Through the halls of Sariola,
How the hero went unbidden
To the feasting and carousal,
Uninvited to the banquet.
Lemminkainen full of courage,
Full of life, and strength, and magic.
Stepped across the ancient threshold,
To the centre of the court-room,
And the floors of linwood trembled,
Walls and ceilings creaked and murmured.
Spake the reckless Lemminkainen,
These the words that Ahti uttered:
'Be ye greeted on my coming,
Ye that greet, be likewise greeted!
Listen, all ye hosts of Pohya;
Is there food about this homestead,
Barley for my hungry courser,
Beer to give a thirsty stranger?
Sat the host of Sariola
At the east end of the table,
Gave this answer to the questions:
'Surely is there in this homestead,
For thy steed an open stable,
Never will this host refuse thee,
469
Shouldst thou act a part becoming,
Worthy, coming to these portals,
Waiting near the birchen rafters,
In the spaces by the kettles,
By the triple hooks of iron.'
Then the reckless Lemminkainen
Shook his sable locks and answered:
'Lempo may perchance come hither,
Let him fill this lowly station,
Let him stand between the kettles,
That with soot he may be blackened.
Never has my ancient father,
Never has the dear old hero,
Stood upon a spot unworthy,
At the portals near the rafters;
For his steed the best of stables,
Food and shelter gladly furnished,
And a room for his attendants,
Corners furnished for his mittens,
Hooks provided for his snow-shoes,
Halls in waiting for his helmet.
Wherefore then should I not find here
What my father found before me?'
To the centre walked the hero,
Walked around the dining table,
Sat upon a bench and waited,
On a bench of polished fir-wood,
And the kettle creaked beneath him.
Spake the reckless Lemminkainen:
'As a guest am I unwelcome,
Since the waiters bring no viands,
Bring no dishes to the stranger?'
Ilpotar, the Northland hostess,
Then addressed the words that follow:
'Lemminkainen, thou art evil,
Thou art here, but not invited,
Thou hast not the look of kindness,
Thou wilt give me throbbing temples,
Thou art bringing pain and sorrow.
All our beer is in the barley,
All the malt is in the kernel,
All our grain is still ungarnered,
470
And our dinner has been eaten;
Yesterday thou shouldst have been here,
Come again some future season.'
Whereupon wild Lemminkainen
Pulled his mouth awry in anger,
Shook his coal-black locks and answered:
'All the tables here are empty,
And the feasting-time is over;
All the beer has left the goblets,
Empty too are all the pitchers,
Empty are the larger vessels.
O thou hostess of Pohyola,
Toothless dame of dismal Northland,
Badly managed is thy wedding,
And thy feast is ill-conducted,
Like the dogs hast thou invited;
Thou hast baked the honey-biscuit,
Wheaten loaves of greatest virtue,
Brewed thy beer from hops and barley,
Sent abroad thine invitations,
Six the hamlets thou hast honored,
Nine the villages invited
By thy merry wedding-callers.
Thou hast asked the poor and lowly,
Asked the hosts of common people,
Asked the blind, and deaf, and crippled,
Asked a multitude of beggars,
Toilers by the day, and hirelings;
Asked the men of evil habits,
Asked the maids with braided tresses,
I alone was not invited.
How could such a slight be given,
Since I sent thee kegs of barley?
Others sent thee grain in cupfuls,
Brought it sparingly in dippers,
While I sent thee fullest measure,
Sent the half of all my garners,
Of the richest of my harvest,
Of the grain that I had gathered.
Even now young Lemminkainen,
Though a guest of name and station
Has no beer, no food, no welcome,
471
Naught for him art thou preparing,
Nothing cooking in thy kettles,
Nothing brewing in thy cellars
For the hero of the Islands,
At the closing of his journey.'
Ilpotar, the ancient hostess,
Gave this order to her servants:
'Come, my pretty maiden-waiter,
Servant-girl to me belonging,
Lay some salmon to the broiling,
Bring some beer to give the stranger!'
Small of stature was the maiden,
Washer of the banquet-platters,
Rinser of the dinner-ladles,
Polisher of spoons of silver,
And she laid some food in kettles,
Only bones and beads of whiting,
Turnip-stalks and withered cabbage,
Crusts of bread and bits of biscuit.
Then she brought some beer in pitchers,
Brought of common drink the vilest,
That the stranger, Lemminkainen,
Might have drink, and meat in welcome,
Thus to still his thirst and hunger.
Then the maiden spake as follows:
'Thou art sure a mighty hero,
Here to drink the beer of Pohya,
Here to empty all our vessels!'
Then the minstrel, Lemminkainen,
Closely handled all the pitchers,
Looking to the very bottoms;
There beheld he writhing serpents,
In the centre adders swimming,
On the borders worms and lizards.
Then the hero, Lemminkainen,
Filled with anger, spake as follows:
Get ye hence, ye things of evil,
Get ye hence to Tuonela,
With the bearer of these pitchers,
With the maid that brought ye hither,
Ere the evening moon has risen,
Ere the day-star seeks the ocean!
472
0 thou wretched beer of barley,
Thou hast met with great dishonor,
Into disrepute hast fallen,
But I'll drink thee, notwithstanding,
And the rubbish cast far from me.'
Then the hero to his pockets
Thrust his first and unnamed finger,
Searching in his pouch of leather;
Quick withdraws a hook for fishing,
Drops it to the pitcher's bottom,
Through the worthless beer of barley;
On his fish-book hang the serpents,
Catches many hissing adders,
Catches frogs in magic numbers,
Catches blackened worms in thousands,
Casts them to the floor before him,
Quickly draws his heavy broad sword,
And decapitates the serpents.
Now he drinks the beer remaining,
When the wizard speaks as follows:
'As a guest am I unwelcome,
Since no beer to me is given
That is worthy of a hero;
Neither has a ram been butchered,
Nor a fattened calf been slaughtered,
Worthy food for Lemminkainen.'
Then the landlord of Pohyola
Answered thus the Island-minstrel:
'Wherefore hast thou journeyed hither,
Who has asked thee for thy presence?
Spake in answer Lemminkainen:
'Happy is the guest invited,
Happier when not expected;
Listen, son of Pohylander,
Host of Sariola, listen:
Give me beer for ready payment,
Give me worthy drink for money!'
Then the landlord of Pohyola,
In bad humor, full of anger,
Conjured in the earth a lakelet,
At the feet of Kaukomieli,
Thus addressed the Island-hero:
473
'Quench thy thirst from yonder lakelet,
There, the beer that thou deservest!'
Little heeding, Lemminkainen
To this insolence made answer:
'I am neither bear nor roebuck,
That should drink this filthy water,
Drink the water of this lakelet.'
Ahti then began to conjure,
Conjured he a bull before him,
Bull with horns of gold and silver,
And the bull drank from the lakelet,
Drank he from the pool in pleasure.
Then the landlord of Pohyola
There a savage wolf created,
Set him on the floor before him
To destroy the bull of magic,
Lemminkainen, full of courage,
Conjured up a snow-white rabbit,
Set him on the floor before him
To attract the wolf's attention.
Then the landlord of Pohyola
Conjured there a dog of Lempo,
Set him on the floor before him
To destroy the magic rabbit.
Lemminkainen, full of mischief,
Conjured on the roof a squirrel,
That by jumping on the rafters
He might catch the dog's attention.
But the master of the Northland
Conjured there a golden marten,
And he drove the magic squirrel
From his seat upon the rafters.
Lemminkainen, full of mischief,
Made a fox of scarlet color,
And it ate the golden marten.
Then the master of Pohyola
Conjured there a hen to flutter
Near the fox of scarlet color.
Lemminkainen, full of mischief,
Thereupon a hawk created,
That with beak and crooked talons
He might tear the hen to pieces.
474
Spake the landlord of Pohyola,
These the words the tall man uttered:
'Never will this feast be bettered
Till the guests are less in number;
I must do my work as landlord,
Get thee hence, thou evil stranger,
Cease thy conjurings of evil,
Leave this banquet of my people,
Haste away, thou wicked wizard,
To thine Island-home and people!
Spake the reckless Lemminkainen:
'Thus no hero will be driven,
Not a son of any courage
Will be frightened by thy presence,
Will be driven from thy banquet.'
Then the landlord of Pohyola
Snatched his broadsword from the rafters,
Drew it rashly from the scabbard,
Thus addressing Lemminkainen:
'Ahti, Islander of evil,
Thou the handsome Kaukomieli,
Let us measure then our broadswords,
Let our skill be fully tested;
Surely is my broadsword better
Than the blade within thy scabbard.'
Spake the hero, Lemminkainen.
'That my blade is good and trusty,
Has been proved on heads of heroes,
Has on many bones been tested;
Be that as it may, my fellow,
Since thine order is commanding,
Let our swords be fully tested,
Let us see whose blade is better.
Long ago my hero-father
Tested well this sword in battle,
Never failing in a conflict.
Should his son be found less worthy?'
Then he grasped his mighty broadsword,
Drew the fire-blade from the scabbard
Hanging from his belt of copper.
Standing on their hilts their broadswords,
Carefully their blades were measured,
475
Found the sword of Northland's master
Longer than the sword of Ahti
By the half-link of a finger.
Spake the reckless Lemminkainen.
'Since thou hast the longer broadsword,
Thou shalt make the first advances,
I am ready for thy weapon.'
Thereupon Pohyola's landlord
With the wondrous strength of anger,
Tried in vain to slay the hero,
Strike the crown of Lemminkainen;
Chipped the splinters from the rafters,
Cut the ceiling into fragments,
Could not touch the Island-hero.
Thereupon brave Kaukomieli,
Thus addressed Pohyola's master:
'Have the rafters thee offended?
What the crimes they have committed,
Since thou hewest them in pieces?
Listen now, thou host of Northland,
Reckless landlord of Pohyola,
Little room there is for swordsmen
In these chambers filled with women;
We shall stain these painted rafters,
Stain with blood these floors and ceilings;
Let us go without the mansion,
In the field is room for combat,
On the plain is space sufficient;
Blood looks fairer in the court-yard,
Better in the open spaces,
Let it dye the snow-fields scarlet.'
To the yard the heroes hasten,
There they find a monstrous ox-skin,
Spread it on the field of battle;
On the ox-skin stand the swordsmen.
Spake the hero, Lemminkainen:
'Listen well, thou host of Northland,
Though thy broadsword is the longer,
Though thy blade is full of horror,
Thou shalt have the first advantage;
Use with skill thy boasted broadsword
Ere the final bout is given,
476
Ere thy head be chopped in pieces;
Strike with skill, or thou wilt perish,
Strike, and do thy best for Northland.'
Thereupon Pohyola's landlord
Raised on high his blade of battle,
Struck a heavy blow in anger,
Struck a second, then a third time,
But he could not touch his rival,
Could Dot draw a single blood-drop
From the veins of Lemminkainen,
Skillful Islander and hero.
Spake the handsome Kaukomieli:
'Let me try my skill at fencing,
Let me swing my father's broadsword,
Let my honored blade be tested!'
But the landlord of Pohyola,
Does not heed the words of Ahti,
Strikes in fury, strikes unceasing,
Ever aiming, ever missing.
When the skillful Lemminkainen
Swings his mighty blade of magic,
Fire disports along his weapon,
Flashes from his sword of honor,
Glistens from the hero's broadsword,
Balls of fire disporting, dancing,
On the blade of mighty Ahti,
Overflow upon the shoulders
Of the landlord of Pohyola.
Spake the hero, Lemminkainen:
'O thou son of Sariola,
See! indeed thy neck is glowing
Like the dawning of the morning,
Like the rising Sun in ocean!'
Quickly turned Pohyola's landlord,
Thoughtless host of darksome Northland,
To behold the fiery splendor
Playing on his neck and shoulders.
Quick as lightning, Lemminkainen,
With his father's blade of battle,
With a single blow of broadsword,
With united skill and power,
Lopped the head of Pohya's master;
477
As one cleaves the stalks of turnips,
As the ear falls from the corn-stalk,
As one strikes the fins from salmon,
Thus the head rolled from the shoulders
Of the landlord of Pohyola,
Like a ball it rolled and circled.
In the yard were pickets standing,
Hundreds were the sharpened pillars,
And a head on every picket,
Only one was left un-headed.
Quick the victor, Lemminkainen,
Took the head of Pohya's landlord,
Spiked it on the empty picket.
Then the Islander, rejoicing,
Handsome hero, Kaukomieli,
Quick returning to the chambers,
Crave this order to the hostess:
'Evil maiden, bring me water,
Wherewithal to cleanse my fingers
From the blood of Northland's master,
Wicked host of Sariola.'
Ilpotar, the Northland hostess,
Fired with anger, threatened vengeance,
Conjured men with heavy broadswords,
Heroes clad in copper-armor,
Hundred warriors with their javelins,
And a thousand bearing cross-bows,
To destroy the Island-hero,
For the death of Lemminkainen.
Kaukomieli soon discovered
That the time had come for leaving,
That his presence was unwelcome
At the feasting of Pohyola,
At the banquet of her people.
~ Elias Lönnrot,#NFDB
994: THE
(on:
THE SEVEN SEALS
YES AND AMEN SONG)
1
If I am a soothsayer and full of that soothsaying spirit
which wanders on a high ridge between two seas, wandering like a heavy cloud between past and future, an
enemy of all sultry plains and all that is weary and can
neither die nor live-in its dark bosom prepared for
lightning and the redemptive flash, pregnant with lightning bolts that say Yes and laugh Yes, soothsaying
lightning bolts-blessed is he who is thus pregnant!
And verily, long must he hang on the mountains like a
dark cloud who shall one day kindle the light of the
future: Oh, how should I not lust after eternity and
after the nuptial ring of rings, the ring of recurrence?
Never yet have I found the woman from whom I
wanted children, unless it be this woman whom I love:
for I love you, 0 eternity.
For I love you, 0 eternity!
2
If ever my wrath burst tombs, moved boundary
stones, and rolled old tablets, broken, into steep depths;
if ever my mockery blew moldy words into the wind,
and I came as a broom to the cross-marked spiders and
as a sweeping gust to old musty tomb chambers; if ever
I sat jubilating where old gods lie buried, world-blessing, world-loving, beside the monuments of old worldslanders-for I love even churches and tombs of gods,
once the sky gazes through their broken roofs with its
229
pure eyes, and like grass and red poppies, I love to sit
on broken churches: Oh, how should I not lust after
eternity and after the nuptial ring of rings, the ring of
recurrence?
Never yet have I found the woman from whom I
wanted children, unless it be this woman whom I love:
for I love you, 0 eternity.
For I love you, 0 eternity!
3
If ever one breath came to me of the creative breath
and of that heavenly need that constrains even accidents
to dance star-dances; if I ever laughed the laughter of
creative lightning which is followed obediently but
grumblingly by the long thunder of the deed; if I ever
played dice with gods at the gods' table, the earth, till
the earth quaked and burst and snorted up floods of
fire-for the earth is a table for gods and trembles with
creative new words and gods' throws: Oh, how should
I not lust after eternity and after the nuptial ring of
rings, the ring of recurrence?
Never yet have I found the woman from whom I
wanted children, unless it be this woman whom I love:
for I love you, 0 eternity.
For I love you, 0 eternity!
4
If ever I drank full drafts from that foaming spice and blend-mug in which all things are well blended; if
my hand ever poured the farthest to the nearest, and
fire to spirit, and joy to pain, and the most wicked to
the most gracious; if I myself am a grain of that redeeming salt which makes all things blend well in the
blend-mug-for there is a salt that unites good with
evil; and even the greatest evil is worthy of being used
230
as spice for the last foaming over: Oh, how should I
not lust after eternity and after the nuptial ring of rings,
the ring or recurrence?
Never yet have I found the woman from whom I
wanted children, unless it be this woman whom I love:
for I love you, 0 eternity.
For I love you, 0 eternity!
5
If I am fond of the sea and of all that is of the sea's
kind, and fondest when it angrily contradicts me; if that
delight in searching which drives the sails toward the
undiscovered is in me, if a seafarer's delight is in my
delight; if ever my jubilation cried, "The coast has
vanished, now the last chain has fallen from me; the
boundless roars around me, far out glisten space and
time; be of good cheer, old heart!" Oh, how should I
not lust after eternity and after the nuptial ring of rings,
the ring of recurrence?
Never yet have I found the woman from whom I
wanted children, unless it be this woman whom I love:
for I love you, 0 eternity.
For I love you, 0 eternity!
6
If my virtue is a dancer's virtue and I have often
jumped with both feet into golden-emerald delight; if
my sarcasm is a laughing sarcasm, at home under rose
slopes and hedges of lilies-for in laughter all that is
evil comes together, but is pronounced -holy and absolved by its own bliss; and if this is my alpha and
omega, that all that is heavy and grave should become
light; all that is body, dancer; all that is spirit, bird and verily, that is my alpha and omega: Oh, how should
231
I not lust after eternity and after the nuptial ring of
rings, the fing of recurrence?
Never yet have I found the woman from whom I
wanted children, unless it be this woman whom I love:
for I love you, 0 eternity.
For I love you, 0 eternity
7
If ever I spread tranquil skies over myself and soared
on my own wings into my own skies; if I swam playfully in the deep light-distances, and the bird-wisdom
of my freedom came-but bird-wisdom speaks thus:
"Behold, there is no above, no below Throw yourself
around, out, back, you who are lightly Sing! Speak no
morel Are not all words made for the grave and heavy?
Are not all words lies to those who are light? Single
Speak no morel" Oh, how should I not lust after eternity and after the nuptial ring of rings, the ring of recurrence?
Never yet have I found the woman from whom I
wanted children, unless it be this woman whom I love:
for I love you, 0 eternity.
For I love you, 0 eternity
Thus Spoke Zarathustra:
Fourth and Last Part
Alas, where in the world has there been more
folly than among the pitying? And what in the
world has caused more suffering than the folly of
the pitying? Woe to all who love without having
a height that is above their pityl
232
Thus spoke the devil to me once: "God too has
his hell: that is his love of man." And most recently I heard him say this: "God is dead; God
died of his pity for man." (Zarathustra, II, p. go)
TRANSLATOR'S NOTES
Part Four was originally intended as an intermezzo, not
as the end of the book. The very appearance of a collection
of sayings is abandoned: Part Four forms a whole, and
as such represents a new stylistic experiment-as well as
a number of widely different stylistic experiments, held
together by a unity of plot and a pervasive sense of
humor.
1.
The Honey Sacrifice: Prologue. The "queer fish" are not
long in coming: the first of them appears in the next chapter.
2. The Cry of Distress: Beginning of the story that continues to the end of the book. The soothsayer of Part Two
reappears, and Zarathustra leaves in search of the higher
man. Now that he has overcome his nausea, his final
trial is: pity.
3. Conversation with the Kings: The first of seven encounters in each of which Zarathustra meets men who have
accepted some part of his teaching without, however,
embodying the type he envisages. Their revolting and tiresome flatteries might be charged to their general inadequacy. But Zarathustra's own personality, as it emerges
in chapter after chapter, poses a more serious problem. At
least in part, this is clearly due to the author's deliberate
malice: he does not want to be a "new idol": "I do not
want to be a saint, rather even a buffoon. Perhaps I am a
buffoon. And nevertheless, or rather not nevertheless-for
there has never been anybody more mendacious than
saints-truth speaks out of me" (Ecce Homo). Earlier in
the same work he says of Shakespeare: "What must a
man have suffered to have found it that necessary to be
a buffoon!" In these pages Nietzsche would resemble the
233
dramatist rather than the hagiographer, and a Shakespearean fool rather than the founder of a new cult.
4. The Leech: Encounter with "the conscientious in spirit."
5. The Magician: In the magician some of Nietzsche's
own features blend with some of Wagner's as conceived
by Nietzsche. The poem appears again in a manuscript of
a888, which bears the title "Dionysus Dithyrambs" and
the motto: "These are the songs of Zarathustra which he
sang to himself to endure his ultimate loneliness." In this
later context, the poem is entitled "Ariadne's Lament,"
and a new conclusion has been added by Nietzsche:
(Lightning.
beauty.)
Dionysus becomes
DIONYSUS:
visible in emerald
Be clever, Ariadnel
You have small ears, you have my ears:
Put a clever word into them
Must one not first hate each other
if one is to love each other?
I am your labyrinth.
The song is not reducible to a single level of meaning. The
outcry is (1) Nietzsche's own; and the unnamable, terrible
thought near the beginning is surely that of the eternal
recurrence; it is (2) projected onto Wagner, who is here
imagined as feeling desperately forsaken after Nietzsche
left him (note especially the penultimate stanza); it is
(3) wishfully projected onto Cosima Wagner-Nietzsche's
Ariadne (see my Nietzsche, i, 11)-who is here imagined as desiring and possessed by Nietzsche-Dionysus.
Part Four is all but made up of similar projections. All the
characters are caricatures of Nietzsche. And like the magician, he too would lie if he said: "'I did all this only as a
game.' There was seriousness in it too."
6. Retired: Encounter with the last pope. Reflections on
the death and inadequacies of God.
7. The Ugliest Man: The murderer of God. The sentence
beginning "Has not all success . . ." reads in German:
234
War nicht aller Erfolg fisher bei den Gut-Verfolgten? Und
wer gut verfolgt, lernt leicht folgen:-ist er doch einmalhinterherl
8. The Voluntary Beggar: A sermon on a mount-about
cows.
9. The Shadow: An allusion to Nietzsche's earlier work,
The Wanderer and His Shadow (188o).
10. At Noon: A charming intermezzo.
:i. The Welcome: Zarathustra rejects his guests, though
together they form a kind of higher man compared to their
contemporaries. He repudiates these men of great longing
and nausea as well as all those who enjoy his diatribes and
denunciations and desire recognition and consideration
for being out of tune with their time. What Nietzsche
envisages is the creator for whom all negation is merely
incidental to his great affirmation: joyous spirits, "laughing
lions."
12. The Last Supper: One of the persistent themes of Part
Four reaches its culmination in this chapter: Nietzsche not
only satirizes the Gospels, and all hagiography generally,
but he also makes fun of and laughs at himself.
13. On the Higher Man: A summary comparable to "On
Old and New Tablets" in Part Three. Section 5 epitomizes
Nietzsche's praise of "evir"-too briefly to be clear apart
from the rest of his work-and the conclusion should be
noted. The opening paragraph of section 7 takes up the
same theme: Nietzsche opposes sublimation to both license
and what he elsewhere calls "castratism." A fine epigram
is mounted in the center of section 9. The mellow moderation of the last lines of section 15 is not usually associated
with Nietzsche. And the chapter ends with a praise of
laughter.
14. The Song of Melancholy: In the 3888 manuscript of
the "Dionysus Dithyrambs" this is the first poem and it
bears the title "Only Fooll Only Poetl" The two introductory sections of this chapter help to dissociate Nietzsche
from the poem, while the subsquent references to this song
show that he considered it far more depressing than it
235
appears in its context. Though his solitude sometimes
flattered him, "On every parable you ride to every truth"
("The Return Home"), he also knew moments when he
said to himself, "I am ashamed that I must still be a poet"
("On Old and New Tablets"). Although Zarathustra's
buffooneries are certainly intended as such by the author,
the thought that he might be "only" a fool, "only" a poet
"climbing around on mendacious word bridges," made
Nietzsche feel more than despondent. Soon it led him to
abandon further attempts to ride on parables in favor of
some of the most supple prose in German literature.
15. On Science: Only the origin of science is considered.
The attempt to account for it in terms of fear goes back to
the period of The Dawn (188i), in which Nietzsche tried
to see how far he could reduce different phenomena to
fear and power. Zarathustra suggests that courage is crucial
-that is, the will to power over fear.
i6. Among Daughters of the Wilderness: Zarathustra, about
to slip out of his cave for the second time because he cannot stand the bad smell of the "higher men," is called
back by his shadow, who has nowhere among men smelled
better air-except once. In the following song Nietzsche's
buffoonery reaches its climax. But though it can and should
be read as thoroughly delightful nonsense, it is not entirely
void of personal significance. Wilste means "desert" or
"wilderness," and wdist can also mean wild and dissolute;
and the "flimsy little fan-, flutter-, and tinsel-skirts" seem
to have been suggested by the brothel to which a porter
in Cologne once took the young Nietzsche, who had asked
to be shown to a hotel. (He ran away, shocked; cf. my
Nietzsche, 3, I.) Certainly the poem is full of sexual
fantasies. But the double meaning of "date" is not present
in the original.
