In the chapters that follow, I will attempt to explain consciousness.

In the chapters that follow, I will attempt to explain consciousness. More precisely, I will explain the various phenomena that compose what we call consciousness, showing how they are all physical effects of the brain's activities, how these activities evolved, and how they give rise to illusions about their own powers and properties. It is very hard to imagine how your mind could be your brain - but not impossible. In order to imagine this, you really have to know quite a lot of what science has discovered about how brains work, but much more important, you have to learn new ways of thinking. Adding facts helps you imagine new possibilities, but the discoveries and theories of neuroscience are not enough - even neuroscientists are often baffled by consciousness. In order to stretch your imagination, I will provide, along with the relevant scientific facts, a series of stories, analogies, thought experiments, and other devices designed to give you new perspectives, break old habits of thought, and help you organize the facts into a single, coherent vision strikingly different from the traditional view of consciousness we tend to trust. The thought experiment about the brain in the vat and the game of psychoanalysis are warm-up exercises for the main task, which is to sketch a theory of the biological mechanisms and a way of thinking about these mechanisms that will let you see how the traditional paradoxes and mysteries of consciousness can be resolved.

Consciousness Explained, Daniel C. Dennett, 1991

It was almost always the foreman who kept them advised of the tiger's movements

It was almost always the foreman who kept them advised of the tiger's movements; Luis had the greatest confidence in him, and since he passed almost the whole day working in his study, he neither emerged nor let those who came down from the next floor move about until don Roberto sent in his report. But they had to rely on one another also. Busy with the household chores inside, Rema knew exactly what was happening upstairs and down. At other times, it was the children who brought the news to the Kid or Luis. Not that they'd seen anything, just that don Roberto had run into them outside, indicated the tiger's whereabouts to them, and they came back in to pass it on. The believed Nino without question, Isabel less, she was new and might make a mistake. Later, though, since she always went about with Nino stuck to her skirt, they finally believed both of them equally. That was in the morning and afternoon; at night it was the Kid who went out to check and see that the dogs were tied up or that no live coals had been left close to the houses. Isabel noticed that he carried the revolver and sometimes a stick with a silver handle.

She hadn't wanted to ask Rema about it because Rema clearly found it something so obvious and necessary; to pester her would have meant looking stupid, and she treasured her pride before another woman. Nino was easy, he talked straight. Everything clear and obvious when he explained it. Only at night, if she wanted to reconstruct that clarity and obviousness, Isabel noticed that the important reasons were still missing. She learned quickly what was really important: if you wanted to leave the house, or go down to the dining room, to Luis' study, or to the library, find out first. "You have to trust don Roberto," Rema had said. Her and Nino as well. She hardly ever asked Luis, because he hardly ever knew. The Kid, who always knew, she never asked. And so it was always easy, the life organized itself for Isabel with a few more obligations as far as her movements went, and a few less when it came to clothes, meals, the time to go to bed. A real summer, the way it should be all year round.

Bestiary, Julio Cortazar, 1951, translation Paul Blackburn

Light years are interchangeable with years of living in darkness.

Light years are interchangeable with years of living in darkness.
The role of darkness is not to be seen as, or equated with, ignorance, but with the unknown, and the mysteries of the unseen.

Thus, in the name of:
ROBESON, GOD'S SON, HURSTON, AKHENATON, HATSHEPSUT, BLACKFOOT, HELEN, LENNON, KAHLO, KALI, THE THREE MARIAS, TARA, LILITH, LORDE, WHITMAN, BALDWIN, GINSBERG, KAUFMAN, LUMUMBA, GANDHI, GIBRAN, SHABAZZ, SHABAZZ, SIDDHARTHA, MEDUSA, GUEVARA, GURDJIEFF, RAND, WRIGHT, BANNEKER, TUBMAN, HAMER, HOLIDAY, DAVIS, COLTRANE, MORRISON, JOPLIN, DUBOIS, CLARKE, SHAKESPEARE, RACHMANINOV, ELLINGTON, CARTER, GAYE, HATHAWAY, HENDRIX, KUTI, DICKERSON,
RIPERTON, MARY, ISIS, TERESA, HANSBERRY, TESLA, PLATH, RUMI, FELLINI,MICHAUX, NOSTRADAMUS, NEFERTITI, LA ROCK, SHIVA, GANESHA, YEMAJA, OSHUN, OBATALA, OGUN, KENNEDY, KING, FOUR LITTLE GIRLS, HIROSHIMA, NAGASAKI, KELLER, BIKO, PERON, MARLEY, MAGDALENE, COSBY, SHAKUR, THOSE WHO BURNED, THOSE STILL AFLAME, AND THE COUNTLESS UNNAMED.