17. The Awakening: The titles of this and the following
chapter might well be reversed; for it is this chapter that
culminates in the ass festival, Nietzsche's version of the
Black Mass. But "the awakening' here does not refer to the
moment when an angry Moses holds his people accountable
236
for their worship of the golden calf, but to the moment
when "they have learned to laugh at themselves." In this
art, incidentally, none of the great philosophers excelled
the author of Part Four of Zarathustra.
i8. The Ass Festival: Five of the participants try to justify
themselves. The pope satirizes Catholicism (Luther was
last made fun of at the end of the song in Chapter i6),
while the conscientious in spirit develops a new theology
-and suggests that Zarathustra himself is pretty close to
being an ass.
19. The Drunken Song: Nietzsche's great hymn to joy invites comparison with Schiller's-minus Beethoven's music.
That they use different German words is the smallest difference. Schiller writes:
Suffer bravely, myriadsl
Suffer for the better world
Up above the firmament
A great God will give rewards.
Nietzsche wants the eternity of this life with all its agonies
-and seeing that it flees, its eternal recurrence. As it is expressed in sections 9, io, and 3i, the conception of the
eternal recurrence is certainly meaningful; but its formulation as a doctrine depended on Nietzsche's mistaken belief
that science compels us to accept the hypothesis of the
eternal recurrence of the same events at gigantic intervals.
(See "On the Vision and the Riddle" and "The Convalescent," both in Part Three, and, for a detailed discussion,
my Nietzsche, 11, II.)
20. The Sign: In "The Welcome," Zarathustra repudiated
the "higher men" in favor of "laughing lions." Now a lion
turns up and laughs, literally. And in place of the single
dove in the New Testament, traditionally understood as a
symbol of the Holy Ghost, we are presented with a whole
flock. Both the lion and the doves were mentioned before
("On Old and New Tablets," section 3) as the signs for
which Zarathustra must wait, and now afford Nietzsche an
237
opportunity to preserve his curious blend of myth, irony,
and hymn to the very end.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, THE SEVEN SEALS OR THE YES AND AMEN SONG
,#NFDB
995: ON THE HIGHER
MAN
1
The first time I came to men I committed the folly
of hermits, the great folly: I stood in the market place.
And as I spoke to all, I spoke to none. But in the
evening, tightrope walkers and corpses were my companions; and I myself was almost a corpse. But with
the new morning a new truth came to me: I learned
to say, "Of what concern to me are market and mob and
mob noise and long mob ears?"
You higher men, learn this from me: in the market
place nobody believes in higher men. And if you want
to speak there, very well! But the mob blinks: "We are
all equal."
"You higher men"-thus blinks the mob-"there are
no higher men, we are all equal, man is man; before
God we are all equal."
Before God! But now this god has died. And before
the mob we do not want to be equal. You higher men,
go away from the market place!
2
Before God! But now this god has died. You higher
men, this god was your greatest danger. It is only since
he lies in his tomb that you have been resurrected.
Only now the great noon comes; only now the higher
man becomes-lord.
Have you understood this word, 0 my brothers? You
are startled? Do your hearts become giddy? Does the
287
abyss yawn before you? Does the hellhound howl at
you? Well then, you higher men! Only now is the mountain of man's future in labor. God died: now we want
the overman to live.
3
The most concerned ask today: "How is man to be
preserved?" But Zarathustra is the first and only one to
ask: "How is man to be overcome?"
I have the overman at heart, that is my first and only
concern-and not man: not the neighbor, not the poorest, not the most ailing, not the best.
O my brothers, what I can love in man is that he is
an overture and a going under. And in you too there
is much that lets me love and hope. That you despise,
you higher men, that lets me hope. For the great
despisers are the great reveres. That you have despaired, in that there is much to revere. For you did not
learn how to surrender, you did not learn petty prudences. For today the little people lord it: they all
preach surrender and resignation and prudence and
industry and consideration and the long etcetera of the
small virtues.
What is womanish, what derives from the servile, and
especially the mob hodgepodge: that would now become
master of all human destiny. 0 nausea Nauseal Nausea!
That asks and asks and never grows weary: "How is
man to be preserved best, longest, most agreeably?"
With that-they are the masters of today.
Overcome these masters of today, 0 my brothers these, small people, they are the overman's greatest
danger.
You higher men, overcome the small virtues, the small
prudences, the grain-of-sand consideration, the ants' riffraff, the wretched contentment, the "happiness of the
288
greatest number"! And rather despair than surrender.
And verily, I love you for not knowing how to live
today, you higher men! For thus you live best.
4
Do you have courage, 0 my brothers? Are you brave?
Not courage before witnesses but the courage of hermits
and eagles, which is no longer watched even by a god.
Cold souls, mules, the blind, and the drunken I do
not call brave. Brave is he who knows fear but conquers
fear, who sees the abyss, but with pride.
Who sees the abyss but with the eyes of an eagle;
who grasps the abyss with the talons of an eagle-that
man has courage.
5
"Man is evil"-thus said all the wisest to comfort me.
Alas, if only it were still true today! For evil is man's
best strength.
"Man must become better and more evil"-thus I
teach. The greatest evil is necessary for the overman's
best. It may have been good for that preacher of the
little people that he suffered and tried to bear man's
sin. But I rejoice over great sin as my great consolation.
But this is not said for long ears. Not every word
belongs in every mouth. These are delicate distant
matters: they should not be reached for by sheeps' hoofs.
6
You higher men, do you suppose I have come to set
right what you have set wrong? Or that I have come to
you that suffer to bed you more comfortably? Or to
you that are restless, have gone astray or climbed
astray, to show you new and easier paths?
No! Nol Three times no! Ever more, ever better ones
289
of your kind shall perish-for it shall be ever worse
and harder for you. Thus alone-thus alone, man grows
to the height where lightning strikes and breaks him:
lofty enough for lightning.
My mind and my longing are directed toward the
few, the long, the distant; what are your many small
short miseries to me? You do not yet suffer enough to
suit mel For you suffer from yourselves, you have not
yet suffered from man. You would lie if you claimed
otherwise! You all do not suffer from what I have
suffered.
7
It is not enough for me that lightning no longer does
any harm. I do not wish to conduct it away: it shall
learn to work for me.
My wisdom has long gathered like a cloud; it is
becoming stiller and darker. Thus does every wisdom
that is yet to give birth to lightning bolts.
For these men of today I do not wish to be light, or
to be called light. These I wish to blind. Lightning of
my wisdom! put out their eyes!
8
Will nothing beyond your capacity: there is a wicked
falseness among those who will beyond their capacity.
Especially if they will great things For they arouse
mistrust against great things, these subtle counterfeiters
and actors-until finally they are false before themselves, squinters, whited worm-eaten decay, cloaked
with strong words, with display-virtues, with splendid
false deeds.
Take good care there, you higher menl For nothing
today is more precious to me and rarer than honesty.
Is this today not the mob's? But the mob does not
290
know what is great, what is small, what is straight and
honest: it is innocently crooked, it always lies.
9
Have a good mistrust today, you higher men, you
stouthearted ones, you openhearted ones And keep
your reasons secretly For this today is the mob's.
What the mob once learned to believe without reasons
-who could overthrow that with reasons?
And in the market place one convinces with gestures.
But reasons make the mob mistrustful.
And if truth was victorious for once, then ask yourself
with good mistrust: "What strong error fought for it?"
Beware of the scholars! They hate you, for they are
sterile. They have cold, dried-up eyes; before them
every bird lies unplumed.
Such men boast that they do not lie: but the inability
to lie is far from the love of truth. Bewarel
Freedom from fever is not yet knowledge by any
means I do not believe chilled spirits. Whoever is
unable to lie does not know what truth is.
10
If you would go high, use your own legs. Do not let
yourselves be carried up; do not sit on the backs and
heads of others. But you mounted a horse? You are now
riding quickly up to your goal? All right, my friend!
But your lame foot is sitting on the horse too. When you
reach your goal, when you jump off your horse-on
your very height, you higher man, you will stumble.
11
You creators, you higher men! One is pregnant only
with one's own child. Do not let yourselves be gulled
and beguiled! Who, after all, is your neighbor? And
291
even if you act "for the neighbor"-you still do not
create for him.
Unlearn this "for," you creators! Your very virtue
wants that you do nothing "for" and "in order" and
"because." You shall plug up your ears against these
false little words. "For the neighbor" is only the virtue
of the little people: there one says "birds of a feather"
and "one hand washes the other." They have neither
the right nor the strength for your egoism. In your egoism, you creators, is the caution and providence of the
pregnant. What no one has yet laid eyes on, the fruit:
that your whole love shelters and saves and nourishes.
Where your whole love is, with your child, there is
also your whole virtue. Your work, your will, that is
your "neighbor": do not let yourselves be gulled with
false values
12
You creators, you higher menl Whoever has to give
birth is sick; but whoever has given birth is unclean.
Ask women: one does not give birth because it is
fun. Pain makes hens and poets cackle.
You creators, there is much that is unclean in you.
That is because you had to be mothers.
A new child: oh, how much new filth has also come
into the world Go aside! And whoever has given birth
should wash his soul clean.
13
Do not be virtuous beyond your strength! And do
not desire anything of yourselves against probability.
Walk in the footprints where your fathers' virtue
walked before you. How would you climb high if your
fathers' will does not climb with you?
But whoever would be a firstling should beware lest
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he also become a lastling. And wherever the vices of
your fathers are, there you should not want to represent
saints. If your fathers consorted with women, strong
wines, and wild boars, what would it be if you wanted
chastity of yourself? It would be folly! Verily, it seems
much to me if such a man is the husb and of one or two
or three women. And if he founded monasteries and
wrote over the door, "The way to sainthood," I should
yet say, What for? It is another folly. He founded a
reformatory and refuge for himself: may it do him
good! But I do not believe in it.
In solitude, whatever one has brought into it growsalso the inner beast. Therefore solitude is inadvisable for
many. Has there been anything filthier on earth so far
than desert saints? Around them not only was the devil
loose, but also the swine.
14
Shy, ashamed, awkward, like a tiger whose leap has
failed: thus I have often seen you slink aside, you
higher men. A throw had failed you. But, you dicethrowers, what does it matter? You have not learned to
gamble and jest as one must gamble and jest. Do we
not always sit at a big jesting-and-gaming table? And if
something great has failed you, does it follow that you
yourselves are failures? And if you yourselves are failures, does it follow that man is a failure? But if man is
a failure-well then!
15
The higher its type, the more rarely a thing succeeds.
You higher men here, have vou not all failed?
Be of good cheer, what does it matter? How much is
still possible! Learn to laugh at yourselves as one must
laugh!
293
Is it any wonder that you failed and only half
succeeded, being half broken? Is not something thronging and pushing in you-man's future? Man's greatest
distance and depth and what in him is lofty to the stars,
his tremendous strength-are not all these frothing
against each other in your pot? Is it any wonder that
many a pot breaks? Learn to laugh at yourselves as
one must laugh! You higher men, how much is still
possible
And verily, how much has already succeeded! How
rich is the earth in little good perfect things, in what
has turned out well!
Place little good perfect things around you, 0 higher
menl Their golden ripeness heals the heart. What is
perfect teaches hope.
i6
What has so far been the greatest sin here on earth?
Was it not the word of him who said, "Woe unto those
who laugh here"? Did he himself find no reasons oln
earth for laughing? Then he searched very badly. Even
a child could find reasons here. He did not love enough:
else he would also have loved us who laugh. But he
hated and mocked us: howling and gnashing of teeth
he promised us.
Does one have to curse right away, where one does
not love? That seems bad taste to me. But thus he acted,
being unconditional. He came from the mob. And he
himself simply did not love enough: else he would not
have been so wroth that one did not love him. All great
love does not want love: it wants more.
Avoid all such unconditional people! They are a poor
sick sort, a sort of mob: they look sourly at this life,
they have the evil eye for this earth. Avoid all such
unconditional people! They have heavy feet and sultry
294
hearts: they do not know how to dance. How should
the earth be light for them?
17
All good things approach their goal crookedly. Like
cats, they arch their backs, they purr inwardly over their
approaching happiness: all good things laugh.
A man's stride betrays whether he has found his
own way: behold me walking! But whoever approaches
his goal dances. And verily, I have not become a statue:
I do not yet stand there, stiff, stupid, stony, a column;
I love to run swiftly. And though there are swamps and
thick melancholy on earth, whoever has light feet runs
even over mud and dances as on swept ice.
Lift up your hearts, my brothers, high, higher And
do not forget your legs either. Lift up your legs too,
you good dancers; and better yet, stand on your heads
38
This crown of him who laughs, this rose-wreath
crown: I myself have put on this crown, I myself have
pronounced my laughter holy. Nobody else have I
found strong enough for this today.
Zarathustra the dancer, Zarathustra the light, waves
with his wings, ready for flight, waving at all birds,
ready and heady, happily lightheaded; Zarathustra the
soothsayer, Zarathustra the sooth-laugher, not impatient,
not unconditional, one who loves leaps and side-leaps:
I myself have put on this crown!
19
Lift up your hearts, my brothers, high, higher And
do not forget your legs either. Lift up your legs too,
you good dancers; and better yet, stand on your heads
In happiness too there are heavy animals; there are
295
pondrous-pedes through and through. Curiously they
labor, like an elephant laboring to stand on its head.
But it is still better to be foolish from happiness than
foolish from unhappiness; better to dance ponderously
than to walk lamely. That you would learn my wisdom
from me: even the worst thing has two good reverse
sides-even the worst thing has good dancing legs; that
you would learn, you higher men, to put yourselves on
your right legsl That you would unlearn nursing melancholy and all mob-sadnessl Oh, how sad even the mob's
clowns seem to me today But this today is the mob's.
20
Be like the wind rushing out of his mountain caves:
he wishes to dance to his own pipe; the seas tremble
and leap under his feet.
What gives asses wings, what milks lionessespraised be this good intractable spirit that comes like
a cyclone to all today and to all the mob. What is
averse to thistle-heads and casuists' heads and to all
wilted leaves and weeds-praised be this wild, good,
free storm spirit that dances on swamps and on melancholy as on meadows. What hates the mob's blether.cocks and all the bungled gloomy brood-praised
be this spirit of all free spirits, the laughing gale that
blows dust into the eyes of all the black-sighted, soreblighted.
You higher men, the worst about you is that all of
you have not learned to dance as one must dance--dancing away over yourselves! What does it matter that you
are failures? How much is still possible! So learn to
laugh away over yourselves! Lift up your hearts, you
good dancers, high, higher And do not forget good
laughter. This crown of him who laughs, this rose-wreath
crown: to you, my brothers, I throw this crown. Laugh-
296
ter I have pronounced holy; you higher men, learn to,
laugh
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, ON THE HIGHER MAN
,#NFDB
996:The Creek Of The Four Graves
I verse a Settler's tale of olden times
One told me by our sage friend, Egremont;
Who then went forth, meetly equipt, with four
Of his most trusty and adventrous men
Into the wilderness - went forth to seek
New streams and wider pastures for his fast
Augmenting flocks and herds. On foot were all
For horses then were beast of too great price
To be much ventured on mountain routes,
And over wild wolds clouded up with brush,
And cut with marshes, perilously deep.
So went they forth at dawn: and now the sun
That rose behind them as they journeyed out,
Was firing with his nether rim a range
Of unknown mountains that, like ramparts, towered
Full in their front, and his last glances fell
Into the gloomy forest's eastern glades
In golden massses, transiently, or flashed
Down to the windings of a nameless Creek,
That noiseless ran betwixt the pioneers
And those new Apennines - ran, shaded up
With boughs of the wild willow, hanging mixed
From either bank, or duskily befringed
With upward tapering feathery swamp-oaks The sylvan eyelash always of remote
Australian waters, whether gleaming still
In lake or pool, or bickering along
Between the marges of some eager stream.
Before then, thus extended, wilder grew
The scene each moment - and more beautiful!
For when the sun was all but sunk below
Those barrier mountains, - in the breeze that o'er
Their rough enormous backs deep-fleeced with wood
Came whispering down, the wide up-slanting sea
Of fanning leaves in the descending rays
Danced interdazzingly, as if the trees
147
That bore them, were all thrilling, - tingling all
Even to the roots for very happiness:
So prompted from within, so sentient seemed
The bright quick motion - wildly beautiful.
But when the sun had wholly disappeared
Behind those mountains - O what words, what hues
Might paint the wild magnificence of view
That opened westward! Out extending, lo,
The heights rose crowding, with their summits all
Dissolving, as it seemed, and partly lost
In the exceeding radiancy aloft;
And thus transfigured, for awhile they stood
Like a great company of Archaeons, crowned
With burning diadems, and tented o'er
With canopies of purple and of gold!
Here halting wearied, now the sun was set,
Our travellers kindled for their first night's camp
The brisk and crackling fire, which also looked
A wilder creature than 'twas elsewhere wont,
Because of the surrounding savageness.
And soon in cannikins the tea was made,
Fragrant and stong; long fresh-sliced rashers then
Impaled on whittled skewers, were deftly broiled
On the live embers, and when done, transferred
To quadrants from an ample damper cut,
Their only trenchers - soon to be dispatched
With all the savoury morsels they sustained,
By the keen tooth of healthful appitite.
And as they supped, birds of new shape and plume
And wild strange voice came by,nestward repairing by,
Oft too their wonder; or betwixt the gaps
In the ascending forest growths they saw
Perched on the bare abutments of the hills,
Where haply yet some lingering gleam fell through,
The wallaroo look forth: till aastward all
The view had wasted into formless gloom,
Night's front; and westward, the high massing woods
Steeped in a swart but mellowed Indian hue A deep dusk loveliness, lay ridged and heaped
148
Only the more distinctly for their shade
Against the twilight heaven - a cloudless depth
Yet luminous with the sunset's fading glow;
And thus awhile, in the lit dusk, they seemed
To hang like mighty pictures of themselves
In the still chambers of some vaster world.
The silent business of their supper done,
The Echoes of the solitary place,
Came as in sylvan wonder wide about
To hear, and imitate tentatively,
Stange voice moulding a strange speech, as then
Within the pleasant purlieus of the fire
Lifted in glee - but to be hushed erelong,
As with the night in kindred darkness came
O'er the adventurers, each and all, some sense Some vague-felt intimation from without,
Of danger lurking in its forest lairs.
But nerved by habit, and all settled soon
About the well-built fire, whose nimble tongues
Sent up continually a strenuous roar
Of fierce delight, and from their fuming pipes
Fu11 charged and fragrant with the Indian weed,
Drawing rude comfort,- typed without, as 'twere,
By tiny clouds over their several heads
Quietly curling upward; - thus disposed
Within the pleasant firelight, grave discourse
of their peculiar business brought to each
A steadier mood, that reached into the night.
The simple subject to their minds at length
Fully discussed, their couches they prepared
Of rushes, and the long green tresses pulled
Down from the boughs of the wild willows near.
The four, as prearranged, stretched out their limbs
Under the dark arms of the forest trees
That mixed aloft, high in the starry air,
In arcs and leafy domes whose crossing curves
And roof-like features, - blurring as they ran
Into some denser intergrowth of sprays, Were seen in mass traced out against the clear
149
Wide gaze of heaven; and trustful of the watch
Kept near them by their thoughtful Master, soon
Drowsing away, forgetful of their toil,
And of the perilous vast wilderness
That lay around them like a spectral world,
Slept, breathing deep; - whilst all things there as well
Showed slumbrous, - yea, the circling forest trees,
Their foremost holes carved from a crowded mass
Less visible, by the watchfire's bladed gleams,
As quick and spicular, from the broad red ring
Of its more constant light they ran in spurts
Far out and under the umbrageous dark;
And even the shaded and enormous mounts,
Their bluff brows grooming through the stirless air,
Looked in their quiet solemnly asleep:
Yea, thence surveyed, the Universe might have seemed
Coiled in vast rest, - only that one dim cloud,
Diffused and shapen like a huge spider,
Crept as with scrawling legs along the sky;
And that the stars, in their bright orders, still
Cluster by cluster glowingly revealed
As this slow cloud moved on, - high over all, Looked wakeful - yea, looked thoughtful in their peace.
II
Meanwhile the cloudless eastem heaven had grown
More and more luminous - and now the Moon
Up from behind a giant hill was seen
Conglobing, till - a mighty mass - she brought
Her under border level with its cone,
As thereon it were resting: when, behold
A wonder! Instantly that cone's whole bulk
Erewhile so dark, seemed inwardly a-glow
With her instilled irradiance; while the trees
That fringed its outline, - their huge statures dwarfed,
By distance into brambles, and yet all
Clearly defined against her ample orb, Out of its very disc appeared to swell
In shadowy relief, as they had been
All sculptured from its substance as she rose.
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Thus o'er that dark height her great orb arose,
Till her full light, in silvery sequence still
Cascading forth from ridgy slope to slope,
Like the dropt foldings of a lucent veil,
Chased mass by mass the broken darkness down
Into the dense-brushtd valleys, where it crouched,
And shrank, and struggled, like a dragon doubt
Glooming some lonely spirit that doth still
Resist the Truth with obstinate shifts and shows,
Though shining out of heaven, and from defect
Winning a triumph that might else not be.
There standing in his lone watch, Egremont
On all this solemn beauty of the world,
Looked out, yet wakeful; for sweet thoughts of home
And all the sacred charities it held,
Ingathered to his heart, as by some nice
And subtle interfusion that connects
The loved and cherished (then the most, perhaps,
When absent, or when passed, or even when lost)
With all serene and beautiful and bright
And lasting things of Nature. So then thought
The musing Egremont: when sudden - hark!
A bough crackt loudly in a neighboring brake,
And drew at once, as with alarum, all
His spirits thitherward in wild surmise.
But summoning caution, and back stepping close
Against the shade-side of a bending gum,
With a strange horror gathering to his heart,
As if his blood were charged with insect life
And writhed along in clots, he stilled himself,
Listening long and heedfully, with head
Bent forward sideways, till his held breath grew
A pang, and his ears rung. But Silence there
Had recomposed her ruffled wings, and now
Brooded it seemed even stillier than before,
Deep nested in the darkness: so that he
Unmasking from the cold shade, grew erelong
More reassured from wishing to be so,
And to muse, Memory's suspended mood,
Though with an effort, quietly recurred.
151
But there again - crack upon crack! And hark!
O Heaven! have Hell's worst fiends burst howling up
Into the death-doom'd world? Or whence, if not
From diabolic rage, could surge a yell
So horrible as that which now affrights
The shuddering dark! Beings as fell are near!
Yea, Beings, in their dread inherited hate
And deadly enmity, as vengeful, come
In vengeance! For behold, from the long grass
And nearer brakes, a semi-belt of stript
And painted Savages divulge at once
Their bounding forms! - full in the flaring light
Thrown outward by the fire, that roused and lapped
The rounding darkness with its ruddy tongues
More fiercely than before, - as though even it
Had felt the sudden shock the air received
From those dire cries, so terrible to hear!
A moment in wild agitation seen
Thus, as they bounded up, on then they came
Closing, with weapons brandished high, and so
Rushed in upon the sleepers! three of whom
But started, and then weltered prone beneath
The first fell blow dealt down on each by three
Of the most stalwart of their pitiless foes!
But One again, and yet again, heaved up Up to his knees, under the crushing strokes
Of huge-clubbed nulla-nullas, till his own
Warm blood was blinding him! For he was one
Who had with Misery nearly all his days
Lived lonely, and who therefore, in his soul
Did hunger after hope, and thirst for what
Hope still had promised him, - some taste at least
Of human good however long deferred,
And now he could not, even in dying, loose
His hold on life's poor chances of tomorrow Could not but so dispute the terrible fact
Of death, e'en in Death's presence! Strange it is:
Yet oft 'tis seen that Fortune's pampered child
Consents to his untimely power with less
Reluctance, less despair, than does the wretch
152
Who hath been ever blown about the world
The straw-like sport of Fate's most bitter blasts,
Vagrant and tieless; - ever still in him
The craving spirit thus grieves to itself:
'I never yet was happy - never yet
Tasted unmixed enjoyment, and I would
Yet pass on the bright Earth that I have loved
Some season, though most brief, of happiness;
So should I walk thenceforward to my grave,
Wherever in her green maternal breast
It might await me, more than now prepared
To house me in its gloom, - resigned at heart,
Subjected to its certainty and soothed
Even by the consciousness of having shaped
Some personal good in being; - strong myself,
And strengthening others. But to have lived long years
Of wasted breath, because of woe and want,
And disappointed hope, - and now, at last,
To die thus desolate, is horrible!'
And feeling thus through many foregone moods
Whose lives had in the temper of his soul
All mixed, and formed one habit, - that poor man,
Though the black shadows of untimely death,
Inevitably, under every stroke,
But thickened more and more, - against them still
Upstruggled, nor would cease: until one last
Tremendous blow, dealt down upon his head
As if in mercy, gave him to the dust
With all his many woes and frustrate hope.
Struck through with a cold horror, Egremont,
Standing apart, - yea, standing as it were
In marble effigy, saw this, saw all!
And when outthawing from his frozen heart
His blood again rushed tingling - with a leap
Awaking from the ghastly trance which there
Had bound him, as with chill petrific bonds,
He raised from instinct more than conscious thought
His death-charged tube, and at that murderous crew
Firing! saw one fall ox-like to the earth; -
153
Then turned and fled. Fast fled he, but as fast
His deadly foes went thronging on his track!
Fast! for in full pursuit, behind him yelled
Wild men whose wild speech had no word for mercy!
And as he fled, the forest beasts as well,
In general terror, through the brakes a-head
Crashed scattering, or with maddening speed athwart
His course came frequent. On - still on he flies Flies for dear life! and still behind him hears
Nearer and nearer, the so rapid dig
Of many feet, - nearer and nearer still.
III
So went the chase! And now what should he do?
Abruptly turning, the wild Creek lay right
Before him! But no time was there for thought:
So on he kept, and from a bulging rock
That beaked the bank like a bare promontory,
Plunging right forth and shooting feet-first down,
Sunk to his middle in the flashing stream In which the imaged stars seemed all at once
To burst like rockets into one wide blaze
Of intewrithing light. Then wading through
The ruffled waters, forth he sprang and seized
A snake-like root that from the opponent bank
Protruded, and round which his earnest fear
Did clench his cold hand like a clamp of steel,
A moment, - till as swiftly thence he swung
His dripping form aloft, and up the dark
O'erjutting ledge, went clambering in the blind
And breathless haste of one who flies for life:
When its face - 0 verily our God
Hath those in his peculiar care for whom
The daily prayers of spotless Womanhood
And helpless Infancy, are offered up! When in its face a cavity he felt,
The upper earth of which in one rude mass
Was held fast bound by the enwoven roots
Of two old trees, - and which, beneath the mould,
Just o'er the clammy vacancy below,
Twisted and lapped like knotted snakes, and made
154
A natural loft-work. Under this he crept,
Just as the dark forms of his hunters thronged
The bulging rock whence he before had plunged.
Duskily visible, thereon a space
They paused to mark what bent his course might take
Over the farther bank, thereby intent
To hold upon the chase, which way soe'er
It might incline, more surely. But no form
Amongst the moveless fringe of fern was seen
To shoot up from its outline, - up and forth
Into the moonlight that lay bright beyond
In torn and shapless blocks, amid the boles
And mxing shadows of the taller trees,
All standing now in the keen radiance there
So ghostly still, as in a solemn trance,
But nothing in the silent prospect stirred No fugitive apparition in the view
Rose, as they stared in fierce expectancy:
Wherefore they augured that their prey was yet
Somewhere between, - and the whole group with that
Plunged forward, till the fretted current boiled
Amongst their crowd'ing trunks from bank to bank;
And searching thus the stream across, and then
Lengthwise, along the ledges, - combing down
Still, as they went, with dripping fingers, cold
And cruel as inquisitive, each clump
Of long-flagged swamp-grass where it flourished high, The whole dark line passed slowly, man by man,
Athwart the cavity - so fearfully near,
That as they waded by the Fugitive
Felt the strong odour of their wetted skins
Pass with them, trailing as their bodies moved
Stealthily on, coming with each, and going.
But their keen search was keen in vain. And now
Those wild men marvelled, - till, in consultation,
There grouped in dark knots standing in the stream
That glimmered past them, moaning as it went,
His Banishment, so passing strange it seemed,
They coupled with the mystery of some crude
Old fable of their race; and fear-struck all,
155
And silent, then withdrew. And when the sound
Of their receding steps had from his ear
Died off, as back to the stormed Camp again
They hurried to despoil the yet warm dead,
Our Friend slid forth, and springing up the bank.
Renewed his flight, nor rested from it, till
He gained the welcoming shelter of his Home.
Return we for a moment to the scene
Of recent death. There the late flaring fire
Now smouldered, for its brands were strewn about,
And four stark corses plundered to the skin
And brutally mutilated, seemed to stare
With frozen eyeballs up into the pale
Round visage of the Moon, who, high in heaven,
With all her stars, in golden bevies, gazed
As peacefully down as on a bridal there
Of the warm Living - not, alas! on them
Who kept in ghastly silence through the night
Untimely spousals with a desert death.
0 God! and thus this lovely world hath been
Accursed forever by the bloody deeds
Of its prime Creature - Man. Erring or wise,
Savage or civilised, still hath he made
This glorious residence, the Earth, a Hell
Of wrong and robbery and untimely death!
Some dread Intelligence opposed to Good
Did, of a surety, over all the earth
Spread out from Eden - or it were not so!
For see the bright beholding Moon, and all
The radiant Host of Heaven, evince no touch
Of sympathy with Man's wild violence; Only evince in their calm course, their part
In that original unity of Love,
Which, like the soul that dwelleth in a harp,
Under God's hand, in the beginning, chimed
The sabbath concord of the Universe;
And look on a gay clique of maidens, met
In village tryst, and interwhirling all
In glad Arcadian dances on the green Or on a hermit, in his vigils long,
156
Seen kneeling at the doorway, of his cell Or on a monster battlefield where lie
In swelterin heaps, the dead and dying both,
On the cold gory grounds - as they that night
Looked in bright peace, down on the doomful Wild.
Afterwards there, for many changeful years,
Within a glade that sloped into the bank
Of that wild mountain Creek - midway within,
In partial record of a terrible hour
Of human agony and loss extreme,
Four grassy mounds stretched lengthwise side by side,
Startled the wanderer; - four long grassy mounds
Bestrewn with leaves, and withered spraylets, stript
By the loud wintry wing gales that roamed
Those solitudes, from the old trees which there
Moaned the same leafy dirges that had caught
The heed of dying Ages: these were all;
And thence the place was long by travellers called
The Creek of the Four Graves. Such was the Tale
Egremont told us of the wild old times.
~ Charles Harpur,#NFDB
997:Muiopotmos, Or The Fate Of The Butterflie
I SING of deadly dolorous debate,
Stir'd vp through wrathfull Nemesis despight,
Betwixt two mightie ones of great estate,
Drawne into armes, and proofe of mortall fight,
Through prowd ambition, and hartswelling hate,
Whilest neither could the others greater might
And sdeignfull scorne endure; that from small iarre
Their wraths at length broke into open warre.
The rote whereof and tragicall effect,
Vouchsafe, O thou the mournfulst Muse of nyne,
That wontst the tragick stage for to direct,
In funerall complaints and waylfull tyne,
Reueale to me, and all the meanes detect,
Through which sad Clarion did at last declyne
To lowest wretchednes; And is there then
Such rancor in the harts of mightie men?
Of all the race of siluer-winged Flies
Which doo possesse the Empire of the aire,
Betwixt the centred earth, and azure skies,
Was none more fauourable, nor more faire,
Whilst heauen did fauour his felicities,
Then Clarion, the eldest sonne and haire
Of Muscaroll, and in his fathers sight
Of all aliue did seeme the fairest wight.
With fruitfull hope his aged breast he fed
Of future good, which his young toward yeares,
Full of braue courage and bold hardyhed,
Aboue th' ensample of his equall peares,
Did largely promise, and to him forered,
(Whilst oft his heart did melt in tender teares)
That he in time would sure proue such an one,
As should be worthie of his fathers throne.
The fresh young flie, in whom the kindly fire
Of lustfull yong[th] began to kindle fast,
Did much disdaine to subject his desire
116
To loathsome sloth, or houres in ease to wast,
But ioy'd to range abroad in fresh attire;
Through the wide compas of the ayrie coast,
And with vnwearied wings each part t'inquire
Of the wide rule of his renowmed sire.
For he so swift and nimble was of flight,
That from this lower tract he dar'd to stie
Vp to the clowdes, and thence with pineons light,
To mount aloft vnto the Christall skie,
To vew the workmanship of heauens hight:
Whence downe descending he along would flie
Vpon the streaming riuers, sport to finde;
And oft would dare to tempt the troublous winde.
So on a Summers day, when season milde
With gentle calme the world had quieted,
And high in heauen Hyperionsfierie childe
Ascending, did his beames abroad dispred,
Whiles all the heauens on lower creatures smilde;
Yong Clarion with vaunted lustie head,
After his guize did cast abroad to fare;
And theretoo gan his furnitures prepare.
His breastplate first, that was of substance pure,
Before his noble heart he firmely bound,
That mought his life from yron death assure,
And ward his gentle corpes from cruell wound:
For it by arte was framed to endure
The bit of balefull steele and bitter stownd,
No lesse then that, which Vulcane made to sheild
Achilles life from fate of Troyan field.
And then about his shoulders broad he threw
An hairie hide of some wild beast, whom hee
In saluage forrest by aduenture slew,
And rest the spoyle his ornament to bee:
Which spredding all his backe with dreadfull vew,
Made all that him so horrible did see,
Thinke him Alcides with the Lyons skin,
When the Næmean Conquest he did win.
Vpon his head his glistering Burganet,
117
The which was wrought by wonderous deuice,
And curiously engrauen, he did set:
The mettall was of rare and passing price;
Not Bilbo steele, nor brasse from Corinth fet,
Nor costly Oricalche from strange Phoenice;
But such as could both Phoebus arrowes ward,
And th' hayling darts of heauen beating hard.
Therein two deadly weapons fixt he bore,
Strongly outlaunced towards either side,
Like two sharpe speares, his enemies to gore:
Like as a warlike Brigandine, applyde
To fight, layes forth her threatfull pikes afore,
The engines which in them sad death doo hyde:
So did this flie outstretch his fearefull hornes,
Yet so as him their terrour more adornes.
Lastly his shinie wings as siluer bright,
Painted with thousand colours, passing farre
All Painters skill, he did about him dight:
Not halfe so manie sundrie colours arre
In Iris bowe, ne heauen doth shine so bright,
Distinguished with manie a twinckling starre,
Nor Iunoes Bird in her ey-spotted traine
So many goodly colours doth containe.
Ne (may it be withouten perill spoken)
The Archer God, the son of Cytheree,
That ioyes on wretched louers to be wroken,
And heaped spoyles of bleeding harts to see,
Beares in his wings so manie a changefull token.
Ah my liege Lord, forgiue it vnto mee,
If ought against thine honour I haue tolde;
Yet sure those wings were fairer manifolde.
Full manie a Ladie faire, in Court full oft
Beholding them, him secretly enuide,
And wisht that two such fannes, so silken soft,
And golden faire, her Loue would her prouide;
Or that when them the gorgeous Flie had doft,0
Some one that would with grace be gratifide,
From him would steale them priuily away,
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And bring to her so precious a pray.
Report is that dame Venus on a day
In spring when flowres doo clothe the fruitfull ground,
Walking abroad with all her Nymphes to play,
Bad her faire damzels flocking her arownd,
To gather flowres, her forhead to array:
Emongst the rest a gentle Nymph was found,
Hight Astery, excelling all the crewe
In curteous vsage, and vnstained hewe
Who beeing nimbler ioynted than the rest,
And more industrious, gathered more store
Of the fields honour, than the others best;
Which they in secret harts enuying sore,
Tolde Venus, when her as the worthiest
She praisd, that Cupide (as they heard before)
Did lend her secret aide, in gathering
Into her lap the children of the spring.
Wherof the Goddesse gathering iealous feare,
Not yet vnmindfull how not long agoe
Her sonne to Psyche secrete loue did beare,
And long it close conceal'd, till mickle woe
Thereof arose, and manie a rufull teare;
Reason with sudden rage did ouergoe,
And giuing hastie credit to th'accuser,
Was led away of them that did abuse her.
Eftsoones that Damzell by her heauenly might,
She turn'd into a winged Butterflie,
In the wide aire to make her wandring flight;
And all those flowres, with which so plenteouslie
Her lap she filled had, that bred her spright,
She placed in her wings, for memorie
Of her pretended crime, though crime none were:
Since which that flie them in her wings doth beare.
Thus the fresh Clarion being readie dight,
Vnto his iourney did himselfe addresse,
And with good speed began to take his flight:
Ouer the fields in his franke lustinesse,
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And all the countrey wide he did possesse,
Feeding vpon their pleasures bounteouslie,
That none gainsaid, nor none him did enuie.
The woods, the riuers, and the meadowes green,
With his aire-cutting wings he measur'd wide,
Ne did he leaue the mountaines bare vnseene,
Nor the ranke grassie fennes delights vntride.
But none of these, how euer sweete they beene,
Mote please his fancie, nor him cause t'abide:
His choicefull sense with euerie change doth flit.
No common things may please a wauering wit.
To the gay gardins his vnstaid desire
Him wholly caried, to refresh his sprights:
There lauish Nature in her best attire,
Powres forth sweete odors, and alluring sights;
And Arte with her contending, doth aspire
T'excell the naturall, with made delights:
And all that faire or pleasant may be found,
In riotous excesse doth there abound.
There he arriuing, round about doth flie,
From bed to bed, from one to other border,
And takes suruey with curious busie eye,
Of euerie flowre and herbe there set in order;
Now this, now that he tasteth tenderly,
Yet none of them he rudely doth disorder,
Ne with his feete their silken leaues deface;
But pastures on the pleasures of each place.
And euermore with most varietie,
And change of sweetnesse (for all change is sweete)
He casts his glutton sense to satisfie,
Now sucking of the sap of herbe most meete,
Or of the deaw, which yet on them does lie,
Now in the same bathing his tender feete:
And then he pearcheth on some braunch thereby,
To weather him, and his moyst wings to dry.
And then againe he turneth to his play,
To spoyle the pleasure of that Paradise:
The wholsome Saluge, and Lauender still gray,
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Ranke smelling Rue, and Cummin good for eyes,
The Roses raigning in the pride of May,
Sharpe Isope, good for greene wounds remedies,
Faire Marigoldes, and Bees alluring Thime,
Sweet Marioram, and Daysies decking prime.
Coole Violets, and Orpine growing still,
Embathed Balme, and chearfull Galingale,
Fresh Costmarie, and breathfull Camomill,
Red Poppie, and drink-quickning Setuale,
Veyne-healing Veruen, and hed-purging Dill,
Sound Sauorie, and Bazil hartie-hale,
Fat Colworts and comforting Perseline,0
Colde Lettuce, and refreshing Rosmarine.
And whatso else of virtue good or ill
Grewe in the Gardin, fetcht from farre away,
Of euerie one he takes, and tastes at will,
And on their pleasures greedily doth pray.
Then when he hath both plaid, and fed his fill,
In the warme Sunne he doth himselfe embay,
And there him rests in riotous siffisaunce
Of all his gladfulnes, and kingly ioyaunce.
What more felicitie can fall to creature
Than to enioy delight with libertie,
And to be Lord of all the workes of Nature,
To raine in th' aire from th' earth to highest skie,
To feed on flowres, and weeds of glorious feature,
To take what euer thing doth please the eie?
Who rests not pleased with such happines,
Well worthie he to taste of wretchednes.
But what on earth can long abide in state?
Or who can him assure of happie day;
Sith morning faire may bring fowle euening late,
And least mishap the most blisse alter may?
For thousand perills lie in close awaite
About vs daylie, to worke our decay;
That none, except a God, or God him guide,
May them auoyde, or remedie prouide.
And whatso heauens in their secrete doome
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Ordained haue, how can fraile fleshly wight
Forecast, but it must needs to issue come?
The sea, the aire, the fire, the day, the night,
And th' armies of their creatures all and some
Do serue to them, and with importune might
Warre against vs the vassals of their will.
Who then can saue, what they dispose to spill?
Not thou, O Clarion, though fairest thou
Of all thy kinde, vnhappie happie Flie,
Whose cruell fate is wouen euen now
Of Ioues owne hand, to worke thy miserie:
Ne may thee helpe the manie hartie vow,
Which thy olde Sire with sacred pietie
Hath powred forth for thee, and th' altars sprent:
Nought may thee saue from heauens auengement.
It fortuned (as heauens had behight)
That in this gardin, where yong Clarion
Was wont to solace him, a wicked wight,
The foe of faire things, th' author of confusion,
The shame of Nature, the bondslaue of spight,
Had lately built his hatefull mansion;
And, lurking closely, in awayte now lay
How he might anie in his trap betray.
But when he spide the ioyous Butterflie
In this faire plot displacing too and fro,
Fearles of foes and hidden ieopardie,
Lord how he gan for to bestirre him tho,
And to his wicked worke each part applie:
His heate did earne against his hated foe,
And bowels so with ranckling poyson swelde,
That scarce the skin the strong contagion helde.
The cause why he this Flie so maliced,
Was (as in stories it is written found)
For that his mother which him bore and bred,
The most fine-fingred workwoman on ground,
Arachne, by his meanes was vanquished
Of Pallas, and in her owne skill confound,
When she with her for excellence contended,
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That wrought her shame, and sorrow neuer ended.
For the Tritonian goddesse, hauing hard
Her blazed fame, which all the world had fil'd,
Came downe to proue the truth, and due reward
For her prais-worthie workmanship to yeild
But the presumptuous Damzel rashly dar'd
The Goddesse selfe to chalenge to the field,
And to compare with her in curious skill
Of workes with loome, with needle, and with quill.
Minerua did the chalenge not refuse,
But deign'd with her the paragon to make:
So to their worke they sit, and each doth chuse
What storie she will for her tapet take.
Arachne figur'd how Ioue did abuse
Europa like a Bull, and on his backe
Her through the sea did beare; so liuely seene,
That it true Sea, and true Bull ye would weene.
Shee seem'd still backe vnto the land to looke,
And her play-fellowes aide to call, and feare
The dashing of the waues, that vp she tooke
Her daintie feete, and garments gathered neare:
But (Lord) how she in euerie member shooke,
When as the land she saw no more appeare,
But a wilde wildernes of waters deepe:
Then gan she greatly to lament and weepe.
Before the Bull she pictur'd winged Loue,
With his yong brother Sport, light fluttering
Vpon the waues, as each had beene a Doue;
The one his bowe and shafts, the other Spring.
A burning Teade about his head did moue,
As in their Syres new loue both triumphing:
And manie Nymphes about them flocking round,
And manie Tritons, which did their hornes sound.
And round about, her worke she did empale
With a faire border wrought of sundrie flowres,
Enwouen with an Yuie winding trayle:0
A goodly worke, full fit for Kingly bowres,
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Such as Dame Pallas, such as Enuie pale,
That al good things with venemous tooth deuowres,
Could not accuse. Then gan the Goddesse bright
Her selfe likewise vnto her worke to dight.
She made the storie of the old debate
Which she with Neptune did for Athens trie:
Twelue Gods doo sit around in royall state,
And Ioue in midst with awfull Maiestie,
To iudge the strife betweene them stirred late:
Each of the Gods by his like visnomie
Eathe to be knowen; but Ioue aboue them all,
By his great lookes and power Imperiall.
Before them stands the God of Seas in place,
Clayming that sea-coast Citie as his right,
And strikes the rockes with his three-forked mace;
Whenceforth issues a warlike steed in sight,
The signe by which he chalengeth the place,
That all the Gods, which saw his wondrous might
Did surely deeme the victorie his due:
But seldome seene, foriudgement proueth true.
Then to her selfe she giues her Aegide shield,
And steelhed speare, and morion on her hedd,
Such as she oft is seene in warlicke field:
Then sets she forth, how with her weapon dredd
She smote the ground, the which streight foorth did yield
A fruitfull Olyue tree, with berries spredd,
That all the Gods admir'd; then all the storie
She compast with a wreathe of Olyues hoarie.
Emongst these leaues she made a Butterflie,
With excellent deuice and wondrous flight,
Fluttring among the Oliues wantonly,
That seem'd to liue, so like it was in sight:
The veluet nap which on his wings doth lie,
The siken downe with which his backe is dight,
His broad outstretched hornes, his [h]ayrie thies,
His glorious colours, and his glittering eies.
Which when Arachne saw, as ouerlaid
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And mastered with workmanship so rare,
She stood astonied long, ne ought gainesaid,
And with fast fixed eyes on her did stare,
And by her silence, signe of one dismaid,
The victorie did yeeld her as her share:
Yet she did inly fret, and felly burne,
And all her blood to poysonous rancor turne:
That shortly from the shape of womanhed,
Such as she was, when Pallas she attempted
, She grew to hideous shape of dryrihed,
Pined with griefe of folly late repented:
Eftsoones her white streight legs were altered
To crooked crawling shankes, of marrowe empted,
And her faire face to fowle and loathsome hewe
And her fine corpses to a bag of venim grewe.
This cursed creature, mindfull of that olde
Enfested grudge, the which his mother felt,
So soone as Clarion he did beholde,
His heart with vengefull malice inly swelt;
And weauing straight a net with manie a folde
About the caue, in which he lurking dwelt,
With fine small cords about it stretched wide,
So finely sponne, that scarce they could be spide.
Not anie damzell, which her vaunteth most
In skilfull knitting of soft silken twyne;
Nor anie skil'd in workmanship embost;
Nor anie skil'd in loupes of fingring fine,
Might in their diuers cunning euer dare,
With this so curious networke to compare.
Ne doo I thinke, that that same subtil gin,
The which the Lemnian God framde craftilie,
Mars sleeping with his wife to compasse in,
That all the Gods with common mockerie
Might laugh at them, and scorne their shamefull sin,
Was like to this. This same he did applie
For to entrap the careles Clarion,
That ran'gd each where without suspition.
Suspition of friend, nor feare of foe,
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That hazarded his health, had he at all,
But walkt at will, and wandred too and fro,
In the pride of his freedome principall:
Litle wist he his fatall future woe,
But was secure, the liker he to fall.
He likest is to fall into mischaunce,
That is regardles of his gouernaunce.
Yet still Aragnoll (so his foe was hight)
Lay lurking couertly him to surprise,
And all his gins that him entangle might,
Drest in good order as he could deuise.
At length the foolish Flie without foresight,
As he that did all danger quite despise,
Toward those parts came flying careleslie
, Where hidden was his hatefull enemie.
Who, seeing him, with secrete ioy therefore
Did tickle inwardly in euerie vaine,
And his false hart fraught with all treasons store,
Was fil'd with hope, his purpose to obtaine:
Himselfe he close vpgathered more and more
Into his den, that his deceiptfull traine
By his there being might not be bewraid,
Ne anie noyse, ne anie motion made.
Like as a wily Foxe, that hauing spide,
Where on a sunnie banke the Lambes doo play,
Full closely creeping by the hinder side,
Lyes in ambushment of his hoped pray,
Ne stirreth limbe, till seeing readie tide,
He rusheth forth, and snatcheth quite away
One of the little yonglings vnawares:
So to his worke Aragnoll him prepares.
Who now shall giue vnto my heauie eyes
A well of teares, that all may ouerflow?
Or where shall I finde lamentable cryes,
And mournfull tunes enough my griefe to show?
Helpe O thou Tragick Muse, me to deuise
Notes sad enough t'expresse this bitter throw:
For loe, the drerie stownd is now arriued,
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That of all happines hath vs depriued.
The luckles Clarion, whether cruell Fate,
Or wicked Fortune faultles him misled,
Or some vngracious blast out of the gate
Of Aeoles raine perforce him droue on hed,
Was (O sad hap and howre vnfortunate)
With violent swift flight forth caried
Into the cursed cobweb, which his foe
Had framed for his finall ouerthroe.
There the fond Flie entangled, strugled long,
Himselfe to free thereout; but all in vaine.
For striuing more, the more in laces strong
Himselfe he tide, and wrapt his winges twine
In lymie snares the subtill loupes among;
That in the ende he breathlesse did remaine,
And all his yougthly forces idly spent,
Him to the mercie of th' auenger lent.
Which when the greisly tyrant did espie,
Like a grimme Lyon rushing with fierce might
Out of his den, he seized greedilie
On the resistles pray, and with fell spight,
Vnder the left wing stroke his weapon slie
Into his heart, that his deepe groning spright
In bloodie streames foorth fled into the aire,
His bodie left the spectacle of care.