We claim the present as the pre-sent, as the hereafter.
We are unraveling our navels so that we may ingest the sun.
We are not afraid of the darkness, we trust that the moon shall guide us.
We are determining the future at this very moment.
We know that the heart is the philosophers' stone.
Our music is our alchemy.
We stand as the manifested equivalent of 3 buckets of water and a handful of minerals, thus realizing that those very buckets turned upside down supply the percussive factor of forever.
If you must count to keep the beat then count.
Find your mantra and awaken your subconscious.
Walk your circles counterclockwise.
Use your cipher to decipher coded language, manmade laws.
Climb waterfalls and trees; commune with nature, snakes and bees.
Let your children name themselves and claim themselves
as the new day for today
We are determined to be the channelers of these changing frequencies into songs, paintings, writings, dance, drama, photography, carpentry, crafts, love, and love.
We enlist every instrument: acoustic, electronic.
Every so-called gender, race, sexual preference.
Every per-son as beings of sound
to acknowledge their responsibility to uplift the consciousness
of the entire fucking world.
Any utterance unaimed, will be disclaimed, will be maimed - true rappers slain.
Any utterance unaimed, will be disclaimed, will be maimed - true rappers slain.

Coded Language, Saul Williams, 1999

But though a shot had killed the rabbit

But though a shot had killed the rabbit, though the bored rifles of General Cialdini were now dismaying the Bourbon troops at Gaeta, though the midday heat was making men doze off, nothing could stop the ants. Attracted by a few chewed grape skins spat out by Don Ciccio, along they rushed in close order, morale high at the chance of annexing this bit of garbage soaked with an organist's saliva. Up they came full of confidence, disordered but resolute; groups of three or four would stop now and again for a chat, exalting, perhaps, the ancient glories and future prosperity of ant hill Number Two under cork-tree Number Four on the top of Mount Morco; then once again they would take up their march with the others towards a buoyant future; the gleaming backs of those imperialists seemed to quiver with enthusiasm, while from their ranks no doubt rose the notes of an anthem.

By some association of ideas which it would be inopportune to pursue, the activity of these insects reminded him of the days of the Plebiscite about Unification through which he had lived shortly before at Donnafugata itself. Apart from a sense of amazement those days had left him many an enigma to solve; now, in sight of nature which, except for ants, obviously had no such bothers, he might perhaps find a solution for one of them. The dogs were sleeping stretched and crouched like figures in relief, the little rabbit hanging head down from a branch was swinging out diagonally under the constant surge of wind, but Tumeo, with the help of his pipe, still managed to keep his eyes open.

"And you, Don Ciccio, how did you vote on the twenty-first?"

The poor man started; taken by surprise at a moment when he was outside the stockade of precautions in which like each of his fellow townsmen he normally moved, he hesitated, not knowing what to reply.

The Prince mistook for alarm what was really only surprise, and felt irritated. "Well, what are you afraid of? There's no one here but us, the wind and the dogs."

The list of reassuring witnesses was not really happily chosen; wind is a gossip by definition, the Prince was half-Sicilian. Only the dogs were absolutely trustworthy and that only because they lacked articulate speech. But Don Ciccio had now recovered; his peasant astuteness had suggested the right reply - nothing at all. "Excuse me, Excellency, but there's no point in your question. You know that everyone in Donnafugata voted 'yes'."

The Leopard, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, 1958, translated Archibald Colquhoun

The paranoid spokesman

The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millenialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date for the apocalypse. (“Time is running out,” said Welch in 1951. “Evidence is piling up on many sides and from many sources that October 1952 is the fatal month when Stalin will attack.”)

As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as yet unaroused public, the paranoid is a militant leader. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated—if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes.

The enemy is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman—sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself a victim of his past, his desires, his limitations. He wills, indeed he manufactures, the mechanism of history, or tries to deflect the normal course of history in an evil way. He makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced. The paranoid’s interpretation of history is distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone’s will. Very often the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; he has unlimited funds; he has a new secret for influencing the mind (brainwashing); he has a special technique for seduction (the Catholic confessional).

It is hard to resist the conclusion that this enemy is on many counts the projection of the self; both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him. The enemy may be the cosmopolitan intellectual, but the paranoid will outdo him in the apparatus of scholarship, even of pedantry. Secret organizations set up to combat secret organizations give the same flattery. The Ku Klux Klan imitated Catholicism to the point of donning priestly vestments, developing an elaborate ritual and an equally elaborate hierarchy. The John Birch Society emulates Communist cells and quasi-secret operation through “front” groups, and preaches a ruthless prosecution of the ideological war along lines very similar to those it finds in the Communist enemy. Spokesmen of the various fundamentalist anti-Communist “crusades” openly express their admiration for the dedication and discipline the Communist cause calls forth.