~ Edmund Spenser,#NFDB
998:The Bush
I wonder if the spell, the mystery,
That like a haze about your silence clings,
Moulding your void until we seem to see
Tangible Presences of Deathless Things,
Patterned but little to our spirits' woof,
Yet from our love or hate not all aloof,
Can. be the matrix where are forming slowly
Troy tales of Old Australia, to refine
Eras to come of ordered melancholy
'Neath lily-pale Perfection's anodyne.
For Troy hath ever been, and Homer sang
Its younger story for a lodging's fee,
While o'er Scamander settlers' axes rang
Amid the Bush where Ilium was to be.
For Cretan Art, dim centuries before,
Minoan Dream-times some Briseis bore.
Sumerian Phoebus by a willowed water
Song-built a Troy for far Chaldea, where
The sons of God, beholding Leda's daughter,
Bartered eternal thrones for love of her.
Across each terraced aeon Time hath sowed
With green tautology of vanished years,
Gaping aghast or webbed with shining lode,
Achilles' anger's earthquake-rift appears.
The towers that Phoebus builds can never fall:
Desire that Helen lights can never pall:
Yea, wounded Love hath still but gods to fly to,
When lust of war inflames Diomedes:
Must some Australian Hector vainly die, too?
Captives in ships? (0 change that omen, Trees!)
Yea, Mother Bush, in your deep dreams abide
Cupids alert for man and maid unborn,
Apprentice Pucks amid your saplings hide,
And wistful gorges wait a Roland horn:
Wallet of Sigurd shall this swag replace,
And centaurs curvet where those brumbies race.
39
That drover's tale of love shall greaten duly
Through magic prisms of a myriad years,
Till bums Isolde to Tristram's fervour newly,
Or Launcelot to golden Guinevere's.
The miner cradling washdirt by the creek,
Or pulled through darkness dripping to the plat:
The navvy boring tunnels through the peak:
The farmer grubbing box-trees on the flat:
The hawker camping by the roadside spring:
The hodman on the giddy scaffolding:
Moths that around the fashion windows flutter:
The racecourse spider and the betting fly:
The children romping by the city gutter,
While baby crows to every passer-byFrom these rough blocks strewn o'er our ancient stream
Sculptors shall chisel brownie, fairy, faun,
Any myrmidons of some Homeric dream
From Melbourne mob and Sydney push be drawn.
The humdrum lives that now we tire of, then
Romance shall be, and 'we heroic men
Treading the vestibule of Golden Ages,
The Isthmus of the Land of Heart's Desire:
For lo! the Sybil's final volume's pages
Ope with our Advent, close when we expire.
Forgetful Change in one 'antiquity'
Boreal gleams shall drown, and southern glows;
Out of some singing woman's heart-break plea
Australia's dawn shall flush with Sappho's rose:
Strong Shirlow's hand shall trace Mantegna's line,
And Soma foam from Victor Daley's wine:
Scholars to be our prehistoric drama
From Esson's 'Woman Tamer' shall restore,
Or find in Gilbert's 'Lotus Stream and Lama'
An Austral Nile and Buddhas we adore.
The sunlit Satyrs follow Hugh McCrae,
Quinn spans the ocean with a Celtic ford,
And Williamson the Pan-pipe learns to play
From magpie-songs our schoolboy ears ignored:
40
A sweeter woe no keen of Erin gave
Than Kendall sings o'er Araluen's grave:
Tasmanian Wordsworth to his chapel riding
The Burning Bush and Ardath mead shall pass,
Or, from the sea-coast of Bohemia gliding
On craft of dream, behold a shepherd lass.
Jessie Mackay on Southern Highlands sees
The elves deploy in kem and gallowglass:
Our Gilbert Murray writes 'Euripides':
Pirani merges in Pythagoras:
Marsyas plunges into Lethe, flayed,
From Rhadamanthine Stephens' steady blade:
While Benvenuto Morton, drunk with singing,
Sees salamanders in a bush-fire's bed,
And Spencer sails from Alcheringa bringing
Intaglios, totems and Books of the Dead.
On Southern fiords shall Brady's Long Snakes hiss,
Heavy with brides he wins to Viking troth:
O'Reilly's Sydney shall be Sybaris,
While Melbourne's Muses sup their Spartan broth:
Murdoch, Zenobia's counsellor, in time,
Redacts from Burke his book on The Sublime:
By Way was Homer into Greek translated:
And Shakespeare's self is Sophocles so plain
They know the kerb whereon the Furies waited
Outside the Mermaid Inn in Brogan's Lane.
Vane shall divide with Vern Eureka's fame;
Tillett and Mann are Tyler then and Cade:
Dowie's entwines with Cagliostro's name,
And in Tarpeia's, lo, those fair forms fade
Who drug the poor, for social bread and wine,
And lift the furtive latch to Catiline:
There, where the Longmore-featured Gracchi hurry,
And Greek-browed Higinbotham walks, anon,
The 'wealthy lower orders' leap the Murray
Before the stockwhip cracks of Jardine Don.
Cleons in 'Windsor dress at Syracuse
Their thin plebeians' promised meal delay;
41
And Archibald begets Australia's Muse
Upon an undine red of Chowder Bay:
Paterson's swan draws Amphitrite's car,
And Sidon learns from Young what purples are:
Rose Scott refutes dogmatic Cyril gaily,
Hypatia turns the anti-suffrage flank,
And Herod's daughter sools her 'morning daily'
On John the Baptist by the Yarra Bank.
Yon regal bustard, fading hence ere long,
Shall seem the guide we followed to the Grail;
This lyre-bird on his dancing-mound of song
Our mystagogue of some Bacchantic vale,
Where feathered Pan guffaws 'Evoe!' above,
And Maenad curlews shriek their midnight love:
That trailing flight of distant swans is bearing
Sarpedon's soul to its eternal joy:
This ibis, from the very Nile, despairing,
Memnon our own would warn from fatal Troy.
Primeval gnomes distilled the golden bribes
That have impregnated your musing waste with men;
But shall the spell of your pathetic tribes
Curl round, in time, our fairer limbs again?
Through that long tunnel of your gloom, I see
Gardens of a metropolis to be!
Out of the depths the mountain ash is soaring
To embryon gods of what unsounded space?
Out of the heights what influence is pouring
Thin desolation on your haunted face?
Many there are who see no higher lot
For all your writhing centuries of toil
Than that the avaricious plough should blot
Their wilding burgeon, and the red brand spoil
Your cyclopean garniture, to sow
The cheap parterres of Europe on your woe.
They weave all sorceries but yours, and borrow
The tinkling spells of alien winds and seas
To drown the chord of purifying sorrow,
Bom ere the world, that pulses through your trees.
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For, save when we, in not o'er-subtle mood,
Hear magpies warbling soft November in,
Or, hand in hand with Love, a dreaming wood
Or bouldered crest of crisper April win,
Your harps, unblurred by glozing strings, intone
The dirges that behind Creation moan'Where, riding reinless billows, new lives dash on
The souring beach of yesterday's decay,
Where Love's chord leaps from mandrake shrieks of passion,
And groping gods mould man from quivering clay.
(Is Nature deaf and blind and dumb? A cruse
Unfilled of wine? Clay for an unbreathed soul?
Alien to man, till his desires transfuse
Their flames through wind and water, leaf and bole,
And each crude fane elaborately fit
With oracles that echo all his wit?
The living wilds of Greece saw death returning
When Pan that men had made fell from his throne:
Till through her sap our very blood is churning
The Bush her lonely alien woe shall moan!
Or is she reticent but to be kind?
Whispers she not beneath her mask of clods'Who asks he shall receive, who seeks shall find,
Who knocks shall open every door of God's?'
Dumb Faith's, blind Hope's eternal consort she,
Gravid with all that is on earth to be;
Corn, wine and oil in hungry granite hiding,
All Beauty under sober wings of clay,
All life beneath her dead heart long abiding,
Yea, all the gods her sons and she obey!)
What sin's wan expiation strewed your Vast
With mounded pillage of what conquering fire?
Slumbering throes of what prodigious Past
Exhale these lingering ghosts of its desire?
Sunshine that bleached corruption out, that glare?
Desolate blue of Purgatory, there?
Flagellant winds through guilty Eden scouring?
Sahara drowning Prester John's domain?
Satumian dam her progeny devouring?
Hath dawn-time Hun these footprints left? Hath Cain?
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Even the human wave, that shall at length
To man's endurance key your strident surge,
Sings in your poignant tones and sombre strength,
And makes, as yet, its own your primal dirge:
A gun-shot startles dawn back from the sky,
And mourning tea-trees echo Gordon's sigh:
Nardoo with Burke's faint sweat is dank for ever:
Spectral a tribe round poisoned rations shrieks:
Till doomday Leichhardt walks die Never Never:
Pensive, of Boake, the circling stock-whip speaks.
The wraiths unseen of roadside crimes unnamed
About that old-time shanty's ruins roam:
This squatter's fenceless acres hide ashamed
The hearth and battered zinc of Naboth's home:
Deserted 'yam-holes' pit your harmonies
With sloughing pock-marks of the gold-disease:
The sludgy creek 'mid hungry rushes rambles,
Where teal once dived and lowan raised her mound:
That tree, with crows, o'erlooks the township shambles:
These paddocks, ordure-smeared, the city bound.
0 yield not all to factory and farm!
For we, who drew a milk no stranger knows
From her scant paps, yearn for the acrid charm
That gossamers the Bush Where No Tree Grows.
And we have ritual moments when we crave
For worship in some messmate-pillared nave,
Where contrite 'bears' for woodland sins are kneeling,
And, 'mid the censers of the mountain musk,
Acolyte bell-birds the Angelus are pealing,
And boobooks moan lone vespers in the dusk,
And you have Children of the Dreaming Star,
Who care but little for the crowded ways
Where meagre spirits' vapid prizes are,
Or for the paddocked ease of dreamless days
And hedges clipped of every sunny growth
That plights the soul to God in daily troth:
Their wayward love prefers your desolation,
Or (where the human trail hath seared its charm)
44
The briar-rose on some abandoned 'station',
To all the tilled obedience of the farm.
Vineyards that purblind thrift shall never glean
The weedy waste and thistly gully hold:
No mint shall melt to currency unclean
Yon river-rounded hillock's Cape-broom gold:
The onion-grass upon that dark green slope
Returns our gaze from eyes of heliotrope:
But more we seek your underflowered expanses
Of scrub monotonous, or, where, O Bush,
The craters of your fiery noon's romances,
Like great firm bosoms, through the bare plains push.
As many. Mother, are your moods and forms
As all the sons who love you. Here, you mow
Careering grounds for every brood of storms
The wild sea-mares to desert stallions throw;
Anon, up through a sea of sand you glance
With green ephemeral exuberance,
And then quick seeds dive deep to years of slumber
From hot-hoofed drought's precipitate return:
There, league on league, the snow's cold fingers number
The shrinking nerves of supple-jack and fern.
To other eyes and ears you are a great
Pillared cathedral tremulously green,
An odorous and hospitable gate
To genial mystery, the happy screen
Of truants or of lovers rambling there
'Neath sun-shot boughs o'er miles of maidenhair.
Wee rubies dot the leaflets of the cherries,
The wooing wagtails hop from log to bough,
The bronzewing comes from Queensland for the berries,
The bell-bird by the creek is calling now.
And you can ride, an Eastern queen, they say,
By living creatures sumptuously borne,
With all barbaric equipages gay,
Beneath the torrid blue of Capricorn.
That native lotus is the very womb
That was the Hindoo goddess' earthly tomb.
45
The gang-gang screams o'er cactus wildernesses,
Palm trees are there, and swampy widths of rice,
Unguents and odours ooze from green recesses,
The jungles blaze with birds of Paradise.
But I, in city exile, hear you sing
Of saplinged hill and box-tree dotted plain,
Or silver-grass that prays the North Wind's wing
Convey its sigh to the loitering rain:
And Spring is half distraught with wintry gusts,
Summer the daily spoil of tropic lusts
The sun and she too fiercely shared together
Lingering thro' voluptuous Hindoo woods,
But o'er my windless, soft autumnal weather
The peace that passes understanding broods.
When, now, they say 'The Bush!', I see the top
Delicate amber leanings of the gum
Flutter, or flocks of screaming green leeks drop
Silent, where in the shining morning hum
The gleaning bees for honey-scented hours
'Mid labyrinthine leaves and white gum flowers.
Cantering midnight hoofs are nearing, nearing,
The straining bullocks flick the harpy flies,
The 'hatter' weeds his melancholy clearing,
The distant cow-bell tinkles o'er the rise.
You are the brooding comrade of our way,
Whispering rumour of a new Unknown,
Moulding us white ideals to obey,
Steeping whate'er we learn in lore your own,
And freshening with unpolluted light
The squalid city's day and pallid night,
Till we become ourselves distinct, Australian,
(Your native lightning charging blood and nerve),
Stripped to the soul of borrowed garments, alien
To that approaching Shape of God you serve.
Brooding, brooding, your whispers murmur plain
That searching for the clue to mystery
In grottos of decrepitude is vain,
That never shall the eye of prophet see
46
In crooked Trade's tumultuous streets the plan
Of templed cities adequate to man.
Brooding, brooding, you make us Brahmins waiting
(While uninspired pass on the hurtling years),
Faithful to dreams your spirit is creating,
Till Great Australia, born of you, appears.
For Great Australia is not yet: She waits
(Where o'er the Bush prophetic auras play)
The passing of these temporary States,
Flaunting their tawdry flags of far decay.
Her aureole above the alien mists
Beacons our filial eyes to mountain trysts:
'Mid homely trees with all ideals fruited,
She shelters us till Trade's Simoom goes by,
And slakes our thirst from cisterns unpolluted .
For ages cold in brooding deeps of sky.
We love our brothers, and to heal their woe
Pluck simples from the known old gardens still:
We love our kindred over seas, and grow
Their symbols tenderly o'er plain and hill;
We feel their blood rebounding in our hearts,
And speak as they would speak our daily parts:
But under all we know, we know that only
A virgin womb unsoiled by ancient fear
Can Saviours bear. So, we, your Brahmins, lonely,
Deaf to the barren tumult, wait your Year.
The Great Year's quivering dawn pencils the Night
To be the morning of our children's prime,
And weave from rays of yet ungathered Light
A richer noon than e'er apparelled Time.
If it must be, as Tuscan wisdom knew,
Babylon's seer, and wistful Egypt too,
That mellow afternoon shall pensive guide us
Down somnolent Decay's ravine to rest,
Then you, reborn, 0 Mother Bush, shall hide us
All the long night at your dream-laden breast.
Australian eyes that heed your lessons know
Another world than older pilgrims may:
47
Prometheus chained in Kosciusko's snow
Sees later gods than Zeus in turn decay:
Boundless plateaux expand the spirit's sight,
Resilient gales uphold her steeper flight:
And your close beating heart, 0 savage Mother,
Throbs secret words of joy and starker pain
Than reach the ears all old deceptions smother
In Lebanon, or e'en in Westermain.
We marvel not, who hear your undersong,
And catch a glimpse in rare exalted hours
Of something like a Being gleam along
Festooned arcades of flossie creeper flowers,
Or, toward the mirk, seem privileged to share
The silent rapture of the trees at prayerWe marvel not that seers in other ages,
With eyes unstrained by peering logic, saw
The desolation glow with Koran pages,
Or Sinai stones with Tables of the Law.
Homers are waiting in the gum trees now,
Far driven from the tarnished Cyclades:
More Druids to your green enchantment bow
Than 'neath unfaithful Mona's vanished trees:
A wind hath spirited from ageing France
To our fresh hills the carpet of Romance:
Heroes and maids of old with young blood tingling
In ampler gardens grow their roses new:
And races long apart their manas mingling
Prepare the cradle of an Advent due.
And those who dig the mounded eld for runes
To read Religion's tangled cipher, here,
Where all Illusion haunts the fainting noons
Of days hysteric with the tireless leer
Of ravenous enamoured suns, shall find
How May a flings her mantle o'er the mind,
Till sober sand to shining water changes,
Dodona whispers from the she-oak groves,
Afreets upon the tempest cross the ranges,
And Fafnir through the bunyip marshes roves.
48
Once, when Uranian Love appeared to glow
Through that abysmal Night that bounds our reignLove that a man may scarcely feel and know i
Quite the same world as other men againWith earthward-streaming frontier wraiths distraught,
Your oracles, 0 Mother Bush, I sought:
But found, dismayed, that eerie light revealing
Those wraiths already in your depths on sleuth,
Termagant Scorns along your hillsides stealing,
Remorse unbaring slow her barbed tooth.
My own thoughts first from far dispersion flew
Back to their sad creator, with the crops
Of woes in flower and all the harvests due
Till tiring Time the fearful seeding stops:
In pigmy forms of friends and foes, anon
In my own image, they came, stung, were gone:
And then I heard the voice of Him Who Questions,
Knowing the faltered answer ere it came,
Chilling the soul by hovering suggestions
Of wan damnation at a wince of blame.
And all your leaves in symbols were arranged,
Despairs long dead would leap from bough to bough,
A gum-tree buttress to a goblin changed
Grinning the warmth of some old broken vow:
Furtive desires for scarce-remembered maids
Glanced in a fearful bo-peep from your shades:
Till you became a purgatory cleansing
With rosy flakes in form of manikins,
To fiercer shame within my soul condensing,
The dim pollution of forgotten sins.
And She, the human symbol of that Love,
Would, as my cleansed eyes forgot their fear,
Comrade beside me. Comforter above,
With sunny smile ubiquitous appear:
Run on before me to the nooks we knew,
Walk hand in hand as glad young lovers do,
Gravely reprove me toying with temptation,
Show me the eyes and ears in roots and clods,
Bend with me o'er some blossom's revelation,
49
Or read from clouds the judgments of the gods.
My old ideals She would tune until
The grating note of self no longer rang:
She drove the birds of gloom and evil will
Out of the cote wherein my poems sang.
Time at Her wand annulled his calendar,
And Space his fallacy of Near and Far,
For through my Bush along with me She glided,
And crowded days of Beauty made more fair,
Though lagging weeks and ocean widths divided
Her mortal casing from Her Presence there.
Her wetted finger oped my shuttered eyes
To boyhood's scership of the Real again:
Upon the Bush descended from the skies
The rapt-up Eden of primordial men:
August Dominions through the vistas strode:
On white-maned clouds the smiling cherubs rode:
Maltreated Faith restored my jangled hearing
Till little seraphs sang from chip and clod:
And prayers were radiant children that, unfearing,
Floated as kisses to the lips of God.
It matters not that for some purpose wise
Myopic Reason censored long ago
The revelations of that Paradise,
When, back of all I feel or will or know,
Its silent angels beacon through the Dark
And point to harbours new my drifted ark.
Nor need we dread the fogs that round us thicken
Questing the Bush for Grails decreed for man,
When Powers our fathers saw unseen still quicken
Eyes that were ours before the world began.
'Twas then I saw the Vision of the Ways,
And 'mid their gloom and glory seemed to live,
Threaded the coverts of the Dark Road's maze,
Toiled up, with tears, the Track Retributive,
And, on the Path of Grace, beheld aglow
The love-lit Nave of all that wheeled below.
And She who flowered, my Mystic Rose, in Heaven,
50
And lit the Purging Mount, my Guiding Star,
Trudged o'er the marl, my mate, through Hell's wan levin,
Nor shrank, like lonely Dante's love, afar.
High towered a cloud over one leafy wild,
And to a bridged volcano grew. Above,
A great Greek group of father, mother, child,
Illumed a narrow round with radiant love.
Below, a smoke-pool thick with faces swirled,
The mutinous omen. of an Under-world,
Defeated, plundered, blackened, but preparing,
E'en though that calm, white dominance fell down,
To overflow the rim, and, sunward faring,
Shape myriad perfect groups from slave and clown.
Or thus I read the symbol, though 'twas sent
To hound compunction on my wincing pride,
That dreamed of raceless brotherhood, content
Though all old Charm dissolved and Glory died.
For often signs will yield their deeper signs,
Virginal Bush, in your untrodden shrines,
Than where the craven ages' human clamour
Distorts the boldest oracle with fear,
Or where dissolving wizards dew with glamour
Arden, Broceliande, or Windermere.
Once while my mother by a spreading tree
Our church's sober rubric bade me con,
My vagrant eyes among the boughs would see
Forbidden wings and •wizard aprons on
Father's 'wee people' from their Irish glades
Brighten and darken with your lights and shades.
And I would only read again those stern leaves
For whispered bribe that, when their tale I told,
We would go and look for fairies in the fern-leaves
And red-capped leprechauns with crocks of gold.
Anon, my boyhood saw how Sunbursts flamed
Or filmy hinds lured on a pale Oisin,
Where lithe indignant saplings crowding claimed
The digger's ravage for their plundered queen:
And heard within yon lichened 'mullock-heap'
51
Lord Edward's waiting horsemen moan in sleep:
Or flew the fragrant path of swans consoling
Lir's exiled daughter wandering with me,
And traced below the Wattle River rolling
Exuberant and golden toward the sea.
Here, would the •wavering wings of heat uplift
Some promontory till the tree-crowned pile
Above a phantom sea would swooning drift,
St. Brendan's vision of the Winged Isle:
Anon, the isle divides again, again,
Till archipelagos poise o'er the main.
There, lazy fingers of a breeze have scattered
The distant blur of factory chimney smoke
hi poignant groups of all the young lives shattered
To feed the ravin of a piston-stroke!
Or when I read the tale of what you were
Beyond these hungry eyes' home-keeping view,
I peopled petrel rocks with Sirens fair,
In Maid Mirage the Fairy Morgan knew,
Steered Quetzalcoatl's skiff to coral coasts,
On Chambers' Pillar throned the Olympian hosts,
Heard in white sulphur-crested parrots' screeches
Remorseful Peris vent their hopeless rage,
Atlantis' borders traced on sunken beaches,
m Alcheringa found the Golden Age.
Sibyl and Siren, with alternate breaths
You read our foetal nation's boon and bane,
And lure to trysts of orgiastic Deaths
Adventurous love that listens to your strain:
Pelsarts and Vanderdeckens of the world
Circle your charms or at your feet are hurled:
And, Southern witch, whose glamour drew De Quiros
O'er half the earth for one unyielded kiss,
Were yours the arms that healed the scalded Eros
When Psyche's curious lamp darkened their bliss?
Ye, who would challenge when we claim to see
The bush alive with Northern wealth of wings,
Forget that at a common mother's knee
52
We learned, with you, the lore of Silent Things.
There is no New that is not older far
Than swirling cradle of the first-born star:
Our youngest hearts prolong the far pulsation
And churn the brine of the primordial sea:
The foetus writes the précis of Creation:
Australia is the whole world's legatee.
Imagination built her throne in us
Before your present bodies saw the sky:
Your myths were counters of our abacus,
And in your brain developed long our eye:
We from the misty folk have also sprung
Who saw the gnomes and heard the Ever Young:
Do Southern skies the fancy disinherit
Of moly flower and Deva-laden breeze?
Do nerves attuned by old defect and merit
Their timbre lose by crossing tropic seas?
All mysteries ye claim as yours alone
Have wafted secrets over oceans here:
Our living soil Antiquity hath sown
With just the corn and tares ye love and fear:
Romance and song enthral us just as you,
Nor change of zenith changes spirit too:
Our necks as yours are sore with feudal halters:
To the Pole ye know our compasses are set;
And shivering years that huddled round your altars
Beneath our stars auspicious tremble yet.
Who fenced the nymphs in European vales?
Or Pan tabooed from all but Oxford dreams?
Warned Shakespeare off from foreign Plutarch's tales?
Or tethered Virgil to Italian themes?
And when the body sailed from your control
Think ye we left behind in bond the soul?
Whate'er was yours is ours in equal measure,
The Temple was not built for you alone,
Altho' 'tis ours to grace the common treasure
With Lares and Penates of our own!
Ye stole yourselves from gardens fragrant long
53
The sprouting seed-pods of your choicest blooms,
And wove the splendid garments of your song
From Viking foam on grave Hebraic looms:
'Twas Roman nerve and rich Hellenic lymph
Changed your pale pixie to a nubile nymph:
Yea, breathed at dawn around Atlantis' islands,
Wind-home o'er some Hesperidean road,
The morning clouds on dim Accadian highlands
Spring-fed the Nile that over Hellas flowed!
As large-eyed Greek amid Sicilian dews
Saw Dis, as ne'er before, pursue the Maid,
Or, safe 'neath screening billows, Arethuse
Alpheus' rugged sleuth unsoiled evade:
We shall complete the tale ye left half-told,
Under the ocean lead your fountains old,
To slake our sceptic thirst with haunted water,
And tame our torrents with a wedding kiss,
Shall loose, mayhap, the spell on Ceres' daughter,
And show, unclouded, God in very Dis.