On the other hand, the sexual freedom often attributed to the enemy, his lack of moral inhibition, his possession of especially effective techniques for fulfilling his desires, give exponents of the paranoid style an opportunity to project and express unacknowledgeable aspects of their own psychological concerns. Catholics and Mormons—later, Negroes and Jews—have lent themselves to a preoccupation with illicit sex. Very often the fantasies of true believers reveal strong sadomasochistic outlets, vividly expressed, for example, in the delight of anti-Masons with the cruelty of Masonic punishments.

The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Richard Hofstadter, Harper's Magazine November 1964

Shortly after dawn on 10 April

Shortly after dawn on 10 April Zapata and his escort were up and riding. This was Zapata's home ground. Chinameca hacienda lay along the Cuautla River barely thirty-five miles below Villa de Ayala. It was one of the first places he had seized after joining Madero in 1911. And as he recalled later in the day he had almost been trapped and killed here in that summer's crisis. Many times he had ridden these same country trails - as a young man, headed for markets or stock auctions, then for the last eight years as a rebel, revolutionary, and outlaw, hiding and hunting. He knew every path, creek and fence. The countryside was cool and fresh in the early April morning. The rains and planting had already begun. In August he would be forty. Of his children he knew only the eldest, Nicolás, now thirteen; and he had hardly reared him. There was no omen about the day, a plain Thursday; dealing with Guajardo heightened the tension, but the basic strain of trust, fear, and hope was old and familiar. At about 8:30 in the morning he and his men came down out of the hills to Chinameca.

Outside the hacienda and back against its front walls stood various shops, and in one Zapata and Guajardo conferred. Inside the walls, Zapata's escort rested. But the talk of ammunition and attacks was soon interrupted by reports that nationals were in the area. Zapata quickly directed Guajardo to guard the hacienda, and then organized patrols from his own men and sent them out on reconnaissance. He himself led one patrol. Although there was no sign of the enemy, Zapata posted sentries and returned to the hacienda environs. It was 1:30 in the afternoon. Only Guajardo's troops were inside the walls now, except for the aide Palacios, who was in conference with Guajardo about collecting twelve thousand rounds from his cache of ammunition. Zapata waited. Invited in to join Guajardo for dinner and close the deal, Zapata chose to keep waiting. But as Guajardo's officers went on repeating the invitation, tacos and beer sounded better. The day had started early, and there had been a lot of rough riding. By two o'clock Zapata was growing impatient; finally at 2:10 he accept. Mounting the sorrel Guajardo had given him the day before, he ordered ten men to come with him inside the hacienda gate.

'Ten of us followed him just as he ordered,' a young aide at the scene reported to Magaña that evening. 'The rest of the people stayed [outside the walls] under the trees, confidently resting in the shade with their carbines stacked. Having formed ranks, [Guajardo's] guard looked ready to do him the honours. Three times the bugle sounded the honour call; and as the last note died away, as the General in Chief reached the threshold of the door...at point blank, without giving him time even to draw his pistols, the soldiers who were presenting arms fired two volleys, and our unforgettable General Zapata fell never to rise again.'

Zapata and the Mexican Revolution, John Womack, Jr. 1968

How Fortunate The Man With None

You saw sagacious Solomon
You know what came of him,
To him complexities seemed plain.
He cursed the hour that gave birth to him
And saw that everything was vain.
How great and wise was Solomon.
The world however did not wait
But soon observed what followed on.
It's wisdom that had brought him to this state.
How fortunate the man with none.

You saw courageous Caesar next
You know what he became.
They deified him in his life
Then had him murdered just the same.
And as they raised the fatal knife
How loud he cried: you too my son!
The world however did not wait
But soon observed what followed on.
It's courage that had brought him to that state.
How fortunate the man with none.

You heard of honest Socrates
The man who never lied:
They weren't so grateful as you'd think
Instead the rulers fixed to have him tried
And handed him the poisoned drink.
How honest was the people's noble son.
The world however did not wait
But soon observed what followed on.
It's honesty that brought him to that state.
How fortunate the man with none.

Here you can see respectable folk
Keeping to God's own laws.
So far he hasn't taken heed.
You who sit safe and warm indoors
Help to relieve our bitter need.
How virtuously we had begun.
The world however did not wait
But soon observed what followed on.
It's fear of god that brought us to that state.
How fortunate the man with none.