(Yet, there are moods and mornings when I hear,
Above the music of the Bush's breath,
The rush of alien breezes far and near
Drowning her oracles to very death:
Exotic battle-cries the silence mar,
Seductive perfumes drive the gum-scent far;
And organ-tones august a moment show me
Miltonic billows and Homeric gales
Until I feel the older worlds below me,
And all her wonder trembles, thins and fails.)
Yea, you are all that we may be, and yet
In us is all you are to be for aye!
The Giver of the gifts that we shall get?
An empty womb that waits the wedding day?
Thus drifting sense by age-long habit buoyed
Plays round the thought that knows all nature void!
And so, my song alternate would believe her
Idiot Bush and Daughter of the Sun,
A worthless gift apart from the receiver,
An empty womb, but in a Deathless One.
54
To shapes we would of Freedom, Truth and Joy
Shall we your willing plasm mould for man:
Afresh rebuild the world, and thus destroy
What only Ragnarok in Europe can:
There is no Light but in your dark blendes sleeps,
Drops from your stars or through your ether leaps:
Yea, you are Nature, Chaos since Creation,
Waiting what human Word to chord in song?
Matrix inert of what auspicious nation?
For what far bees your nectar hiving long?
Exhausted manas of the conquering North
Shall rise refreshed to vivid life again
At your approach, and in your lap pour forth
Grateful the gleanings of his mighty reign:
As, when a tropic heat-king southward crawls,
Blistering the ranges, till he hears the calls
Of some cold high-browed bride, her streaming tresses,
Sprinkled with rose-buds, make his wild eyes thrill
To such desire for her superb caresses
He yields his fiery treasures to her will.
'Where is Australia, singer, do you know?
These sordid farms and joyless factories,
Mephitic mines and lanes of pallid woe?
Those ugly towns and cities such as these
With incense sick to all unworthy power,
And all old sin in full malignant flower?
No! to her bourn her children still are faring:
She is a Temple that we are to build:
For her the ages have been long preparing:
She is a prophecy to be fulfilled!
All that we love in olden lands and lore
Was signal of her coming long ago!
Bacon foresaw her, Campanella, More
And Plato's eyes were with her star aglow!
Who toiled for Truth, whate'er their countries were,
Who fought for Liberty, they yearned for her!
No corsair's gathering ground, or tryst for schemers,
55
No chapman Carthage to a huckster Tyre,
She is the Eldorado of old dreamers,
The Sleeping Beauty of the world's desire!
She is the scroll on which we are to write
Mythologies our own and epics new:
She is the port of our propitious flight
From Ur idolatrous and Pharaoh's crew.
She is our own, unstained, if worthy we,
By dream, or god, or star we would not see:
Her crystal beams all but the eagle dazzle;
Her wind-wide ways none but the strong-winged sail:
She is Eutopia, she is Hy-Brasil,
The watchers on the tower of morning hail I
Yet she shall be as we, the Potter, mould:
Altar or tomb, as we aspire, despair:
What wine we bring shall she, the chalice, hold:
What word we write shall she, the script, declare:
Bandage our eyes, she shall be Memphis, Spain:
Barter our souls, she shall be Tyre again:
And if we pour on her the red oblation
All o'er the world shall Asshur's buzzards throng:
Love-lit, her Chaos shall become Creation:
And dewed with dream, her silence flower in song.
~ Bernard O'Dowd,#NFDB
999:ON OLD AND NEW TABLETS
I
Here I sit and wait, surrounded by broken old
tablets and new tablets half covered with writing. When
will my hour come? The hour of my going down and
going under; for I want to go among men once more.
For that I am waiting now, for first the signs must
come to me that my hour has come: the laughing lion
with the flock of doves. Meanwhile I talk to myself as
one who has time. Nobody tells me anything new: so
I tell myself-myself.
2
When I came to men I found them sitting on an old
conceit: the conceit that they have long known what
is good and evil for man. All talk of virtue seemed an
old and weary matter to man; and whoever wanted to
sleep well still talked of good and evil before going to
sleep.
I disturbed this sleepiness when I taught: what is
good and evil no one knows yet, unless it be he who
creates. He, however, creates man's goal and gives the
earth its meaning and its future. That anything at all
is good and evil-that is his creation.
And I bade them overthrow their old academic
chairs and wherever that old conceit had sat; I bade
them laugh at their great masters of virtue and saints
and poets and world-redeemers. I bade them laugh at
their gloomy sages and at whoever had at any time sat
on the tree of life like a black scarecrow. I sat down by
their great tomb road among cadavers and vultures,
and I laughed at all their past and its rotting, decaying
glory.
197
Verily, like preachers of repentance and fools, I
raised a hue and cry of wrath over what among them
is great and small, and that their best is still so small.
And that their greatest evil too is still so small-at
that I laughed.
My wise longing cried and laughed thus out of me
-born in the mountains, verily, a wild wisdom-my
great broad-winged longing! And often it swept me
away and up and far, in the middle of my laughter; and
I flew, quivering, an arrow, through sun-drunken delight, away into distant futures which no dream had yet
seen, into hotter souths than artists ever dreamed of,
where gods in their dances are ashamed of all clothesto speak in parables and to limp and stammer like
poets; and verily, I am ashamed that I must still be a
poet.
Where all becoming seemed to me the dance of gods
and the prankishness of gods, and the world seemed
free and frolicsome and as if fleeing back to itself-as
an eternal fleeing and seeking each other again of many
gods, as the happy controverting of each other, conversing again with each other, and converging again
of many gods.
Where all time seemed to me a happy mockery of
moments, where necessity was freedom itself playing
happily with the sting of freedom.
Where I also found again my old devil and archenemy, the spirit of gravity, and all that he created:
constraint, statute, necessity and consequence and purpose and will and good and evil.
For must there not be that over which one dances
and dances away? For the sake of the light and the
lightest, must there not be moles and grave dwarfs?
198
3
There it was too that I picked up the word "overman" by the way, and that man is something that must
be overcome-that man is a bridge and no end: proclaiming himself blessed in view of his noon and
evening, as the way to new dawns-Zarathustra's word
of the great noon, and whatever else I hung up over
man like the last crimson light of evening.
Verily, I also let them see new stars along with new
nights; and over clouds and day and night I still spread
out laughter as a colorful tent.
I taught them all my creating and striving, to create
and carry together into One what in man is fragment
and riddle and dreadful accident; as creator, guesser of
riddles, and redeemer of accidents, I taught them to
work on the future and to redeem with their creation
all that has been. To redeem what is past in man and
to re-create all "it was" until the will says, "Thus I
willed itl Thus I shall will it"-this I called redemption
and this alone I taught them to call redemption.
Now I wait for my own redemption-that I may go
to them for the last time. For I want to go to men
once more; under their eyes I want to go under; dying,
I want to give them my richest gift. From the sun I
learned this: when he goes down, overrich; he pours
gold into the sea out of inexhaustible riches, so that
even the poorest fisherman still rows with golden oars.
For this I once saw and I did not tire of my tears as I
watched it.
Like the sun, Zarathustra too wants to go under; now
he sits here and waits, surrounded by broken old tablets
and new tablets half covered with writing.
199
4
Behold, here is a new tablet; but where are my
brothers to carry it down with me to the valley and
into hearts of flesh?
Thus my great love of the farthest demands it: do
not spare your neighbor! Man is something that must
be overcome.
There are many ways of overcoming: see to that
yourself! But only a jester thinks: "Man can also be
skipped over.'
Overcome yourself even in your neighbor: and a
right that you can rob you should not accept as a gift.
What you do, nobody can do to you in turn. Behold,
there is no retri bution.
He who cannot comm and himself should obey. And
many can comm and themselves, but much is still lacking before they also obey themselves.
5
This is the manner of noble souls: they do not want
to have anything for nothing; least of all, life. Whoever
is of the mob wants to live for nothing; we others,
however, to whom life gave itself, we always think
about what we might best give in return. And verily,
that is a noble speech which says, "What life promises
us, we ourselves want to keep to life."
One shall not wish to enjoy where one does not give
joy. And one shall not wish to enjoy For enjoyment and
innocence are the most bashful things: both do not want
to be sought. One shall possess them-but rather seek
even guilt and suffering.
200
6
My brothers, the firstling is always sacrificed. We,
however, are firstlings. All of us bleed at secret sacrificial altars; all of us burn and roast in honor of old
idols. What is best in us is still young: that attracts old
palates. Our flesh is tender, our hide is a mere lambskin: how could we fail to attract old idol-priests? Even
in ourselves the old idol-priest still lives who roasts
what is best in us for his feast. Alas, my brothers, how
could firstlings fail to be sacrifices?
But thus our kind wants it; and I love those who do
not want to preserve themselves. Those who are going
under I love with my whole love: for they cross over.
7
To be true-only a few are able! And those who are
still lack the will. But the good have this ability least
of all. Oh, these good men! Good men never speak the
truth; for the spirit, to be good in this way is a disease.
They give in, these good men; they give themselves up;
their heart repeats and their ground obeys: but whoever
heeds commands does not heed himself.
Everything that the good call evil must come together
so that one truth may be born. 0 my brothers, are you
evil enough for this truth? The audacious daring, the
long mistrust, the cruel No, the disgust, the cutting into
the living-how rarely does all this come together. But
from such seed is truth begotten.
Alongside the bad conscience, all science has grown
so far. Break, break, you lovers of knowledge, the old
tablets
201
8
When the water is spanned by planks, when bridges
and railings leap over the river, verily, those are not
believed who say, "Everything is in flux." Even the
blockheads contradict them. "How now?" say the blockheads. "Everything should be in flux? After all, planks
and railings are over the river. Whatever is over the
river is firm; all the values of things, the bridges, the
concepts, all 'good' and 'evil'-all that is firm."
But when the hard winter comes, the river-animal
tamer, then even the most quick-witted learn mistrust;
and verily, not only the blockheads then say, "Does not
everything stand still?"
"At bottom everything stands still"-that is truly a
winter doctrine, a good thing for sterile times, a fine
comfort for hibernators and hearth-squatters.
"At bottom everything stands still"-against this the
thawing wind preaches. The thawing wind, a bull
that is no plowing bull, a raging bull, a destroyer who
breaks the ice with wrathful horns. Ice, however, breaks
bridges
O my brothers, is not everything in flux now? Have
not all railings and bridges fallen into the water? Who
could still cling to "good" and "evil"?
"Woe to us! Hail to usl The thawing wind blows!"thus preach in every street, my brothers.
9
There is an old illusion, which is called good and evil.
So far the wheel of this illusion has revolved around
soothsayers and stargazers. Once man believed in soothsayers and stargazers, and therefore believed: "All is
destiny: you ought to, for you must."
Then man again mistrusted all soothsayers and star-
202
gazers, and therefore believed: "All is freedom: you
can, for you will."
0 my brothers, so far there have been only illusions
about stars and the future, not knowledge; and therefore there have been only illusions so far, not knowledge, about good and evil.
10
"Thou shalt not rob! Thou shalt not kill" Such words
were once called holy; one bent the knee and head and
took off one's shoes before them. But I ask you: where
have there ever been better robbers and killers in this
world than such holy words?
Is there not in all life itself robbing and killing? And
that such words were called holy-was not truth itself
killed thereby? Or was it the preaching of death that
was called holy, which contradicted and contravened all
life? 0 my brothers, break, break the old tablets!
11
This is my pity for all that is past: I see how all of
it is abandoned-abandoned to the pleasure, the spirit,
the madness: of every generation, which comes along
and reinterprets all that has been as a bridge to itself.
A great despot might come along, a shrewd monster
who, according to his pleasure and displeasure, might
constrain and strain all that is past till it becomes a
bridge to him, a harbinger and herald and cockcrow.
This, however, is the other danger and what prompts
my further pity: whoever is of the rabble, thinks back
as far as the grandfa ther; with the grandfa ther, however, time ends.
Thus all that is past is abandoned: for one day the
rabble might become master and drown all time in
shallow waters.
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Therefore, my brothers, a new nobility is needed to
be the adversary of all rabble and of all that is despotic
and to write anew upon new tablets the word "noble."
For many who are noble are needed, and noble men
of many kinds, that there may be a nobility. Or as I
once said in a parable: "Precisely this is godlike that
there are gods, but no God."
12
0 my brothers, I dedicate and direct you to a new
nobility: you shall become procreators and cultivators
and sowers of the future-verily, not to a nobility that
you might buy like shopkeepers and with shopkeepers'
gold: for whatever has its price has little value.
Not whence you come shall henceforth constitute
your honor, but whither you are going Your will and
your foot which has a will to go over and beyond yourselves-that shall constitute your new honor.
Verily, not that you have served a prince-what do
princes matter now?-or that you became a bulwark
for what stands that it might stand more firmly.
Not that your tribe has become courtly at court and
that you have learned, like a flamingo, to stand for long
hours in a colorful costume in shallow ponds-for the
ability to stand is meritorious among courtiers; and all
courtiers believe that blessedness after death must comprise permission to sit.
Nor that a spirit which they call holy led your ancestors into promised lands, which I do not praise-for
where the worst of all trees grew, the cross, that land
deserves no praise. And verily, wherever this "Holy
Spirit" led his knights, on all such crusades goose aids
goat in leading the way, and the contrary and crude
sailed foremost.
0 my brothers, your nobility should not look back-
204
ward but ahead! Exiles shall you be from all father- and
forefa ther-landsl Your children's land shall you love:
this love shall be your new nobility-the undiscovered
land in the most distant sea. For that I bid your sails
search and search.
In your children you shall make up for being the
children of your fathers: thus shall you redeem all that
is past. This new tablet I place over you.
13
"Why live? All is vanity Living-that is threshing
straw; living-that is consuming oneself in flames without becoming warm." Such antiquarian babbling is still
considered "wisdom"; it is honored all the more for
being old and musty. Mustiness too ennobles.
Children might speak thus: they fear the fire because it burned them. There is much childishness in
the old books of wisdom. And why should those who
always "thresh straw" be allowed to blaspheme threshing? Such oxen should be muzzled after all.
Such men sit down to the table and bring nothing
along, not even a good appetite; and then they blaspheme: "All is vanity." But eating and drinking well, 0
my brothers, is verily no vain art. Break, break the old
tablets of the never gay!
14
"To the clean all is clean," the people say. But I say
unto you, "To the mean all becomes mean."
Therefore the swooners and head-hangers, whose
hearts also hang limply, preach, "The world itself is a
filthy monster." For all these have an unclean spirit but especially those who have neither rest nor repose
except when they see the world from abaft, the afterworldly. To these I say to their faces, even though it
205
may not sound nice: the world is like man in having
a backside abaft; that much is true. There is much
filth in the world; that much is true. But that does not
make the world itself a filthy monster.
There is wisdom in this, that there is much in the
world that smells foul: nausea itself creates wings and
water-divining powers. Even in the best there is still
something that nauseates; and even the best is something that must be overcome. 0 my brothers, there is
much wisdom in this, that there is much filth in the
world.
15
Such maxims I heard pious afterworldly people
speak to their conscience-verily, without treachery or
falseness, although there is nothing falser in the whole
world, nothing more treacherous:
'Let the world go its wayl Do not raise one finger
against it't
"Let him who wants to, strangle and stab and fleece
and flay the people. Do not raise one finger against itl
Thus will they learn to renounce the world."
"And your own reason-you yourself should stifle
and strangle it; for it is a reason of this world; thus
will you yourself learn to renounce the world."
Break, break, 0 my brothers, these old tablets of the
pious. Break the maxims of those who slander the
world.
i6
"Whoever learns much will unlearn all violent desire"
-that is whispered today in all the dark lanes.
"Wisdom makes weary; worth while is-nothing;
thou shalt not desire!"-this new tablet I found hanging even in the open market places.
206
Break, 0 my brothers, break this new tablet too.
The world-weary hung it up, and the preachers of
death, and also the jailers; for behold, it is also an
exhortation to bondage. Because they learned badly,
and the best things not at all, and everything too early
and everything too hastily; because they ate badly,
therefore they got upset stomachs; for their spirit is an
upset stomach which counsels death. For verily, my
brothers, the spirit is a stomach. Life is a well of joy;
but for those out of whom an upset stomach speaks,
which is the father of melancholy, all wells are poisoned.
To gain knowledge is a joy for the lion-willedl But
those who have become weary are themselves merely
being "willed," and all the billows play with them. And
this is always the manner of the weak: they get lost on
the way. And in the end their weariness still asks, "Why
did we ever pursue any way at all? It is all the same."
Their ears appreciate the preaching, "Nothing is worth
while! You shall not will!" Yet this is an exhortation to
bondage.
o my brothers, like a fresh roaring wind Zarathustra
comes to all who are weary of the way; many noses he
will yet make sneeze. Through walls too, my free breath
blows, and into prisons and imprisoned spirits. To will
liberates, for to will is to create: thus I teach. And you
shall learn solely in order to create.
And you shall first learn from me how to lear-how
to learn well. He that has ears to hear, let him hear
17
There stands the bark; over there perhaps the great
nothing lies. But who would embark on this "perhaps"?
No one of you wants to embark on the bark of death.
Why then do you want to be world-weary? Worldwearyl And you are not even removed from the earth.
207
Lusting after the earth I have always found you, in
love even with your own earth-weariness. Not for
nothing is your lip hanging; a little earthly wish still
sits on it. And in your eyes-does not a little cloud of
unforgotten earthly joy float there?
There are many good inventions on earth, some useful, some pleasing: for their sake, the earth is to be
loved. And there is such a variety of well-invented
things that the earth is like the breasts of a woman:
useful as well as pleasing.
But you who are world-weary, you who are earthlazy, you should be lashed with switches: with lashes
one should make your legs sprightly again. For when
you are not invalids and decrepit wretches of whom the
earth is weary, you are shrewd sloths or sweet-toothed,
sneaky pleasure-cats. And if you do not want to run
again with pleasure, then you should pass away. To
the incurable, one should not try to be a physicianthus Zarathustra teaches-so you shall pass awayl
But it takes more courage to make an end than to
make a new verse: all physicians and poets know that.
18
o my brothers, there are tablets created by weariness
and tablets created by rotten, rotting sloth; but though
they speak alike, they must be understood differently.
Behold this man languishing here He is but one span
from his goal, but out of weariness he has defiantly
lain down in the dust-this courageous man! Out of
weariness he yawns at the way and the earth and the
goal and himself: not one step farther will he go-this
courageous man! Now the sun glows on him and the
dogs lick his sweat; but he lies there in his defiance
and would sooner die of thirst-die of thirst one span
away from his goal Verily, you will yet have to drag
208
him by the hair into his heaven-this herol Better yet,
let him lie where he lay down, and let sleep, the comforter, come to him with cooling, rushing rain. Let him
lie till he awakes by himself, till he renounces by himself all weariness and whatever weariness taught through
him. Only, my brothers, drive the dogs away from him,
the lazy creepers, and all the ravenous vermin-all the
raving vermin of the "educated," who feast on every
hero's sweat.
19
I draw circles around me and sacred boundaries;
fewer and fewer men climb with me on ever higher
mountains: I am building a mountain range out of ever
more sacred mountains. But wherever you may climb
with me, 0 my brothers, see to it that no parasite
climbs with you. Parasites: creeping, cringing worms
which would batten on your secret sores. And this is
their art, that they find where climbing souls are weary;
in your grief and discouragement, in your tender parts,
they build their nauseating nests. Where the strong are
weak and the noble all-too-soft-there they build their
nauseating nests: the parasites live where the great have
little secret sores.
What is the highest species of all being and what is
the lowest? The parasite is the lowest species; but whoever is of the highest species will nourish the most
parasites. For the soul that has the longest ladder and
reaches down deepest-how should the most parasites
not sit on that? The most comprehensive soul, which
can run and stray and roam farthest within itself; the
most necessary soul, which out of sheer joy plunges itself into chance; the soul which, having being, dives
into becoming; the soul which has, but wants to want
and will; the soul which flees itself and catches up with
209
itself in the widest circle; the wisest soul, which folly
exhorts most sweetly; the soul which loves itself most,
in which all things have their sweep and countersweep
and ebb and flood-oh, how should the highest soul
not have the worst parasites?
20
0 my brothers, am I cruel? But I say: what is falling,
we should still push. Everything today falls and decays:
who would check it? But I-I even want to push it.
Do you know the voluptuous delight which rolls
stones into steep depths? These human beings of today-look at them, how they roll into my depth!
I am a prelude of better players, 0 my brothers! A
precedent! Follow my precedent
And he whom you cannot teach to fly, teach to fall
faster!
21
I love the valiant; but it is not enough to wield a
broadsword, one must also know against whom. And
often there is more valor when one refrains and passes
by, in order to save oneself for the worthier enemy.
You shall have only enemies who are to be hated,
but not enemies to be despised: you must be proud of
your enemy; thus I taught once before. For the worthier
enemy, 0 my friends, you shall save yourselves; therefore you must pass by much-especially much rabble
who raise a din in your ears about the people and about
peoples. Keep your eyes undefiled by their pro and
conl There is much justice, much injustice; and whoever
looks on becomes angry. Sighting and smiting here
become one; therefore go away into the woods and lay
your sword to sleep.
Go your own ways And let the people and peoples
210
go theirs-dark ways, verily, on which not a single hope
flashes any more. Let the shopkeeper rule where all that
still glitters is-shopkeepers' gold. The time of kings is
past: what calls itself a people today deserves no kings.
Look how these peoples are now like shopkeepers: they
pick up the smallest advantages from any rubbish. They
lie around lurking and spy around smirking-and call
that "being good neighbors." 0 blessed remote time
when a people would say to itself, "I want to be master
-over peoples." For, my brothers, the best should rule,
the best also want to rule. And where the doctrine is
different, there the best is lacking.
22
If those got free bread, alas! For what would they
clamor? Their sustenance-that is what sustains their
attention; and it should be hard for them. They are
beasts of prey: in their "work" there is still an element
of preying, in their "earning" still an element of overreaching. Therefore it should be hard for them. Thus
they should become better beasts of prey, subtler, more
prudent, more human; for man is the best beast of prey.
Man has already robbed all the beasts of their virtues,
for of all beasts man has had the hardest time. Only the
birds are still over and above him. And if man were to
learn to fly-woe, to what heights would his rapaciousness fly?
23
Thus I want man and woman: the one fit for war, the
other fit to give birth, but both fit to dance with head
and limbs. And we should consider every day lost on
which we have not danced at least once. And we should
call every truth false which was not accompanied by at
least one laugh.
211
24
Your wedlock: see to it that it not be a bad lock. If
you lock it too quickly, there follows wedlock-breaking:
adultery. And better even such wedlock-breaking than
wedlock-picking, wedlock-tricking. Thus said a woman
to me: "Indeed I committed adultery and broke my
wedlock, but first my wedlock broke me!"
The worst among the vengeful I always found to be
the ill-matched: they would make all the world pay fox
it that they no longer live singly.
Therefore I would have those who are honest say to
each other, "We love each other; let us see to it that we
remain in love. Or shall our promise be a mistake?"
"Give us a probation and a little marriage, so that we
may see whether we are fit for a big marriage. It is a
big thing always to be two."
Thus I counsel all who are honest; and what would
my love for the overman and for all who shall yet come
amount to if I counseled and spoke differently? Not
merely to reproduce, but to produce something higher
-toward that, my brothers, the garden of marriage
should help you.
25
Whoever has gained wisdom concerning ancient
origins will eventually look for wells of the future and
for new origins. 0 my brothers, it will not be overlong
before new peoples originate and new wells roar down
into new depths. For earthquakes bury many wells and
leave many languishing, but they also bring to light
inner powers and secrets. Earthquakes reveal new
wells. In earthquakes that strike ancient peoples, new
wells break open.
And whoever shouts, "Behold, a well for many who
212
are thirsty, a heart for many who are longing, a will for
many instruments"-around that man there will gather
a people; that is: many triers.
Who can command, who must obey-that is tried out
there. Alas, with what long trials and surmises and unpleasant surprises and learning and retrials!
Human society is a trial: thus I teach it-a long trial;
and what it tries to find is the commander. A trial, 0 my
brothers, and not a "contract." Break, break this word
of the softhearted and half-and-halfl
26
o
my brothers, who represents the greatest danger
for all of man's future? Is it not the good and the just?