How Fortunate The Man With None, Bertolt Brecht, 1928, translation by John Willett

Finally the monkey might

Finally the monkey might try to ignore that he is imprisoned or that there is something seductive in his environment. He plays deaf and dumb and so is indifferent and slothful in relation to what is happening around him. This is stupidity.

To go back a bit, you might say that the monkey is born into his house as he awakens from the blackout. He does not know how he arrived in this prison, so he assumes he has always been there, forgetting that he himself solidified the space into walls. Then he feels the texture of the walls, which is the Second Skandha, Feeling. After that, he relates to the house in terms of desire, hatred, and stupidity, the Third Skandha, Perception-Impulse. Then having developed these three ways of relating to his house, the monkey begins to label and categorize it: "This is a window. This corner is pleasant. That wall frightens me and is bad." He develops a conceptual framework with which to label and categorize and evaluate his house, his world, according to whether he desires, hates or feels indifferent to it. This is the Fourth Skandha, Concept.

The monkey's development through the Fourth Skandha has been fairly logical and predictable. But the pattern of development begins to break down as he enters the Fifth Skandha, Consciousness. The thought pattern becomes irregular and unpredictable and the monkey begins to hallucinate, to dream.

When we speak of "hallucination" or "dream," it means that we attach values to things and events which they do not necessarily have. We have definite opinions about the way things are and should be. This is projection: we project our version of things onto what is there. Thus we become completely immersed in a world of our own creation, a world of conflicting values and opinions. Hallucination, in this sense, is a misinterpretation of things and events, reading into the phenomenal world meanings which it does not have.

...

Q: What does the monkey perceive when he looks out of the five windows of the house?
A: Well, he perceives the east, west, south and north.

Q: How do they look to him?
A: A square world.

Q: What about outside the house?
A: Well, a square world, because he sees through windows.

Q: He doesn't see anything in the distance?
A: He could, but it is also a square picture, because it is is like hanging a picture on the wall, isn't it?

Q: What happens to the monkey when he takes a little LSD or peyote?
A: He has already taken it.

Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, Chögyam Trungpa, 1973

Suppose that we agree to stay away from sincerity

Suppose that we agree to stay away from sincerity, the details of a person's private life, and interpretive diagraming. What then?

To begin with, we ought to decide whether any public discussion of a particular work is appropriate. There are legitimate reasons for being hesitant to speak. Silence is after all the context for the deepest appreciation of art; the only important evaluations are finally personal, interior ones. And, even assuming that public discussion might be helpful, there are many ways to make it unhelpful; because photographs tend to be less inflected than paintings, there is, for example, the question of whether one has seen enough (Cartier-Bresson was right - anybody can take one or two good pictures, or, by extension, a lot of bad ones). To guide public taste fairly requires a great deal of preparation.

Let us suppose though that one has carefully determined that a body of work is bad, unambiguously bad. If so, is it not the critic's duty to speak up? Isn't there an obligation actively to clear away the second rate and the imitative? A critic's job is to support work of merit; how can good work thrive unless the other is conscientiously separated out?

Such questions are not answered quickly. John Rewald, in talking about Seurat and his imitators, identified the center of the problem: "While it is true that those who tried to cash in on the researches of Seurat and his group were so weak that they only underlined the strength and originality of the others, it is also true that public success when it came at last, temporarily went to them, as it always goes to the vulgarizers before reaching the initial inventors." The history of art is filled with people who did not live long enough to enjoy a sympathetic public, and their misery argues that criticism should try to speed justice.

On the other hand, there is the amply documented possibility that a critic's judgement may be wrong. One contemporary defender of the Impressionists asserted that no newspaper had ever discovered a new figure of talent; that is a hard thesis to refute even now. There is also a tactical consideration: in cases in which there is a defensible need for making, in public, a negative judgement, usually the most damaging negation is silence. It is a truism among publishers that a bad review is better than no review at all. True, their attitude is grounded in economics, but even looked at more seriously, a negative review usually implies at least that the issues raised by the work are important. No review implies the worst - boredom.

Beauty in Photography, Robert Adams, 1981

Perceptions of power during the crisis

Perceptions of power during the crisis were particularly revealing. During the early phases, leaders notoriously tended to exaggerate their own power and to perceive their enemies as weaker than they really were. Wilhelm's pledge to Austria, for example, betrayed a fundamental contempt for Russia's military power and an exaggerated confidence in the impact of his own appearance on the Russian leadership. Similarly, the Austrians had contempt for Russia's military machine, which they perceived as more cumbersome and weaker than it actually was. As stress mounted, however, these perceptions gradually changed, and were soon replaced by acute fears of inferiority. These fears, interestingly enough, did not deter any of the participants from actually going to war. At the boiling point, all leaders tended to perceive their own alternatives as more restricted than those of their adversaries. They saw their options as limited by necessity or "fate," whereas those of the adversary were characterized by open choices. This may help explain the curiously mechanistic quality that pervaded the attitudes of statesmen everywhere on the eve of the outbreak: the "we cannot go back now" of Francis Joseph; the "iron dice" of Bethmann-Hollweg; and the unrelenting determinism and enslavement to their timetables of the military leaders who perceived the slightest advantage of the enemy as a catastrophe.