Inasmuch as they say and feel in their hearts, "We already know what is good and just, and we have it too;
woe unto those who still seek here" And whatever harm
the evil may do, the harm done by the good is the most
harmful harm. And whatever harm those do who slander the world, the harm done by the good is the most
harmful harm.
o my brothers, one man once saw into the hearts of
the good and the just and said, "They are the pharisees." But he was not understood. The good and the
just themselves were not permitted to understand him:
their spirit is imprisoned in their good conscience. The
stupidity of the good is unfathomably shrewd. This,
however, is the truth: the good must be pharisees they have no choice. The good must crucify him who
invents his own virtue. That is the truth
The second one, however, who discovered their land
-the land, heart, and soil of the good and the justwas he who asked, "Whom do they hate most?" The
creator they hate most: he breaks tablets and old values.
He is a breaker, they call him lawbreaker. For the good
are unable to create; they are always the beginning of
the end: they crucify him who writes new values on
new tablets; they sacrifice the future to themselves they crucify all man's future.
The good have always been the beginning of the end.
27
O my brothers, have you really understood this word?
And what I once said concerning the 'last man"? Who
represents the greatest danger for all of man's future?
Is it not the good and the just? Break, break the good
and the just! 0 my brothers, have you really understood
this word?
28
You flee from me? You are frightened? You tremble
at this word?
o my brothers, when I bade you break the good and
the tablets of the good, only then did I embark man on
his high sea. And only now does there come to him the
great fright, the great looking-around, the great sickness, the great nausea, the great seasickness.
False coasts and false assurances the good have
taught you; in the lies of the good you were hatched
and huddled. Everything has been made fraudulent and
has been twisted through and through by the good.
But he who discovered the land "man," also discovered the land "man's future." Now you shall be seafarers, valiant and patient. Walk upright betimes, 0 my
brothers; learn to walk upright. The sea is raging; many
want to right themselves again with your help. The sea
is raging; everything is in the sea. Well then, old sea
dogs What of fatherland? Our helm steers us toward
our children's land Out there, stormier than the sea,
storms our great longingly
214
29
"Why so hard?" the kitchen coal once said to the
diamond. "After all, are we not close kin?"
Why so soft? 0 my brothers, thus I ask you: are you
not after all my brothers?
Why so soft, so pliant and yielding? Why is there so
much denial, self-denial, in your hearts? So little destiny
in your eyes?
And if you do not want to be destinies and inexorable
ones, how can you triumph with me?
And if your hardness does not wish to flash and cut
and cut through, how can you one day create with me?
For creators are hard. And it must seem blessedness
to you to impress your hand on millennia as on wax,
Blessedness to write on the will of millennia as on
bronze-harder than bronze, nobler than bronze. Only
the noblest is altoge ther hard.
This new tablet, 0 my brothers, I place over you:
become hard!
30
0 thou my will Thou cessation of all need, my own
necessity Keep me from all small victories! Thou destination of my soul, which I call destiny! Thou in-mel
Over-mel Keep me and save me for a great destiny
And thy last greatness, my will, save up for thy last
feat that thou mayest be inexorable in thy victory. Alas,
who was not vanquished in his victory? Alas, whose
eye would not darken in this drunken twilight? Alas,
whose foot would not reel in victory and forget how to
stand?
That I may one day be ready and ripe in the great
noon: as ready and ripe as glowing bronze, clouds
pregnant with lightning, and swelling milk udders-
215
ready for myself and my most hidden will: a bow lusting for its arrow, an arrow lusting for its star-a star
ready and ripe in its noon, glowing, pierced, enraptured
by annihilating sun arrows-a sun itself and an inexorable solar will, ready to annihilate in victory
O will, cessation of all need, my own necessity Save
me for a great victory!
Thus spoke Zarathustra.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, ON OLD AND NEW TABLETS
,#NFDB
1000:A Dramatic Poem
The deck of an ancient ship. At the right of the stage is the mast,
with a large square sail hiding a great deal of the sky and sea
on that side. The tiller is at the left of the stage; it is a long oar
coming through an opening in the bulwark. The deck rises in a
series of steps hehind the tiller, and the stern of the ship curves
overhead. When the play opens there are four persons upon the
deck. Aibric stands by the tiller. Forgael sleeps upon the raised
portion of the deck towards the front of the stage. Two Sailors
are standing near to the mast, on which a harp is hanging.
First Sailor. Has he not led us into these waste seas
For long enough?
Second Sailor. Aye, long and long enough.
First Sailor. We have not come upon a shore or ship
These dozen weeks.
Second Sailor. And I had thought to make
A good round Sum upon this cruise, and turn
For I am getting on in lifeto something
That has less ups and downs than robbery.
First Sailor. I am so tired of being bachelor
I could give all my heart to that Red Moll
That had but the one eye.
Second Sailor. Can no bewitchment
Transform these rascal billows into women
That I may drown myself?
First Sailor. Better steer home,
Whether he will or no; and better still
To take him while he sleeps and carry him
And drop him from the gunnel.
Second Sailor. I dare not do it.
Weret not that there is magic in his harp,
I would be of your mind; but when he plays it
Strange creatures flutter up before ones eyes,
Or cry about ones ears.
First Sailor. Nothing to fear.
Second Sailor. Do you remember when we sank that
galley
At the full moon?
First Sailor. He played all through the night.
Second Sailor. Until the moon had set; and when I looked
Where the dead drifted, I could see a bird
Like a grey gull upon the breast of each.
While I was looking they rose hurriedly,
And after circling with strange cries awhile
Flew westward; and many a time since then
Ive heard a rustling overhead in the wind.
First Sailor. I saw them on that night as well as you.
But when I had eaten and drunk myself asleep
My courage came again.
Second Sailor. But thats not all.
The other night, while he was playing it,
A beautiful young man and girl came up
In a white breaking wave; they had the look
Of those that are alive for ever and ever.
First Sailor. I saw them, too, one night. Forgael was
playing,
And they were listening ther& beyond the sail.
He could not see them, but I held out my hands
To grasp the woman.
Second Sailor. You have dared to touch her?
First Sailor. O she was but a shadow, and slipped from
me.
Second Sailor. But were you not afraid?
First Sailor. Why should I fear?
Second Sailor. Twas Aengus and Edain, the wandering
lovers,
To whom all lovers pray.
First Sailor. But what of that?
A shadow does not carry sword or spear.
Second Sailor. My mother told me that there is not one
Of the Ever-living half so dangerous
As that wild Aengus. Long before her day
He carried Edain off from a kings house,
And hid her among fruits of jewel-stone
And in a tower of glass, and from that day
Has hated every man thats not in love,
And has been dangerous to him.
First Sailor. I have heard
He does not hate seafarers as he hates
Peaceable men that shut the wind away,
And keep to the one weary marriage-bed.
Second Sailor. I think that he has Forgael in his net,
And drags him through the sea,
First Sailor Well, net or none,
Id drown him while we have the chance to do it.
Second Sailor. Its certain Id sleep easier o nights
If he were dead; but who will be our captain,
Judge of the stars, and find a course for us?
First Sailor. Ive thought of that. We must have Aibric
with us,
For he can judge the stars as well as Forgael.
[Going towards Aibric.]
Become our captain, Aibric. I am resolved
To make an end of Forgael while he sleeps.
Theres not a man but will be glad of it
When it is over, nor one to grumble at us.
Aibric. You have taken pay and made your bargain for it.
First Sailor. What good is there in this hard way of
living,
Unless we drain more flagons in a year
And kiss more lips than lasting peaceable men
In their long lives? Will you be of our troop
And take the captains share of everything
And bring us into populous seas again?
Aibric. Be of your troop! Aibric be one of you
And Forgael in the other scale! kill Forgael,
And he my master from my childhood up!
If you will draw that sword out of its scabbard
Ill give my answer.
First Sailor. You have awakened him.
[To Second Sailor.]
Wed better go, for we have lost this chance.
[They go out.]
Forgael. Have the birds passed us? I could hear your
voice,
But there were others.
Aibric. I have seen nothing pass.
Forgael. Youre certain of it? I never wake from sleep
But that I am afraid they may have passed,
For theyre my only pilots. If I lost them
Straying too far into the north or south,
Id never come upon the happiness
That has been promised me. I have not seen them
These many days; and yet there must be many
Dying at every moment in the world,
And flying towards their peace.
Aibric. Put by these thoughts,
And listen to me for a while. The sailors
Are plotting for your death.
Forgael. Have I not given
More riches than they ever hoped to find?
And now they will not follow, while I seek
The only riches that have hit my fancy.
Aibric. What riches can you find in this waste sea
Where no ship sails, where nothing thats alive
Has ever come but those man-headed birds,
Knowing it for the worlds end?
Forgael. Where the world ends
The mind is made unchanging, for it finds
Miracle, ecstasy, the impossible hope,
The flagstone under all, the fire of fires,
The roots of the world.
Aibric. Shadows before now
Have driven travellers mad for their own sport.
Forgael. Do you, too, doubt me? Have you joined their
plot?
Aibric. No, no, do not say that. You know right well
That I will never lift a hand against you.
Forgael. Why should you be more faithful than the rest,
Being as doubtful?
Aibric. I have called you master
Too many years to lift a hand against you.
Forgael. Maybe it is but natural to doubt me.
Youve never known, Id lay a wager on it,
A melancholy that a cup of wine,
A lucky battle, or a womans kiss
Could not amend.
Aibric. I have good spirits enough.
Forgael. If you will give me all your mind awhile
All, all, the very bottom of the bowl
Ill show you that I am made differently,
That nothing can amend it but these waters,
Where I am rid of lifethe events of the world
What do you call it?that old promise-breaker,
The cozening fortune-teller that comes whispering,
You will have all you have wished for when you have
earned
Land for your children or money in a pot.-
And when we have it we are no happier,
Because of that old draught under the door,
Or creaky shoes. And at the end of all
How are we better off than Seaghan the fool,
That never did a hands turn? Aibric! Aibric!
We have fallen in the dreams the Ever-living
Breathe on the burnished mirror of the world
And then smooth out with ivory hands and sigh,
And find their laughter sweeter to the taste
For that brief sighing.
Aibric. If you had loved some woman
Forgael. You say that also? You have heard the voices,
For that is what they sayall, all the shadows
Aengus and Edain, those passionate wanderers,
And all the others; but it must be love
As they have known it. Now the secrets out;
For it is love that I am seeking for,
But of a beautiful, unheard-of kind
That is not in the world.
Aibric. And yet the world
Has beautiful women to please every man.
Forgael. But he that gets their love after the fashion
Loves in brief longing and deceiving hope
And bodily tenderness, and finds that even
The bed of love, that in the imagination
Had seemed to be the giver of all peace,
Is no more than a wine-cup in the tasting,
And as soon finished.
Aibric. All that ever loved
Have loved that waythere is no other way.
Forgael. Yet never have two lovers kissed but they
believed there was some other near at hand,
And almost wept because they could not find it.
Aibric. When they have twenty years; in middle life
They take a kiss for what a kiss is worth,
And let the dream go by.
Forgael. Its not a dream,
But the reality that makes our passion
As a lamp shadownono lamp, the sun.
What the worlds million lips are thirsting for
Must be substantial somewhere.
Aibric. I have heard the Druids
Mutter such things as they awake from trance.
It may be that the Ever-living know it
No mortal can.
Forgael. Yes; if they give us help.
Aibric. They are besotting you as they besot
The crazy herdsman that will tell his fellows
That he has been all night upon the hills,
Riding to hurley, or in the battle-host
With the Ever-living.
Forgael. What if he speak the truth,
And for a dozen hours have been a part
Of that more powerful life?
Aibric, His wife knows better.
Has she not seen him lying like a log,
Or fumbling in a dream about the house?
And if she hear him mutter of wild riders,
She knows that it was but the cart-horse coughing
That set him to the fancy.
Forgael. All would be well
Could we but give us wholly to the dreams,
And get into their world that to the sense
Is shadow, and not linger wretchedly
Among substantial things; for it is dreams
That lift us to the flowing, changing world
That the heart longs for. What is love itself,
Even though it be the lightest of light love,
But dreams that hurry from beyond the world
To make low laughter more than meat and drink,
Though it but set us sighing? Fellow-wanderer,
Could we but mix ourselves into a dream,
Not in its image on the mirror!
Aibric. While
Were in the body thats impossible.
Forgael. And yet I cannot think theyre leading me
To death; for they that promised to me love
As those that can outlive the moon have known it,
Had the worlds total life gathered up, it seemed,
Into their shining limbsIve had great teachers.
Aengus and Edain ran up out of the wave
Youd never doubt that it was life they promised
Had you looked on them face to face as I did,
With so red lips, and running on such feet,
And having such wide-open, shining eyes.
Aibric. Its certain they are leading you to death.
None but the dead, or those that never lived,
Can know that ecstasy. Forgael! Forgael!
They have made you follow the man-headed birds,
And you have told me that their journey lies
Towards the country of the dead.
Forgael. What matter
If I am going to my death?for there,
Or somewhere, I shall find the love they have
promised.
That much is certain. I shall find a woman.
One of the Ever-living, as I think
One of the Laughing Peopleand she and I
Shall light upon a place in the worlds core,
Where passion grows to be a changeless thing,
Like charmed apples made of chrysoprase,
Or chrysoberyl, or beryl, or chrysclite;
And there, in juggleries of sight and sense,
Become one movement, energy, delight,
Until the overburthened moon is dead.
[A number of Sailors entcr hurriedly.]
First Sailor. Look there! there in the mist! a ship of spice!
And we are almost on her!
Second Sailor. We had not known
But for the ambergris and sandalwood.
First Sailor. NO; but opoponax and cinnamon.
Forgael [taking the tiller from Aibric]. The Ever-living have
kept my bargain for me,
And paid you on the nail.
Aibric. Take up that rope
To make her fast while we are plundering her.
First Sailor. There is a king and queen upon her deck,
And where there is one woman therell be others.
Aibric. Speak lower, or theyll hear.
First Sailor. They cannot hear;
They are too busy with each other. Look!
He has stooped down and kissed her on the lips.
Second Sailor. When she finds out we have better men
aboard
She may not be too sorry in the end.
First Sailor. She will be like a wild cat; for these queens
Care more about the kegs of silver and gold
And the high fame that come to them in marriage,
Than a strong body and a ready hand.
Second Sailor. Theres nobody is natural but a robber,
And that is why the world totters about
Upon its bandy legs.
Aibric. Run at them now,
And overpower the crew while yet asleep!
[The Sailors go out.]
[Voices and thc clashing of swords are heard from the
other ship, which cannot be seen because of the sail.]
A Voice. Armed men have come upon us! O I am slain!
Another Voice. Wake all below!
Another Voice. Why have you broken our sleep?
First Voice. Armed men have come upon us! O I am
slain!
Forgael [who has remained at the tiller]. There! there they
come! Gull, gannet, or diver,
But with a mans head, or a fair womans,
They hover over the masthead awhile
To wait their Fiends; but when their friends have
come
Theyll fly upon that secret way of theirs.
Oneand onea couplefive together;
And I will hear them talking in a minute.
Yes, voices! but I do not catch the words.
Now I can hear. Theres one of them that says,
How light we are, now we are changed to birds!
Another answers, Maybe we shall find
Our hearts desire now that we are so light.
And then one asks another how he died,
And says, A sword-blade pierced me in my sleep.-
And now they all wheel suddenly and fly
To the other side, and higher in the air.
And now a laggard with a womans head
Comes crying, I have run upon the sword.
I have fled to my beloved in the air,
In the waste of the high air, that we may wander
Among the windy meadows of the dawn.
But why are they still waiting? why are they
Circling and circling over the masthead?
What power that is more mighty than desire
To hurry to their hidden happiness
Withholds them now? Have the Ever-living Ones
A meaning in that circling overhead?
But whats the meaning? [He cries out.] Why do you
linger there?
Why linger? Run to your desire,
Are you not happy winged bodies now?
[His voice sinks again.]
Being too busy in the air and the high air,
They cannot hear my voice; but whats the meaning?
[The Sailors have returned. Dectora is with them.]
Forgael [turning and seeing her]. Why are you standing
with your eyes upon me?
You are not the worlds core. O no, no, no!
That cannot be the meaning of the birds.
You are not its core. My teeth are in the world,
But have not bitten yet.
Dectora. I am a queen,
And ask for satisfaction upon these
Who have slain my husband and laid hands upon me.
[Breaking loose from the Sailors who are holding her.]
Let go my hands!
Forgael. Why do you cast a shadow?
Where do you come from? Who brought you to this
place?
They would not send me one that casts a shadow.
Dectora. Would that the storm that overthrew my ships,
And drowned the treasures of nine conquered nations,
And blew me hither to my lasting sorrow,
Had drowned me also. But, being yet alive,
I ask a fitting punishment for all
That raised their hands against him.
Forgael. There are some
That weigh and measure all in these waste seas
They that have all the wisdom thats in life,
And all that prophesying images
Made of dim gold rave out in secret tombs;
They have it that the plans of kings and queens
But laughter and tearslaughter, laughter, and tears;
That every man should carry his own soul
Upon his shoulders.
Dectora. Youve nothing but wild words,
And I would know if you will give me vengeance.
Forgael. When she finds out I will not let her go
When she knows that.
Dectora. What is it that you are muttering
That youll not let me go? I am a queen.
Forgael. Although you are more beautiful than any,
I almost long that it were possible;
But if I were to put you on that ship,
With sailors that were sworn to do your will,
And you had spread a sail for home, a wind
Would rise of a sudden, or a wave so huge
It had washed among the stars and put them out,
And beat the bulwark of your ship on mine,
Until you stood before me on the deck
As now.
Dectora. Does wandering in these desolate seas
And listening to the cry of wind and wave
Bring madness?
Forgael. Queen, I am not mad.
Dectora. Yet say
That unimaginable storms of wind and wave
Would rise against me.
Forgael. No, I am not mad
If it be not that hearing messages
From lasting watchers, that outlive the moon,
At the most quiet midnight is to be stricken.
Dectora. And did those watchers bid you take me
captive?
Forgael. Both you and I are taken in the net.
It was their hands that plucked the winds awake
And blew you hither; and their mouths have
promised
I shall have love in their immortal fashion;
And for this end they gave me my old harp
That is more mighty than the sun and moon,
Or than the shivering casting-net of the stars,
That none might take you from me.
Dectora [first trembling back from the mast where the harp is,
and then laughing]. For a moment
Your raving of a message and a harp
More mighty than the stars half troubled me,
But all thats raving. Who is there can compel
The daughter and the granddaughter of kings
To be his bedfellow?
Forgael. Until your lips
Have called me their beloved, Ill not kiss them.
Dectora. My husband and miy king died at my feet,
And yet you talk of love.
Forgael. The movement of time
Is shaken in these seas, and what one does
One moment has no might upon the moment
That follows after.
Dectora. I understand you now.
You have a Druid craft of wicked sound
Wrung from the cold women of the sea
A magic that can call a demon up,
Until my body give you kiss for kiss.
Forgael. Your soul shall give the kiss.
Dectora. I am not afraid,
While theres a rope to run into a noose
Or wave to drown. But I have done with words,
And I would have you look into my face
And know that it is fearless.
Forgael. Do what you will,
For neither I nor you can break a mesh
Of the great golden net that is about us.
Dectora. Theres nothing in the world thats worth a
fear.
[She passes Forgael and stands for a moment looking into
his face.]
I have good reason for that thought.
[She runs suddenly on to the raiscd part of the poop.]
And now
I can put fear away as a queen should.
[She mounts on to the hulwark and turns towards
Forgael.]
Fool, fool! Although you have looked into my face
You do not see my purpose. I shall have gone
Before a hand can touch me.
Forgael [folding his arms]. My hands are still;
The Ever-living hold us. Do what you will,
You cannot leap out of the golden net.
First Sailor. No need to drown, for, if you will pardon
us
And measure out a course and bring us home,
Well put this man to death.
Dectora. I promise it.
First Sailor. There is none to take his side.
Aibric. I am on his side,
Ill strike a blow for him to give him time
To cast his dreams away.
[Aibric goes in front of Forgael with drawn sword. For-
gael takes the harp.]
First Sailor. No otherll do it.
[The Sailors throw Aibric on one side. He falls and lies
upon the deck. They lift their swords to strike Forgael,
who is about to play the harp. The stage begins to
darken. The Sailors hesitate in fear.]
Second Sailor. He has put a sudden darkness over the
moon.
Dectora. Nine swords with handles of rhinoceros horn
To him that strikes him first!
First Sailor. I will strike him first.
[He goes close up to Forgael with his sword lifted.]
[Shrinking back.] He has caught the crescent moon out
of the sky,
And carries it between us.
Second Sailor. Holy fire
To burn us to the marrow if we strike.
Dectora. Ill give a golden galley full of fruit,
That has the heady flavour of new wine,
To him that wounds him to the death.
First Sailor. Ill do it.
For all his spells will vanish when he dies,
Having their life in him.
Second Sailor. Though it be the moon
That he is holding up between us there,
I will strike at him.
The Others. And I! And I! And I!
[Forgael plays the harp.]
First Sailor [falling into a dream suddenly. But you were
saying there is somebody
Upon that other ship we are to wake.
You did not know what brought him to his end,
But it was sudden.
Second Sailor. You are in the right;
I had forgotten that we must go wake him.
Dectora. He has flung a Druid spell upon the air,
And set you dreaming.
Second Sailor. How can we have a wake
When we have neither brown nor yellow ale?
First Sailor. I saw a flagon of brown ale aboard her.
Third Sailor. How can we raise the keen that do not
know
What name to call him by?
First Sailor. Come to his ship.
His name will come into our thoughts in a minute.
I know that he died a thousand years ago,
And has not yet been waked.
Second Sailor [beginning to keen]. Ohone! O! O! O!
The yew-bough has been broken into two,
And all the birds are scattered.
All the Sailors. O! O! O! O!
[They go out keening.]
Dectora. Protect me now, gods that my people swear by.
[Aibric has risen from the deck where he had fallen. He
has begun looking for his sword as if in a dream.]
Aibric. Where is my sword that fell out of my hand
When I first heard the news? Ah, there it is!
[He goes dreamily towards the sword, but Dectora runs at
it and takes it up before he can reach it.]
Aibric [sleepily]. Queen, give it me.
Dectora. No, I have need of it.
Aibric. Why do you need a sword? But you may keep it.
Now that hes dead I have no need of it,
For everything is gone.
A Sailor [calling from the other ship]. Come hither, Aibric,
And tell me who it is that we are waking.
Aibric [half to Dectora, half to himself]. What name had
that dead king? Arthur of Britain?
No, nonot Arthur. I remember now.
It was golden-armed Iollan, and he died
Broken-hearted, having lost his queen
Through wicked spells. That is not all the tale,
For he was killed. O! O! O! O! O! O!
For golden-armed Iollan has been killed.
[He goes out.]
[While he has been speaking, and through part of what
follows, one hears the wailing of the Sailors from the
other ship. Dectora stands with the sword lifted in
front of Forgael.]
Dectora. I will end all your magic on the instant.
[Her voice hecomes dreamy, and she lowers the sword
slowly, and finally lets it fall. She spreads out her hair.
She takes off her crown and lays it upon the deck.]
This sword is to lie beside him in the grave.
It was in all his battles. I will spread my hair,
And wring my hands, and wail him bitterly,
For I have heard that he was proud and laughing,
Blue-eyed, and a quick runner on bare feet,
And that he died a thousand years ago.
O; O! O! O!
[Forgael changes the tune.]
But no, that is not it.
They killed him at my feet. O! O! O! O!
For golden-armed Iollan that I loved-
But what is it that made me say I loved him?
It was that harper put it in my thoughts,
But it is true. Why did they run upon him,
And beat the golden helmet with their swords?
Forgael. Do you not know me, lady? I am he
That you are weeping for.
Dectora. No, for he is dead.
O! O! O! O! for golden-armed Iollan.
Forgael. It was so given out, but I will prove
That the grave-diggers in a dreamy frenzy
Have buried nothing but my golden arms.
Listen to that low-laughing string of the moon
And you will recollect my face and voice,
For you have listened to me playing it
These thousand years.
[He starts up, listening to the birds. The harp slips from
his hands, and remains leaning against the bulwarks
behind him.]
What are the birds at there?
Why are they all a-flutter of a sudden?
What are you calling out above the mast?
If railing and reproach and mockery
Because I have awakened her to love
By magic strings, Ill make this answer to it:
Being driven on by voices and by dreams
That were clear messages from the Ever-living,
I have done right. What could I but obey?
And yet you make a clamour of reproach.
Dcctora [laughing]. Why, its a wonder out of reckoning
That I should keen him from the full of the moon
To the horn, and he be hale and hearty.