Everywhere, there was a total absence of empathy. No one realized how the situation looked from another point of view. Berchtold did not see that, to a Serbian patriot, Austria's action would look like naked aggression. He did not see that, to the Russian leadership, war might seem to be the only alternative to intolerable humiliation, nor did he see the fateful swing of the pendulum in the mood of his ally, the German Kaiser, from careless overconfidence to frenzied paranoia. Wilhelm's growing panic and total loss of balance made any empathy impossible. And the Russian's contempt for Austria and fear of Germany did likewise.

Finally, one is struck with the overwhelming mediocrity of the personalities involved. Each of the leaders, diplomats, or generals was badly flawed by arrogance, stupidity, carelessness, or weakness. There was a pervasive tendency to place the preservation of one's ego before the preservation of the peace. There was little insight and no vision whatsoever. And there was an almost total absence of excellence and generosity of spirit. It was not fate or Providence that made these men fail so miserably. It was their own evasion of responsibility. As a result of their weakness, the flower of Europe's manhood was destroyed. The sins of the fathers were truly visited upon the sons who forfeited their lives. Of all the cruelties that men have inflicted upon one another, the most terrible has been that of the weak against the weak.

Why Nations Go To War, 2nd ed, John G. Stoessinger, 1978

I have the impression that this isn't the first time

I have the impression that this isn't the first time I've found myself in this situation: with my bow just slackened in my outstretched left hand, my right hand drawn back, the arrow A suspended in midair at about a third of its trajectory, and, a bit farther on, also suspended in midair, and also at about a third of his trajectory, the lion L in the act of leaping upon me, jaws agape and claws extended. In a second I'll know if the arrow's trajectory and the lion's will or will not coincide at a point X crossed by both L and by A at the same second tx, that is, if the lion will slump in the air with a roar stifled by the spurt of blood that will flood his dark throat pierced by the arrow, or whether he will fall unhurt upon me knocking me to the ground with both forepaws which will lacerate the muscular tissue of my shoulders and chest, while his mouth, closing with a simple snap of the jaws, will rip my head from my neck at the level of the first vertebra.

So many and so complex are the factors that condition the parabolic movement both of the arrow and of felines that I am unable for the moment to judge which of the eventualities is the more probable. I am therefore in one of those situations of uncertainty and expectation where one really doesn't know what to think. And the thought that immediately occurs to me is this: it doesn't seem the first time to me.

t zero, Italo Calvino, 1967, translated William Weaver

Until one night that voice rose threateningly

Until one night that voice rose threateningly and irresistibly, demanding that he should bear witness to it with his mouth and with his entrails. And we heard the spirit enter into him as he rose from his bed, tall and growing in prophetic anger, choking with brash words that he emitted like a machine gun. We heard the din of battle and Father's groans, the groans of a titan with a broken hip, but still capable of wrath.

I have never seen an Old Testament prophet, but at the sight of this man stricken by God's fire, sitting clumsily on an enormous china chamberpot behind a windmill of arms, a screen of desperate wrigglings over which there towered his voice, grown unfamiliar and hard, I understood the divine anger of saintly men.

It was a dialogue as grim as the language of thunder. The jerkings of his arms cut the sky into pieces, and in the cracks there appeared the face of Jehovah swollen with anger and spitting out curses. Without looking, I saw him, the terrible Demiurge, as, resting on darkness as on Sinai, propping his powerful palms on the pelmet of the curtains, he press his enormous face against the upper panes of the window which flattened horribly his large fleshy nose.

The Street of Crocodiles, Bruno Schulz 1934, translation Celina Wieniewska

In Pakistan I discovered the full force of religious faith.

In Pakistan I discovered the full force of religious faith. I covered my first war, the struggle which was to lead to the creation of Bangladesh in 1971. After several days' fighting in the Saidpur region, in the north of what was East-Pakistan, but only for a few more days, I asked the Pakistani army to escort me back to Dacca, so that I could send my films to Paris - I had a scoop. They took me, by night, to a makeshift landing zone. Just like in a film, the moonlight picked out the silhouette of the General and his escort scanning the sky, anxiously awaiting the helicopter which would ferry us over the Indian lines surrounding us. Again, just like in a film, the chopper did not appear. The General then decided to cross the enemy lines by road - he had to be at his HQ by morning - and invited me to go with him. Were my films worth such a risk? I told myself that a General did not take as many risks as a lieutenant and agreed to go with him. What I did not know, and one look at his face the next morning revealed this, was that I was dealing with one of those firebrand Generals, a 'mad General', the sort who leads his troops into battle himself. Since then I have never accepted an invitation from anyone whose face I could not see in the dark.

While the General busied himself rustling up a bigger escort, I asked his aide-de-camp, a captain, what the chances were. He answered: 'It's suicide!' It was too late to turn back and from time to time I had to test my luck. Two trucks bristling with machine guns surrounded the general's jeep, and that idiot put me in the first vehicle. We would be the first in the firing line, that was certain. Wedged between the driver and the aide-de-camp, I would not be able to jump out quickly, and I wouldn't even get any shots of the night attack: using a flash was out of the question. The convoy stopped every half-hour, so that the general could consult his map by the light of a dim torch. When at the fourth halt the aide-de-camp muttered 'to be honest, I think we're lost,' fear, which I had felt only vaguely at first, crept up on me.

At dawn, 'when a white thread can be distinguished from a black one', as in the Muslim tradition, we stopped for longer. Increasinly anxious, I got out to see what the hell this general was up to, holding us up when we no longer had the cover of darkness, right in the middle of enemy lines. I found him by the roadside, behind the last truck, quietly absorbed in dawn prayer. My fear evaporated at once. With men of this calibre, nothing could happen to us. Nothing did happen to us.

Allah O Akbar: a journey though militant Islam, Abbas, 1994

You can live longer if you avoid death

You can live longer if you avoid death, get better if you avoid bankruptcy, and become prosperous if you avoid blowups in the fourth quadrant.

Now you would think that people would buy my arguments about lack of knowledge and accept unpredictability. But many kept asking me "now that you say that our measures are wrong, do you have anything better?"

I used to give the same mathematical finance lectures for both graduate students and practitioners, before giving up on academic students and grade-seekers. Students cannot understand the value of "this is what we don't know"—they think it is not information, that they are learning nothing.

The Fourth Quadrant Nassim Nicholas Taleb, 2008

It smells of sweat, chili and onions

It smells of sweat, chili and onions, urine and accumulated garbage and the music from the jukebox mingles with the collective voice, the growl of motors and horns, and it comes to one's ears deformed and thick. Singed faces, prominent cheekbones, eyes made drowsy by routine or indolence wander among the tables, form clusters at the bar, block the entrance. Ambrosio accepts the cigarette that Santiago offers him, smokes, throws the butt on the floor and buries it under his foot. He slurps the soup noisily, nibbles on the pieces of fish, picks up the bones and sucks them, leaves them all shiny, listening or answering or asking a question, and he swallows pieces of bread, takes long swigs of beer and wipes the sweat off with his hand: time swallows a person up before he realizes it, child. He thinks, why don't I leave? He thinks: I have to go and he orders more beer. He fills the glasses, clutches his and while he talks, remembers, dreams, or thinks he watches the circle of foam sprinkled with craters, mouths that silently open up, vomiting golden bubbles and disappearing into the yellow liquid that his hand warms. He drinks without closing his eyes, belches, takes out cigarettes and lights them, leans over to pet Rowdy: the things that have happened, Jesus. He talks and Ambrosio talks, the pouches on his eyelids are bluish, the openings in his nose vibrate as if he'd been running, as if he were drowning, and after each sip he spits, looks nostalgically at the flies, listens, smiles, or grows sad or confused, and his eyes seem to grow furious sometimes or frightened or go away, on top of his overalls he wears a jacket that must have been blue once too and had buttons, and a shirt with a high collar that is wrapped around his neck like a rope. Santiago looks at his enormous shoes: muddy, twisted, fucked up by the weather. His voice comes to him in a stammer, fearful, is lost, cautious, imploring, returns, respectful or anxious or constrained, always defeated: not thirty, forty, a hundred, more. Not only had he fallen apart, grown old, become brutalized; he probably was tubercular as well. A thousand times more fucked up than Carlitos or you, Zavalita. He was leaving, he had to go and he orders more beer. You're drunk, Zavalita, you were about to cry. Life doesn't treat people well in this country, son, since he'd left their house he'd gone through a thousand movie adventures. Life hadn't treated him well either, Ambrosio, and he orders more beer. Was he going to throw up? The smell of frying, feet and armpits swirls about, biting and enveloping, over the straight-haired or bushy heads, over the gummy crests and the flat necks with mange and brillantine, the music on the jukebox grows quiet and revives, grows quiet and revives, and now, more intense and irrevocable than the sated faces and square mouths and dark beardless cheeks, the abject images of memory are also there: more beer. Wasn't this country a can of worms, boy, wasn't Peru a brain-twister?