Forgael. How have I wronged her now that she is merry?
But no, no, no! your cry is not against me.
You know the counsels of the Ever-living,
And all that tossing of your wings is joy,
And all that murmurings but a marriage-song;
But if it be reproach, I answer this:
There is not one among you that made love
by any other means. You call it passion,
Consideration, generosity;
But it was all deceit, and flattery
To win a woman in her own despite,
For love is war, and there is hatred in it;
And if you say that she came willingly
Dectora. Why do you turn away and hide your face,
That I would look upon for ever?
Forgael. My grief!
Dectora. Have I not loved you for a thousand years?
Forgael. I never have been golden-armed Iollan.
Vectora. I do not understand. I know your face
Better than my own hands.
Forgael. I have deceived you
Out of all reckoning.
Tectora. Is it not tme
That you were born a thousand years ago,
In islands where the children of Aengus wind
In happy dances under a windy moon,
And that youll bring me there?
Forgael. I have deceived you;
I have deceived you utterly.
Dectora. How can that be?
Is it that though your eyes are full of love
Some other woman has a claim on you,
And Ive but half!
Forgael. O no!
Dectora. And if there is,
If there be half a hundred more, what matter?
Ill never give another thought to it;
No, no, nor half a thought; but do not speak.
Women are hard and proud and stubborn-hearted,
Their heads being turned with praise and flattery;
And that is why their lovers are afraid
To tell them a plain story.
Forgael. Thats not the story;
But I have done so great a wrong against you,
There is no measure that it would not burst.
I will confess it all.
Dectora. What do I care,
Now that my body has begun to dream,
And you have grown to be a burning sod
In the imagination and intellect?
If something thats most fabulous were true
If you had taken me by magic spells,
And killed a lover or husband at my feet
I would not let you speak, for I would know
That it was yesterday and not to-day
I loved him; I would cover up my ears,
As I am doing now. [A pause.] Why do you weep?
Forgael. I weep because Ive nothing for your eyes
But desolate waters and a battered ship.
Dectora. O why do you not lift your eyes to mine?
Forgael. I weepI weep because bare nights above,
And not a roof of ivory and gold.
Dectora. I would grow jealous of the ivory roof,
And strike the golden pillars with my hands.
I would that there was nothing in the world
But my belovedthat night and day had perished,
And all that is and all that is to be,
All that is not the meeting of our lips.
Forgael. You turn away. Why do you turn away?
Am I to fear the waves, or is the moon
My enemy?
Dectora. I looked upon the moon,
Longing to knead and pull it into shape
That I might lay it on your head as a crown.
But now it is your thoughts that wander away,
For you are looking at the sea. Do you not know
How great a wrong it is to let ones thought
Wander a moment when one is in love?
[He has moved away. She follows him. He is looking out
over the sea, shading his eyes.]
Why are you looking at the sea?
Forgael. Look there!
Dectora. What is there but a troop of ash-grey birds
That fly into the west?
Forgael. But listen, listen!
Dectora. What is there but the crying of the birds?
Forgael. If youll but listen closely to that crying
Youll hear them calling out to one another
With human voices
Dectora. O, I can hear them now.
What are they? Unto what country do they fly?
Forgael. To unimaginable happiness.
They have been circling over our heads in the air,
But now that they have taken to the road
We have to follow, for they are our pilots;
And though theyre but the colour of grey ash,
Theyre crying out, could you but hear their words,
There is a country at the end of the world
Where no childs born but to outlive the moon.
[The Sailors comc in with Aibric. They are in great
excitement.]
First Sailor. The hold is full of treasure.
Second Sailor. Full to the hatches.
First Sailor. Treasure on treasure.
Third Sailor. Boxes of precious spice.
First Sailor. Ivory images with amethyst eyes.
Third Sailor. Dragons with eyes of ruby.
First Sailor. The whole ship
Flashes as if it were a net of herrings.
Third Sailor. Lets home; Id give some rubies to a
woman.
Second Sailor. Theres somebody Id give the amethyst
eyes to.
Aibric [silencing thcm with agesture]. We would return to
our own country, Forgael,
For we have found a treasure thats so great
Imagination cannot reckon it.
And having lit upon this woman there,
What more have you to look for on the seas?
Forgael. I cannotI am going on to the end.
As for this woman, I think she is coming with me.
Aibric. The Ever-living have made you mad; but no,
It was this woman in her womans vengeance
That drove you to it, and I fool enough
To fancy that shed bring you home again.
Twas you that egged him to it, for you know
That he is being driven to his death.
Dectora. That is not true, for he has promised me
An unimaginable happiness.
Aibric. And if that happiness be more than dreams,
More than the froth, the feather, the dust-whirl,
The crazy nothing that I think it is,
It shall be in the country of the dead,
If there be such a country.
Dectora. No, not there,
But in some island where the life of the world
Leaps upward, as if all the streams o the world
Had run into one fountain.
Aibric. Speak to him.
He knows that he is taking you to death;
Speakhe will not deny it.
Dectora. Is that true?
Forgael. I do not know for certain, but I know.
That I have the best of pilots.
Aibric. Shadows, illusions,
That the Shape-changers, the Ever-laughing Ones,
The Immortal Mockers have cast into his mind,
Or called before his eyes.
Dectora. O carry me
To some sure country, some familiar place.
Have we not everything that life can give
In having one another?
Forgael. How could I rest
If I refused the messengers and pilots
With all those sights and all that crying out?
Dectora. But I will cover up your eyes and ear?,
That you may never hear the cry of the birds,
Or look upon them.
Forgael. Were they but lowlier
Id do your will, but they are too hightoo high.
Dectora. Being too high, their heady prophecies
But harry us with hopes that come to nothing,
Because we are not proud, imperishable,
Alone and winged.
Forgael. Our love shall be like theirs
When we have put their changeless image on.
Dectora. I am a woman, I die at every breath.
Aibric. Let the birds scatter, for the tree is broken,
And theres no help in words. [To the Sailors.]
To the other ship,
And I will follow you and cut the rope
When I have said farewell to this man here,
For neither I nor any living man
Will look upon his face again.
[The Sailors go out.]
Forgael [to Dectora], Go with him,
For he will shelter you and bring you home.
Aibric [taking Forgaels hand]. Ill do it for his sake.
Dectora. No. Take this sword
And cut the rope, for I go on with Forgael.
Aibric [half falling into the keen]. The yew-bough has been
broken into two,
And all the birds are scatteredO! O! O!
Farewell! farewell! [He goes out.]
Dectora. The sword is in the rope
The ropes in twoit falls into the sea,
It whirls into the foam. O ancient worm,
Dragon that loved the world and held us to it,
You are broken, you are broken. The world drifts
away,
And I am left alone with my beloved,
Who cannot put me from his sight for ever.
We are alone for ever, and I laugh,
Forgael, because you cannot put me from you.
The mist has covered the heavens, and you and I
Shall be alone for ever. We twothis crown
I half remember. It has been in my dreams.
Bend lower, O king, that I may crown you with it.
O flower of the branch, 0 bird among the leaves,
O silver fish that my two hands have taken
Out of the running stream, O morning star
Trembling in the blue heavens like a white fawn
Upon the misty border of the wood,
Bend lower, that I may cover you with my hair,
For we will gaze upon this world no longer.
Forgael [gathering Dectoras hair about him]. Beloved, hav-
ing dragged the net about us,
And knitted mesh to mesh, we grow immortal;
And that old harp awakens of itself
To cry aloud to the grey birds, and dreams,
That have had dreams for father, live in us.
~ William Butler Yeats, The Shadowy Waters - The Shadowy Waters
,#NFDB
1001:First Sailor. Has he not led us into these waste seas
For long enough?
Second Sailor. Aye, long and long enough.
First Sailor. We have not come upon a shore or ship
These dozen weeks.
Second Sailor. And I had thought to make
A good round Sum upon this cruise, and turn -
For I am getting on in life - to something
That has less ups and downs than robbery.
First Sailor. I am so tired of being bachelor
I could give all my heart to that Red Moll
That had but the one eye.
Second Sailor. Can no bewitchment
Transform these rascal billows into women
That I may drown myself?
First Sailor. Better steer home,
Whether he will or no; and better still
To take him while he sleeps and carry him
And drop him from the gunnel.
Second Sailor. I dare not do it.
Were't not that there is magic in his harp,
I would be of your mind; but when he plays it
Strange creatures flutter up before one's eyes,
Or cry about one's ears.
First Sailor. Nothing to fear.
Second Sailor. Do you remember when we sank that
galley
At the full moon?
First Sailor. He played all through the night.
Second Sailor. Until the moon had set; and when I looked
Where the dead drifted, I could see a bird
Like a grey gull upon the breast of each.
While I was looking they rose hurriedly,
And after circling with strange cries awhile
Flew westward; and many a time since then
I've heard a rustling overhead in the wind.
First Sailor. I saw them on that night as well as you.
But when I had eaten and drunk myself asleep
My courage came again.
Second Sailor. But that's not all.
The other night, while he was playing it,
A beautiful young man and girl came up
In a white breaking wave; they had the look
Of those that are alive for ever and ever.
First Sailor. I saw them, too, one night. Forgael was
playing,
And they were listening there& beyond the sail.
He could not see them, but I held out my hands
To grasp the woman.
Second Sailor. You have dared to touch her?
First Sailor. O she was but a shadow, and slipped from
me.
Second Sailor. But were you not afraid?
First Sailor. Why should I fear?
Second Sailor. "Twas Aengus and Edain, the wandering
lovers,
To whom all lovers pray.
First Sailor. But what of that?
A shadow does not carry sword or spear.
Second Sailor. My mother told me that there is not one
Of the Ever-living half so dangerous
As that wild Aengus. Long before her day
He carried Edain off from a king's house,
And hid her among fruits of jewel-stone
And in a tower of glass, and from that day
Has hated every man that's not in love,
And has been dangerous to him.
First Sailor. I have heard
He does not hate seafarers as he hates
Peaceable men that shut the wind away,
And keep to the one weary marriage-bed.
Second Sailor. I think that he has Forgael in his net,
And drags him through the sea,
First Sailor Well, net or none,
I'd drown him while we have the chance to do it.
Second Sailor. It's certain I'd sleep easier o' nights
If he were dead; but who will be our captain,
Judge of the stars, and find a course for us?
First Sailor. I've thought of that. We must have Aibric
with us,
For he can judge the stars as well as Forgael.
[Going towards Aibric.]
Become our captain, Aibric. I am resolved
To make an end of Forgael while he sleeps.
There's not a man but will be glad of it
When it is over, nor one to grumble at us.
Aibric. You have taken pay and made your bargain for it.
First Sailor. What good is there in this hard way of
living,
Unless we drain more flagons in a year
And kiss more lips than lasting peaceable men
In their long lives? Will you be of our troop
And take the captain's share of everything
And bring us into populous seas again?
Aibric. Be of your troop! Aibric be one of you
And Forgael in the other scale! kill Forgael,
And he my master from my childhood up!
If you will draw that sword out of its scabbard
I'll give my answer.
First Sailor. You have awakened him.
[To Second Sailor.]
We'd better go, for we have lost this chance.
[They go out.]
Forgael. Have the birds passed us? I could hear your
voice,
But there were others.
Aibric. I have seen nothing pass.
Forgael. You're certain of it? I never wake from sleep
But that I am afraid they may have passed,
For they're my only pilots. If I lost them
Straying too far into the north or south,
I'd never come upon the happiness
That has been promised me. I have not seen them
These many days; and yet there must be many
Dying at every moment in the world,
And flying towards their peace.
Aibric. Put by these thoughts,
And listen to me for a while. The sailors
Are plotting for your death.
Forgael. Have I not given
More riches than they ever hoped to find?
And now they will not follow, while I seek
The only riches that have hit my fancy.
Aibric. What riches can you find in this waste sea
Where no ship sails, where nothing that's alive
Has ever come but those man-headed birds,
Knowing it for the world's end?
Forgael. Where the world ends
The mind is made unchanging, for it finds
Miracle, ecstasy, the impossible hope,
The flagstone under all, the fire of fires,
The roots of the world.
Aibric. Shadows before now
Have driven travellers mad for their own sport.
Forgael. Do you, too, doubt me? Have you joined their
plot?
Aibric. No, no, do not say that. You know right well
That I will never lift a hand against you.
Forgael. Why should you be more faithful than the rest,
Being as doubtful?
Aibric. I have called you master
Too many years to lift a hand against you.
Forgael. Maybe it is but natural to doubt me.
You've never known, I'd lay a wager on it,
A melancholy that a cup of wine,
A lucky battle, or a woman's kiss
Could not amend.
Aibric. I have good spirits enough.
Forgael. If you will give me all your mind awhile -
All, all, the very bottom of the bowl -
I'll show you that I am made differently,
That nothing can amend it but these waters,
Where I am rid of life - the events of the world -
What do you call it? - that old promise-breaker,
The cozening fortune-teller that comes whispering,
"You will have all you have wished for when you have
earned
Land for your children or money in a pot.-
And when we have it we are no happier,
Because of that old draught under the door,
Or creaky shoes. And at the end of all
How are we better off than Seaghan the fool,
That never did a hand's turn? Aibric! Aibric!
We have fallen in the dreams the Ever-living
Breathe on the burnished mirror of the world
And then smooth out with ivory hands and sigh,
And find their laughter sweeter to the taste
For that brief sighing.
Aibric. If you had loved some woman -
Forgael. You say that also? You have heard the voices,
For that is what they say - all, all the shadows -
Aengus and Edain, those passionate wanderers,
And all the others; but it must be love
As they have known it. Now the secret's out;
For it is love that I am seeking for,
But of a beautiful, unheard-of kind
That is not in the world.
Aibric. And yet the world
Has beautiful women to please every man.
Forgael. But he that gets their love after the fashion
"Loves in brief longing and deceiving hope
And bodily tenderness, and finds that even
The bed of love, that in the imagination
Had seemed to be the giver of all peace,
Is no more than a wine-cup in the tasting,
And as soon finished.
Aibric. All that ever loved
Have loved that way - there is no other way.
Forgael. Yet never have two lovers kissed but they
believed there was some other near at hand,
And almost wept because they could not find it.
Aibric. When they have twenty years; in middle life
They take a kiss for what a kiss is worth,
And let the dream go by.
Forgael. It's not a dream,
But the reality that makes our passion
As a lamp shadow - no - no lamp, the sun.
What the world's million lips are thirsting for
Must be substantial somewhere.
Aibric. I have heard the Druids
Mutter such things as they awake from trance.
It may be that the Ever-living know it -
No mortal can.
Forgael. Yes; if they give us help.
Aibric. They are besotting you as they besot
The crazy herdsman that will tell his fellows
That he has been all night upon the hills,
Riding to hurley, or in the battle-host
With the Ever-living.
Forgael. What if he speak the truth,
And for a dozen hours have been a part
Of that more powerful life?
Aibric, His wife knows better.
Has she not seen him lying like a log,
Or fumbling in a dream about the house?
And if she hear him mutter of wild riders,
She knows that it was but the cart-horse coughing
That set him to the fancy.
Forgael. All would be well
Could we but give us wholly to the dreams,
And get into their world that to the sense
Is shadow, and not linger wretchedly
Among substantial things; for it is dreams
That lift us to the flowing, changing world
That the heart longs for. What is love itself,
Even though it be the lightest of light love,
But dreams that hurry from beyond the world
To make low laughter more than meat and drink,
Though it but set us sighing? Fellow-wanderer,
Could we but mix ourselves into a dream,
Not in its image on the mirror!
Aibric. While
We're in the body that's impossible.
Forgael. And yet I cannot think they're leading me
To death; for they that promised to me love
As those that can outlive the moon have known it, '
Had the world's total life gathered up, it seemed,
Into their shining limbs - I've had great teachers.
Aengus and Edain ran up out of the wave -
You'd never doubt that it was life they promised
Had you looked on them face to face as I did,
With so red lips, and running on such feet,
And having such wide-open, shining eyes.
Aibric. It's certain they are leading you to death.
None but the dead, or those that never lived,
Can know that ecstasy. Forgael! Forgael!
They have made you follow the man-headed birds,
And you have told me that their journey lies
Towards the country of the dead.
Forgael. What matter
If I am going to my death? - for there,
Or somewhere, I shall find the love they have
promised.
That much is certain. I shall find a woman.
One of the Ever-living, as I think -
One of the Laughing People - and she and I
Shall light upon a place in the world's core,
Where passion grows to be a changeless thing,
Like charmed apples made of chrysoprase,
Or chrysoberyl, or beryl, or chrysclite;
And there, in juggleries of sight and sense,
Become one movement, energy, delight,
Until the overburthened moon is dead.
[A number of Sailors enter hurriedly.]
First Sailor. Look there! there in the mist! a ship of spice!
And we are almost on her!
Second Sailor. We had not known
But for the ambergris and sandalwood.
First Sailor. NO; but opoponax and cinnamon.
Forgael [taking the tiller from Aibric]. The Ever-living have
kept my bargain for me,
And paid you on the nail.
Aibric Take up that rope
To make her fast while we are plundering her.
First Sailor. There is a king and queen upon her deck,
And where there is one woman there'll be others.
Aibric. Speak lower, or they'll hear.
First Sailor. They cannot hear;
They are too busy with each other. Look!
He has stooped down and kissed her on the lips.
Second Sailor. When she finds out we have better men
aboard
She may not be too sorry in the end.
First Sailor. She will be like a wild cat; for these queens
Care more about the kegs of silver and gold
And the high fame that come to them in marriage,
Than a strong body and a ready hand.
Second Sailor. There's nobody is natural but a robber,
And that is why the world totters about
Upon its bandy legs.
Aibric. Run at them now,
And overpower the crew while yet asleep!
[The Sailors go out.]
[Voices and the clashing of swords are heard from the
other ship, which cannot be seen because of the sail.]
A Voice. Armed men have come upon us! O I am slain!
Another Voice. Wake all below!
Another Voice. Why have you broken our sleep?
First Voice. Armed men have come upon us! O I am
slain!
Forgael [who has remained at the tiller]. There! there they
come! Gull, gannet, or diver,
But with a man's head, or a fair woman's,
They hover over the masthead awhile
To wait their Fiends; but when their friends have
come
They'll fly upon that secret way of theirs.
One - and one - a couple - five together;
And I will hear them talking in a minute.
Yes, voices! but I do not catch the words.
Now I can hear. There's one of them that says,
"How light we are, now we are changed to birds!'
Another answers, "Maybe we shall find
Our heart's desire now that we are so light.'
And then one asks another how he died,
And says, "A sword-blade pierced me in my sleep.-
And now they all wheel suddenly and fly
To the other side, and higher in the air.
And now a laggard with a woman's head
Comes crying, "I have run upon the sword.
I have fled to my beloved in the air,
In the waste of the high air, that we may wander
Among the windy meadows of the dawn.'
But why are they still waiting? why are they
Circling and circling over the masthead?
What power that is more mighty than desire
To hurry to their hidden happiness
Withholds them now? Have the Ever-living Ones
A meaning in that circling overhead?
But what's the meaning? [He cries out.] Why do you
linger there?
Why linger? Run to your desire,
Are you not happy winged bodies now?
[His voice sinks again.]
Being too busy in the air and the high air,
They cannot hear my voice; but what's the meaning?
[The Sailors have returned. Dectora is with them.]
Forgael [turning and seeing her]. Why are you standing
with your eyes upon me?
You are not the world's core. O no, no, no!
That cannot be the meaning of the birds.
You are not its core. My teeth are in the world,
But have not bitten yet.
Dectora. I am a queen,
And ask for satisfaction upon these
Who have slain my husband and laid hands upon me.
[Breaking loose from the Sailors who are holding her.]
Let go my hands!
Forgael. Why do you cast a shadow?
Where do you come from? Who brought you to this
place?
They would not send me one that casts a shadow.
Dectora. Would that the storm that overthrew my ships,
And drowned the treasures of nine conquered nations,
And blew me hither to my lasting sorrow,
Had drowned me also. But, being yet alive,
I ask a fitting punishment for all
That raised their hands against him.
Forgael. There are some
That weigh and measure all in these waste seas -
They that have all the wisdom that's in life,
And all that prophesying images
Made of dim gold rave out in secret tombs;
They have it that the plans of kings and queens
But laughter and tears - laughter, laughter, and tears;
That every man should carry his own soul
Upon his shoulders.
Dectora. You've nothing but wild words,
And I would know if you will give me vengeance.
Forgael. When she finds out I will not let her go -
When she knows that.
Dectora. What is it that you are muttering -
That you'll not let me go? I am a queen.
Forgael. Although you are more beautiful than any,
I almost long that it were possible;
But if I were to put you on that ship,
With sailors that were sworn to do your will,
And you had spread a sail for home, a wind
Would rise of a sudden, or a wave so huge
It had washed among the stars and put them out,
And beat the bulwark of your ship on mine,
Until you stood before me on the deck -
As now.
Dectora. Does wandering in these desolate seas
And listening to the cry of wind and wave
Bring madness?
Forgael. Queen, I am not mad.
Dectora. Yet say
That unimaginable storms of wind and wave
Would rise against me.
Forgael. No, I am not mad -
If it be not that hearing messages
From lasting watchers, that outlive the moon,
At the most quiet midnight is to be stricken.
Dectora. And did those watchers bid you take me
captive?
Forgael. Both you and I are taken in the net.
It was their hands that plucked the winds awake
And blew you hither; and their mouths have
promised
I shall have love in their immortal fashion;
And for this end they gave me my old harp
That is more mighty than the sun and moon,
Or than the shivering casting-net of the stars,
That none might take you from me.
Dectora [first trembling back from the mast where the harp is,
and then laughing]. For a moment
Your raving of a message and a harp
More mighty than the stars half troubled me,
But all that's raving. Who is there can compel
The daughter and the granddaughter of kings
To be his bedfellow?
Forgael. Until your lips
Have called me their beloved, I'll not kiss them.
Dectora. My husband and my king died at my feet,
And yet you talk of love.
Forgael. The movement of time
Is shaken in these seas, and what one does
One moment has no might upon the moment
That follows after.
Dectora. I understand you now.
You have a Druid craft of wicked sound
Wrung from the cold women of the sea -
A magic that can call a demon up,
Until my body give you kiss for kiss.
Forgael. Your soul shall give the kiss.
Dectora. I am not afraid,
While there's a rope to run into a noose
Or wave to drown. But I have done with words,
And I would have you look into my face
And know that it is fearless.
Forgael. Do what you will,
For neither I nor you can break a mesh
Of the great golden net that is about us.
Dectora. There's nothing in the world that's worth a
fear.
[She passes Forgael and stands for a moment looking into
his face.]
I have good reason for that thought.
[She runs suddenly on to the raised part of the poop.]
And now
I can put fear away as a queen should.
[She mounts on to the hulwark and turns towards
Forgael.]
Fool, fool! Although you have looked into my face
You do not see my purpose. I shall have gone
Before a hand can touch me.
Forgael [folding his arms]. My hands are still;
The Ever-living hold us. Do what you will,
You cannot leap out of the golden net.
First Sailor. No need to drown, for, if you will pardon
us
And measure out a course and bring us home,
We'll put this man to death.
Dectora. I promise it.
First Sailor. There is none to take his side.
Aibric. I am on his side,
I'll strike a blow for him to give him time
To cast his dreams away.
[Aibric goes in front of Forgael with drawn sword. For-
gael takes the harp.]
First Sailor. No other'll do it.
[The Sailors throw Aibric on one side. He falls and lies
upon the deck. They lift their swords to strike Forgael,
who is about to play the harp. The stage begins to
darken. The Sailors hesitate in fear.]
Second Sailor. He has put a sudden darkness over the
moon.
Dectora. Nine swords with handles of rhinoceros horn
To him that strikes him first!
First Sailor. I will strike him first.
[He goes close up to Forgael with his sword lifted.]
[Shrinking back.] He has caught the crescent moon out
of the sky,
And carries it between us.
Second Sailor. Holy fire
To burn us to the marrow if we strike.
Dectora. I'll give a golden galley full of fruit,
That has the heady flavour of new wine,
To him that wounds him to the death.
First Sailor. I'll do it.
For all his spells will vanish when he dies,
Having their life in him.
Second Sailor. Though it be the moon
That he is holding up between us there,
I will strike at him.
The Others. And I! And I! And I!
[Forgael plays the harp.]
First Sailor [falling into a dream suddenly. But you were
saying there is somebody
Upon that other ship we are to wake.
You did not know what brought him to his end,
But it was sudden.