Conversation in the Cathedral, Mario Vargas Llosa, 1975, translation Gregory Rabassa

Awareness is a process

Awareness is a process of deepening self-acceptance. It is neither a cold, surgical examination of life nor a means of becoming perfect. Whatever it observes, it embraces. There is nothing unworthy of acceptance. The light of awareness will doubtless illuminate things we would prefer not to see. And this may entail a descent into what is forbidden, repressed, denied. We might uncover disquieting memories, irrational childhood terrors. We might have to accept not only a potential sage hidden within but also a potential murderer, rapist or thief.

Despite the sense I might have of myself as a caring person, I observe that I want to punch S in the face. What usually happens to this hatred? I restrain myself from expressing it, not out of any great love for S but because of how it would affect other people's view of me. The attachment to self-image likewise inclines me to shy away from and forget this viciousness. In one way or another I deny it. I do not allow it into the field of awareness. I do not embrace it.

...

But to embrace hatred does not mean to indulge it. To embrace hatred is to accept it for what it is: a disruptive but transient state of mind. Awareness observes it jolt into being, coloring consciousness and gripping the body. The heart accelerates, the breath becomes shallow and jagged, and an almost physical urge to react dominates the mind. At the same time, this frenzy is set against a dark, quiet gulf of hurt, humiliation, and shame. Awareness notices all this without condoning or condemning, repressing or expressing. It recognizes that just as hatred arises, so will it pass away.

Buddhism Without Beliefs, Stephen Batchelor, 1997

He said that journeys involving the company of the dead were notorious for their difficulty but that in truth every journey was so accompanied. He said that in his opinion it was imprudent to suppose that the dead have no power to act in the world, for their power is great and their influence often most weighty with just those who suspect it least. He said that what men do not understand is that what the dead have quit is itself no world but is also only the picture of the world in men's hearts. He said that the world cannot be quit for it is eternal in whatever form as are all things within it. In those faces that shall now be forever nameless among their outworn chattels there is writ a message that can never be spoken because time would always slay the messenger before he could ever arrive.

The Crossing, Cormac McCarthy 1994

The fact that I, a chemist

The fact that I, a chemist, engaged here in writing my stories about chemistry, have lived a different season, has been narrated elsewhere.

At a distance of thirty years I find it difficult to reconstruct the sort of human being that corresponded, in November 1944, to my name or, better, to my numbre: 174517. I must have by then have been overcome the most terrible crisis, the crisis of having become part of Lager system, and I must have developed a strange callousness if I then managed not only to survive but also to think, to register the world around me, and even to perform rather delicate work, in an environment infected by the daily presence of death and at the same time brought to a frenzy by the approach of the Russian liberators, who by now were only eighty kilometers away. Desperation and hope alternated at a rate that would have destroyed almost any normal person in an hour.

We were not normal because we were hungry. Our hunger at that time had nothing in common with the well-known (and not completely disagreeable) sensation of someone who has missed a meal and is certain that the next meal will not be missed: it was a need, a lack, a yearning that had accompanied us now for a year, had struck deep, permanent roots in us, lived in our cells, and conditioned our behaviour. To eat, to get something to eat, was our prime stimulus, behind which, at a great distance, followed all the other problems of survival, and even still farther away the memories of home and the very fear of death.

The Periodic Table, Primo Levi 1975, translated Raymond Rosenthal

This town is filled with echoes

"This town is filled with echoes. It's like they were trapped behind the walls, or beneath the cobblestones. When you walk you feel like someone's behind you, stepping in your footsteps. You hear rustlings. And people laughing. Laughter that sounds used up. And voices worn away by the years. Sound like that. But I think the day will come when those sounds fade away."

That was what Damiana Cisneros was telling me as we walked through the town.

"There was a time when night after night I could hear the sounds of a fiesta. I could hear the noise clear out at the Media Luna. I would walk into town to see what the uproar was about, and this is what i would see: just what we're seeing now. Nothing. No one. The streets as empty as they are now.

"Then I didn't hear anything anymore. You know, you can get worn out celebrating. That's why I wasn't surprised when it ended.

"Yes," Damian Cisneros repeated "This town is filled with echoes. I'm not afraid anymore. I hear the dogs howling, and I let them howl. And on windy days I see the wind blowing leaves from the trees, when anyone can see that there aren't any trees here. There must have been once. Otherwise, where do the leaves come from?

"And the worst of all is when you hear people talking and the voices seem to be coming through a crack, and yet so clear you can recognize who's speaking. In fact, just now as I was coming here I happened upon a wake. I stopped to recite the Lord's Prayer. And while I was praying, one woman stepped away from the others and came toward me and said, 'Damiana! Pray for me, Damiana!'

"Her rebozo fell away from her face and I recognized my sister, Sixtina.

"'What are you doing here?' I asked her.

"The she ran back and hid among the older women.

"In case you didn't know, my sister Sixtina died when I was twelve years old. She was the oldest. There were sixteen of us, so you can figure out how long she's been dead. And look at her now, still wandering through this world. So don't be afraid if you hear newer echoes, Juan Preciado."

"Was it my mother who told you I was coming?" I asked.

"No. And by the way, whatever happened to your mother?"

"She died," I replied.

"Died? What of?"

"I don't really know. Sadness, maybe. She sighed a lot."

"That's bad. Every sigh is like a drop of your life being swallowed up. Well, so she's dead."

"Yes. I thought maybe you knew."

"Why would I know? I haven't heard a thing from her in years."

"The how did you know about me?"

Damiana did not answer.

Pedro Paramo, Juan Rulfo, 1955 translation Margaret Sayers Peden

The Partisan

When they poured across the border
I was cautioned to surrender
This I could not do
I took my gun and vanished.

I have changed my name so often
I've lost my wife and children
But I have many friends
And some of them are with me

An old woman gave us shelter
Kept us hidden in the garret
Then the soldiers came
She died without a whisper.

There were three of us this morning
I'm the only one this evening
But I must go on
The frontiers are my prison.

Oh, the wind, the wind is blowing
Through the graves the wind is blowing
Freedom soon will come
Then we'll come from the shadows.

Les Allemands étaient chez moi
Ils me dirent "résigne toi"
Mais je n'ai pas pu
J'ai repris mon arme.

J'ai changé cent fois de nom
J'ai perdu femme et enfants
Mais j'ai tant d'amis
J'ai la France entiere.

Un vieil homme dans un grenier
Pour la nuit nous a cachés
Les Allemands l'ont pris
Il est mort sans surprise.

Oh, the wind, the wind is blowing
Through the graves the wind is blowing
Freedom soon will come
Then we'll come from the shadows.

Paroles : Hy Zaret, adapté d'Emmanuel d'Astier de la Vigerie (a.k.a. "Bernard").

(this transcription from this website)

This truth destroys the veracity of my story

This truth destroys the veracity of my story, the one I have been telling. But we should not be too fixed on this outward appearance, because both are the same one, except instead of advancing along its horizontal axis I have suddenly moved upward across it, vertically, and this is what I have found. Believe me. This le Nègre Pierre turning the wheel is also true. When his own people and the French discovered his gifts, they bound him to the wheel to keep him from getting away, and this is where le Nègre Pierre spends his days, tied like a mule so the wild beast he is cannot escape.

Vertical, and not horizontal, as if Madame in the brothel of The House were not going through her room in the natural way, horizontally, but had found how to go through it in upward fashion. She would see, then, instead of the habitual air of elegance and sumptuousness, nothing by abandon and negligence: above the frame holding up the drapes, dead flies and little moths, dust dereliction, and gloom are what one sees from up there. ... If she were to describe the room in this way, the room she is writing about would be something else....

And why should I share with the reader the filth that I must clean up all by myself, that must be thrown out because, although it belongs to the room, it is not part of the room? Because, without your closeness, reader, without the warmth and company of your body, I would not have been able to draw the story upward, in a vertical direction, because when your body moves close to mine, I succumb, I let myself go, and in that mode I remain in order to go through the story in a different direction, vertically.... That's the way it is when two bodies draw close to each other. The flesh reveal what neither the eye nor the intelligence is able to see. ... But despite your eroticism, so strong and vigorous, into which I have allowed myself to fall, as into a woman's lap, moving back and forth as I feel you have asked me to do, I do know that the truthfulness of this tale is on the verge of tumbling over the cliff, I know I am capable of collapsing, coming apart, going head over heels -- and with me everything that I have written here, that I swear, reader, is true, just as you are or I am when I hold back this pen with my hand before again setting down in ink this true story which we should not allow to be destroyed , or be turned into its own end. Therefore, I promise myself that throughout this book I will not move through the story in any other fashion and that I will direct myself along the horizontal axis so you will believe me, will trust me, will know that it is true, really true. ... Because this story is the only thing I have for believing myself real.

They're Cows, We're Pigs, Carmen Boullosa, 1991, translation Leland H. Chambers