Second Sailor. You are in the right;
I had forgotten that we must go wake him.
Dectora. He has flung a Druid spell upon the air,
And set you dreaming.
Second Sailor. How can we have a wake
When we have neither brown nor yellow ale?
First Sailor. I saw a flagon of brown ale aboard her.
Third Sailor. How can we raise the keen that do not
know
What name to call him by?
First Sailor. Come to his ship.
His name will come into our thoughts in a minute.
I know that he died a thousand years ago,
And has not yet been waked.
Second Sailor[beginning to keen]. Ohone! O! O! O!
The yew-bough has been broken into two,
And all the birds are scattered.
All the Sailors. O! O! O! O!
[They go out keening.]
Dectora. Protect me now, gods that my people swear by.
[Aibric has risen from the deck where he had fallen. He
has begun looking for his sword as if in a dream.]
Aibric. Where is my sword that fell out of my hand
When I first heard the news? Ah, there it is!
[He goes dreamily towards the sword, but Dectora runs at
it and takes it up before he can reach it.]
Aibric [sleepily]. Queen, give it me.
Dectora. No, I have need of it.
Aibric. Why do you need a sword? But you may keep it.
Now that he's dead I have no need of it,
For everything is gone.
A Sailor [calling from the other ship]. Come hither, Aibric,
And tell me who it is that we are waking.
Aibric [half to Dectora, half to himself]. What name had
that dead king? Arthur of Britain?
No, no - not Arthur. I remember now.
It was golden-armed Iollan, and he died
Broken-hearted, having lost his queen
Through wicked spells. That is not all the tale,
For he was killed. O! O! O! O! O! O!
For golden-armed Iollan has been killed.
[He goes out.]
[While he has been speaking, and through part of what
follows, one hears the wailing of the Sailors from the
other ship. Dectora stands with the sword lifted in
front of Forgael.]
Dectora. I will end all your magic on the instant.
[Her voice becomes dreamy, and she lowers the sword
slowly, and finally lets it fall. She spreads out her hair.
She takes off her crown and lays it upon the deck.]
This sword is to lie beside him in the grave.
It was in all his battles. I will spread my hair,
And wring my hands, and wail him bitterly,
For I have heard that he was proud and laughing,
Blue-eyed, and a quick runner on bare feet,
And that he died a thousand years ago.
O; O! O! O!
[Forgael changes the tune.]
But no, that is not it.
They killed him at my feet. O! O! O! O!
For golden-armed Iollan that I loved-
But what is it that made me say I loved him?
It was that harper put it in my thoughts,
But it is true. Why did they run upon him,
And beat the golden helmet with their swords?
Forgael. Do you not know me, lady? I am he
That you are weeping for.
Dectora. No, for he is dead.
O! O! O! O! for golden-armed Iollan.
Forgael. It was so given out, but I will prove
That the grave-diggers in a dreamy frenzy
Have buried nothing but my golden arms.
Listen to that low-laughing string of the moon
And you will recollect my face and voice,
For you have listened to me playing it
These thousand years.
[He starts up, listening to the birds. The harp slips from
his hands, and remains leaning against the bulwarks
behind him.]
What are the birds at there?
Why are they all a-flutter of a sudden?
What are you calling out above the mast?
If railing and reproach and mockery
Because I have awakened her to love
By magic strings, I'll make this answer to it:
Being driven on by voices and by dreams
That were clear messages from the Ever-living,
I have done right. What could I but obey?
And yet you make a clamour of reproach.
Dectora [laughing]. Why, it's a wonder out of reckoning
That I should keen him from the full of the moon
To the horn, and he be hale and hearty.
Forgael. How have I wronged her now that she is merry?
But no, no, no! your cry is not against me.
You know the counsels of the Ever-living,
And all that tossing of your wings is joy,
And all that murmuring's but a marriage-song;
But if it be reproach, I answer this:
There is not one among you that made love
by any other means. You call it passion,
Consideration, generosity;
But it was all deceit, and flattery
To win a woman in her own despite,
For love is war, and there is hatred in it;
And if you say that she came willingly -
Dectora. Why do you turn away and hide your face,
That I would look upon for ever?
Forgael. My grief!
Dectora. Have I not loved you for a thousand years?
Forgael. I never have been golden-armed Iollan.
Vectora. I do not understand. I know your face
Better than my own hands.
Forgael. I have deceived you
Out of all reckoning.
Tectora. Is it not time
That you were born a thousand years ago,
In islands where the children of Aengus wind
In happy dances under a windy moon,
And that you'll bring me there?
Forgael. I have deceived you;
I have deceived you utterly.
Dectora. How can that be?
Is it that though your eyes are full of love
Some other woman has a claim on you,
And I've but half!
Forgael. O no!
Dectora. And if there is,
If there be half a hundred more, what matter?
I'll never give another thought to it;
No, no, nor half a thought; but do not speak.
Women are hard and proud and stubborn-hearted,
Their heads being turned with praise and flattery;
And that is why their lovers are afraid
To tell them a plain story.
Forgael. That's not the story;
But I have done so great a wrong against you,
There is no measure that it would not burst.
I will confess it all.
Dectora. What do I care,
Now that my body has begun to dream,
And you have grown to be a burning sod
In the imagination and intellect?
If something that's most fabulous were true -
If you had taken me by magic spells,
And killed a lover or husband at my feet -
I would not let you speak, for I would know
That it was yesterday and not to-day
I loved him; I would cover up my ears,
As I am doing now. [A pause.] Why do you weep?
Forgael. I weep because I've nothing for your eyes
But desolate waters and a battered ship.
Dectora. O why do you not lift your eyes to mine?
Forgael. I weep - I weep because bare night's above,
And not a roof of ivory and gold.
Dectora. I would grow jealous of the ivory roof,
And strike the golden pillars with my hands.
I would that there was nothing in the world
But my beloved - that night and day had perished,
And all that is and all that is to be,
All that is not the meeting of our lips.
Forgael. You turn away. Why do you turn away?
Am I to fear the waves, or is the moon
My enemy?
Dectora. I looked upon the moon,
Longing to knead and pull it into shape
That I might lay it on your head as a crown.
But now it is your thoughts that wander away,
For you are looking at the sea. Do you not know
How great a wrong it is to let one's thought
Wander a moment when one is in love?
[He has moved away. She follows him. He is looking out
over the sea, shading his eyes.]
Why are you looking at the sea?
Forgael. Look there!
Dectora. What is there but a troop of ash-grey birds
That fly into the west?
Forgael. But listen, listen!
Dectora. What is there but the crying of the birds?
Forgael. If you'll but listen closely to that crying
You'll hear them calling out to one another
With human voices
Dectora. O, I can hear them now.
What are they? Unto what country do they fly?
Forgael. To unimaginable happiness.
They have been circling over our heads in the air,
But now that they have taken to the road
We have to follow, for they are our pilots;
And though they're but the colour of grey ash,
They're crying out, could you but hear their words,
"There is a country at the end of the world
Where no child's born but to outlive the moon.'
[The Sailors come in with Aibric. They are in great
excitement.]
First Sailor. The hold is full of treasure.
Second Sailor. Full to the hatches.
First Sailor. Treasure on treasure.
Third Sailor. Boxes of precious spice.
First Sailor. Ivory images with amethyst eyes.
Third Sailor. Dragons with eyes of ruby.
First Sailor. The whole ship
Flashes as if it were a net of herrings.
Third Sailor. Let's home; I'd give some rubies to a
woman.
Second Sailor. There's somebody I'd give the amethyst
eyes to.
Aibric [silencing them with agesture]. We would return to
our own country, Forgael,
For we have found a treasure that's so great
Imagination cannot reckon it.
And having lit upon this woman there,
What more have you to look for on the seas?
Forgael. I cannot - I am going on to the end.
As for this woman, I think she is coming with me.
Aibric. The Ever-living have made you mad; but no,
It was this woman in her woman's vengeance
That drove you to it, and I fool enough
To fancy that she'd bring you home again.
'Twas you that egged him to it, for you know
That he is being driven to his death.
Dectora. That is not true, for he has promised me
An unimaginable happiness.
Aibric. And if that happiness be more than dreams,
More than the froth, the feather, the dust-whirl,
The crazy nothing that I think it is,
It shall be in the country of the dead,
If there be such a country.
Dectora. No, not there,
But in some island where the life of the world
Leaps upward, as if all the streams o' the world
Had run into one fountain.
Aibric. Speak to him.
He knows that he is taking you to death;
Speak - he will not deny it.
Dectora. Is that true?
Forgael. I do not know for certain, but I know.
That I have the best of pilots.
Aibric. Shadows, illusions,
That the Shape-changers, the Ever-laughing Ones,
The Immortal Mockers have cast into his mind,
Or called before his eyes.
Dectora. O carry me
To some sure country, some familia'r place.
Have we not everything that life can give
In having one another?
Forgael. How could I rest
If I refused the messengers and pilots
With all those sights and all that crying out?
Dectora. But I will cover up your eyes and ear?,
That you may never hear the cry of the birds,
Or look upon them.
Forgael. Were they but lowlier
I'd do your will, but they are too high - too high.
Dectora. Being too high, their heady prophecies
But harry us with hopes that come to nothing,
Because we are not proud, imperishable,
Alone and winged.
Forgael. Our love shall be like theirs
When we have put their changeless image on.
Dectora. I am a woman, I die at every breath.
Aibric. Let the birds scatter, for the tree is broken,
And there's no help in words. [To the Sailors.]
To the other ship,
And I will follow you and cut the rope
When I have said farewell to this man here,
For neither I nor any living man
Will look upon his face again.
[The Sailors go out.]
Forgael [to Dectora], Go with him,
For he will shelter you and bring you home.
Aibric [taking Forgael's hand]. I'll do it for his sake.
Dectora. No. Take this sword
And cut the rope, for I go on with Forgael.
Aibric [half falling into the keen]. The yew-bough has been
broken into two,
And all the birds are scattered - O! O! O!
Farewell! farewell! [He goes out.]
Dectora. The sword is in the rope -
The rope's in two - it falls into the sea,
It whirls into the foam. O ancient worm,
Dragon that loved the world and held us to it,
You are broken, you are broken. The world drifts
away,
And I am left alone with my beloved,
Who cannot put me from his sight for ever.
We are alone for ever, and I laugh,
Forgael, because you cannot put me from you.
The mist has covered the heavens, and you and I
Shall be alone for ever. We two - this crown -
I half remember. It has been in my dreams.
Bend lower, O king, that I may crown you with it.
O flower of the branch, 0 bird among the leaves,
O silver fish that my two hands have taken
Out of the running stream, O morning star
Trembling in the blue heavens like a white fawn
Upon the misty border of the wood,
Bend lower, that I may cover you with my hair,
For we will gaze upon this world no longer.
Forgael [gathering Dectora's hair about him]. Beloved, hav-
ing dragged the net about us,
And knitted mesh to mesh, we grow immortal;
And that old harp awakens of itself
To cry aloud to the grey birds, and dreams,
That have had dreams for father, live in us.
The deck of an ancient ship. At the right of the stage is the mast,
with a large square sail hiding a great deal of the sky and sea
on that side. The tiller is at the left of the stage; it is a long oar
coming through an opening in the bulwark. The deck rises in a
series of steps behind the tiller, and the stern of the ship curves
overhead. When the play opens there are four persons upon the
deck. Aibric stands by the tiller. Forgael sleeps upon the raised
portion of the deck towards the front of the stage. Two Sailors
are standing near to the mast, on which a harp is hanging.
~ William Butler Yeats, A Dramatic Poem
,#NFDB
1569 Integral Yoga
112 Philosophy
77 Poetry
67 Christianity
18 Occultism
9 Psychology
6 Mythology
4 Mysticism
4 Cybernetics
4 Buddhism
2 Yoga
1 Thelema
1 Science
1 Philsophy
1 Fiction
903 The Mother
903 Satprem
662 Nolini Kanta Gupta
66 Plotinus
45 Friedrich Nietzsche
13 Aleister Crowley
11 Li Bai
8 William Wordsworth
6 Joseph Campbell
6 Carl Jung
5 Sri Aurobindo
4 Sri Ramana Maharshi
4 Norbert Wiener
3 Sri Ramakrishna
3 Friedrich Schiller
3 Bokar Rinpoche
2 William Butler Yeats
2 Rabindranath Tagore
2 George Van Vrekhem
2 Anonymous
184 Agenda Vol 01
125 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03
119 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04
104 Agenda Vol 08
102 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02
98 Agenda Vol 09
91 Agenda Vol 06
89 Agenda Vol 03
87 Agenda Vol 07
86 Agenda Vol 04
83 Agenda Vol 05
81 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01
80 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 05
79 Agenda Vol 02
65 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 07
45 Thus Spoke Zarathustra
45 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 06
44 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 08
21 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 04
21 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 01
12 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 03
12 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 02
11 Li Bai - Poems
9 Magick Without Tears
8 Wordsworth - Poems
6 The Secret Doctrine
6 The Hero with a Thousand Faces
4 Cybernetics
3 Tara - The Feminine Divine
3 Schiller - Poems
3 Liber ABA
3 Aion
3 A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah
2 Yeats - Poems
2 The Synthesis Of Yoga
2 The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna
2 The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
2 Tagore - Poems
2 Preparing for the Miraculous
2 Anonymous - Poems
2 Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 2E
00.00 - Publishers Note A, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
00.00 - Publishers Note B, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
00.00 - Publishers Note, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
00.01 - The Approach to Mysticism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
00.02 - Mystic Symbolism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
00.03 - Upanishadic Symbolism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
00.04 - The Beautiful in the Upanishads, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
00.05 - A Vedic Conception of the Poet, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
0.00 - Publishers Note C, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 05, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
0.00 - The Book of Lies Text, #The Book of Lies, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
This chapter, numbered 0, corresponds to the Negative,
which is before Kether in the Qabalistic system.
--
the Mother in the Tetragrammaton. See Chapter 0,
"God the Father and Mother is concealed in genera-
--
counts as 0.
(7) The legend of "Christ" is only a corruption and
--
The "fool" is the Fool of the Tarot, whose number is 0, but refers the the le
tter
--
Pyrrhonism and Agnosticism; O! = The system of Liber Legis. (See Chapter 0.)
Eye = Phallicism (cf. Chapters 61 and 7 0); I = Fichteanism; Hi! =
01.01 - A Yoga of the Art of Life, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
01.01 - Sri Aurobindo - The Age of Sri Aurobindo, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
01.01 - The New Humanity, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
01.02 - Natures Own Yoga, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
01.02 - Sri Aurobindo - Ahana and Other Poems, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
01.02 - The Creative Soul, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
01.03 - Mystic Poetry, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
01.03 - Rationalism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
01.03 - Sri Aurobindo and his School, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
01.04 - Sri Aurobindos Gita, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
01.04 - The Intuition of the Age, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
01.04 - The Poetry in the Making, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
01.05 - Rabindranath Tagore: A Great Poet, a Great Man, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
01.05 - The Nietzschean Antichrist, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
01.06 - On Communism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
01.06 - Vivekananda, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
01.07 - Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
01.07 - The Bases of Social Reconstruction, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
01.08 - A Theory of Yoga, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
01.08 - Walter Hilton: The Scale of Perfection, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
01.09 - The Parting of the Way, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
01.09 - William Blake: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
01.10 - Nicholas Berdyaev: God Made Human, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
01.10 - Principle and Personality, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
01.11 - Aldous Huxley: The Perennial Philosophy, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
01.11 - The Basis of Unity, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
01.12 - Goethe, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
01.12 - Three Degrees of Social Organisation, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
01.13 - T. S. Eliot: Four Quartets, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
01.14 - Nicholas Roerich, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
0 1951-09-21, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1952-08-02, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1954-08-25 - what is this personality? and when will she come?, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1955-03-26, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1955-04-04, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1955-06-09, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1955-09-03, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1955-09-15, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1955-10-19, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1956-02-29 - First Supramental Manifestation - The Golden Hammer, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1956-03-19, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1956-03-20, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1956-03-21, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1956-04-04, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1956-04-20, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1956-04-23, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1956-04-24, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1956-05-02, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1956-07-29, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1956-08-10, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1956-09-12, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1956-09-14, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1956-10-07, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1956-10-08, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1956-10-28, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1956-11-22, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1956-12-12, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1956-12-26, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1957-01-01, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1957-01-18, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1957-03-03, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1957-04-09, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1957-04-22, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1957-07-03, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1957-07-18, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1957-09-27, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1957-10-08, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1957-10-17, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1957-10-18, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1957-11-12, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1957-11-13, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1957-12-13, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1957-12-21, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1958-01-01, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1958-01-22, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1958-01-25, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1958-02-03a, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1958-02-03b - The Supramental Ship, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1958-02-15, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1958-02-25, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1958-03-07, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1958-04-03, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1958-05-01, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1958-05-10, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1958-05-11 - the ship that said OM, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1958-05-17, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1958-05-30, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1958-06-06 - Supramental Ship, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1958-06-22, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1958-07-02, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1958-07-05, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1958-07-06, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1958-07-19, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1958-07-21, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1958-07-23, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1958-07-25a, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1958-07-25b, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1958-08-07, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1958-08-08, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1958-08-09, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1958-08-12, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1958-08-29, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1958-08-30, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1958-09-16 - OM NAMO BHAGAVATEH, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1958-09-19, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1958-10-01, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1958-10-04, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1958-10-06, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1958-10-10, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1958-10-17, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1958-10-25 - to go out of your body, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1958-11-02, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1958-11-04 - Myths are True and Gods exist - mental formation and occult faculties - exteriorization - work in dreams, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1958-11-08, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1958-11-11, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1958-11-14, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1958-11-15, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1958-11-20, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1958-11-22, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1958-11-26, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1958-11-27 - Intermediaries and Immediacy, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1958-11-28, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1958-11-30, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1958-12-04, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1958-12-15 - tantric mantra - 125,000, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1958-12-24, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1958-12-28, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1958 12 - Floor 1, young girl, we shall kill the young princess - black tent, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1959-01-06, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1959-01-14, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1959-01-21, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1959-01-27, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1959-01-31, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1959-03-10 - vital dagger, vital mass, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1959-03-26 - Lord of Death, Lord of Falsehood, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1959-04-07, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1959-04-13, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1959-04-21, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1959-04-23, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1959-04-24, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1959-05-19 - Ascending and Descending paths, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1959-05-25, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1959-05-28, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1959-06-03, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1959-06-04, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1959-06-07, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1959-06-08, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1959-06-09, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1959-06-11, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1959-06-13a, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1959-06-13b, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1959-06-17, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1959-06-25, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1959-07-09, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1959-07-10, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1959-07-14, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1959-08-11, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1959-08-15, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1959-10-06 - Sri Aurobindos abode, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1959-10-15, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1959-11-25, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1960-01-28, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1960-01-31, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1960-03-03, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1960-03-07, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1960-04-07, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1960-04-13, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1960-04-14, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1960-04-20, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1960-04-24, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1960-04-26, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1960-05-06, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1960-05-16, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1960-05-21 - true purity - you have to be the Divine to overcome hostile forces, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1960-05-24 - supramental flood, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1960-05-28 - death of K - the death process- the subtle physical, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1960-06-03, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1960-06-04, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1960-06-07, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1960-06-11, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1960-06-Undated, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1960-07-12 - Mothers Vision - the Voice, the ashram a tiny part of myself, the Mothers Force, sparkling white light compressed - enormous formation of negative vibrations - light in evil, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1960-07-15, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1960-07-18 - triple time vision, Questions and Answers is like circling around the Garden, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1960-07-23 - The Flood and the race - turning back to guide and save amongst the torrents - sadhana vs tamas and destruction - power of giving and offering - Japa, 7 lakhs, 140000 per day, 1 crore takes 20 years, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1960-07-26 - Mothers vision - looking up words in the subconscient, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1960-08-10 - questions from center of Education - reading Sri Aurobindo, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1960-08-16, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1960-08-20, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1960-08-27, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1960-09-02, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1960-09-20, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1960-09-24, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1960-10-02a, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1960-10-02b, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1960-10-08, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1960-10-11, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1960-10-15, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1960-10-19, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1960-10-22, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1960-10-25, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1960-10-30, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1960-11-05, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1960-11-08, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1960-11-12, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1960-11-15, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1960-11-26, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1960-12-02, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1960-12-13, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1960-12-17, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1960-12-20, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1960-12-23, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1960-12-25, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1960-12-31, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
0 1961-01-07, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Even the translation. You know, when I am tired and work on the translation I feel rested. But, oh, all these letters! Even the best of them are stupid. Anyway. When I came here just now there was someone waiting to see me I told him to come at 11: 0 0, and by then there will be 7 0 0 people waiting for me to come out. They are already gathered around the Samadhi.3
Well, enough grumbling. Lets get to work.
0 1961-01-10, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-01-12, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-01-17, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-01-19, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-01-22, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-01-24, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-01-27, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-01-29, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-01-31, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-01-Undated, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-02-04, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-02-05, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-02-07, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-02-11, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-02-14, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-02-18, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-02-25, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-02-28, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-03-04, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-03-07, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-03-11, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-03-14, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-03-17, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-03-21, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-03-25, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-03-27, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-04-07, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-04-08, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-04-12, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-04-15, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-04-18, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-04-22, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-04-25, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-04-29, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-05-02, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-05-12, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-05-19, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-05-23, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-05-30, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-06-02, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-06-06, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-06-17, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-06-20, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-06-24, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-06-27, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-07-04, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-07-07, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-07-12, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-07-15, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-07-18, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-07-26, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-07-28, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-08-02, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-08-05, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-08-08, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-08-11, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-08-18, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-08-25, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-09-03, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-09-10, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-09-16, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-09-23, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-09-28, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-09-30, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-10-02, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-10-15, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-10-30, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-11-05, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-11-06, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-11-07, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-11-12, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-11-16a, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-11-16b, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-11-23, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
0 1961-12-16, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
--- Overview of noun 0
The noun 0 has 1 sense (first 1 from tagged texts)
1. (20) zero, 0, nought, cipher, cypher ::: (a mathematical element that when added to another number yields the same number)
--- Overview of adj 0
The adj 0 has 1 sense (first 1 from tagged texts)
1. (3) zero, 0 ::: (indicating the absence of any or all units under consideration; "a zero score")
--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun 0
1 sense of 0
Sense 1
zero, 0, nought, cipher, cypher
=> digit, figure
=> integer, whole number
=> number
=> definite quantity
=> measure, quantity, amount
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
--- Hyponyms of noun 0
--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun 0
1 sense of 0
Sense 1
zero, 0, nought, cipher, cypher
=> digit, figure
--- Similarity of adj 0
1 sense of 0
Sense 1
zero, 0
=> cardinal (vs. ordinal)
--- Antonyms of adj 0
1 sense of 0
Sense 1
zero, 0
INDIRECT (VIA cardinal) -> ordinal
--- Coordinate Terms (sisters) of noun 0
1 sense of 0
Sense 1
zero, 0, nought, cipher, cypher
-> digit, figure
=> binary digit
=> octal digit
=> decimal digit
=> duodecimal digit
=> hexadecimal digit
=> significant digit, significant figure
=> zero, 0, nought, cipher, cypher
=> one, 1, I, ace, single, unity
=> two, 2, II, deuce
=> three, 3, III, trio, threesome, tierce, leash, troika, triad, trine, trinity, ternary, ternion, triplet, tercet, terzetto, trey, deuce-ace
=> four, 4, IV, tetrad, quatern, quaternion, quaternary, quaternity, quartet, quadruplet, foursome, Little Joe
=> five, 5, V, cinque, quint, quintet, fivesome, quintuplet, pentad, fin, Phoebe, Little Phoebe
=> six, 6, VI, sixer, sise, Captain Hicks, half a dozen, sextet, sestet, sextuplet, hexad
=> seven, 7, VII, sevener, heptad, septet, septenary
=> eight, 8, VIII, eighter, eighter from Decatur, octad, ogdoad, octonary, octet
=> nine, 9, IX, niner, Nina from Carolina, ennead
--- Pertainyms of adj 0
1 sense of 0
Sense 1
zero, 0
--- Derived Forms of adj 0
--- Grep of noun 0
0
10
100
1000
10000
100000
1000000
1000000000
1000000000000
120
20
20/20
30
40
50
500
60
70
80
90
atomic number 10
atomic number 100
atomic number 110
atomic number 20
atomic number 30
atomic number 40
atomic number 50
atomic number 60
atomic number 70
atomic number 80
atomic number 90
cobalt 60
element 110
january 20
k-dur 20
strontium 90
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