I felt a moment of calmness and clarity, and in that clarity of mind I discovered a simple astounding secret: Death has an opposite, but the opposite is not mere living. It is not courage or faith or human will. The opposite of death is love.
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In all these cases (and like all great transformations of the self), love is experienced as both a recovery and a discovery — as a return and as a going forth.
Love. A History — Yale University PressKitabı okudu
… even though she knew that real love changes and grows with time and discovers new ways of expressing itself
Self-estimation (not self-esteem) never happens spontaneously, there always has to be some crisis to prompt it. Anxiety, trauma and crisis are necessary catalysts to stimulate self-consciousness. A breakup, a death, a betrayal; tragically, it’s at these points in our lives that we do our best introspection, we have our ‘moments of clarity’ and yes, discover what abysmal, simpering chumps we’ve allowed ourselves to be molded into.
Sayfa 25Kitabı okudu
Robert Ader, a research psychologist at the University of Rochester, was engaged in an experiment in which he was trying to condition rats to dislike saccharin-sweetened water. This was similar to the classic experiment of Pavlov in which he conditioned dogs to salivate at the sound of a bell. In order to develop an aversion to the saccharin, Dr. Ader injected the rats with a chemical that made them nauseated so that they associated the sweet water with nausea. What he didn't realize until later was that the chemical be injected, cyclophosphamide, also suppressed the rats immune systems, so that they were dying mysteriously. But the striking thing was that now all he had to do was feed the rats saccharin-sweetened water and their immune systems would be suppressed, even though they had not been injected with the chemical, because they had learned (been conditioned) to associate the sweet water with the nausea-producing chemical. Now, simply feeding saccharin could produce suppression of the immune system. This was a landmark discovery, for it demonstrated that a brain phenomenon, in this case aversion to a taste, could control the immune system.
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I try to imagine the last image that formed in his mind, plucked from his memory, not expecting to figure it out, but believing that if somehow I could discover it, I could renew our intimacy. I would once again be what no one else has been for him.
The quality that we call beauty, however, must always grow from the realities of life, and our ancestors, forced to live in dark rooms, presently came to discover beauty in shadows, ultimately to guide shadows towards beauty’s ends.
Sayfa 29 - VintageKitabı okudu
I don’t know at the time that the writer Hervé Guibert will become an important writer for me. Six months later, I will discover *The Remarkable Adventures* and the passage about the desire to merge with his lover will annihilate me.
I will discover that these books speak to me, and speak *for* me (and will become aware of the power of literary minimalism, the neutral voice that’s closer to reality). Six months later, Guibert will announce he’s dying of AIDS. I’ll wonder then if *The Wounded Man* was a premonition or if, on the contrary, it showed the last glimmer of free love—a love shown without constraint or morality or fear—before the great massacre.
I also don’t know then that I will meet Patrice Chéreau one day and work with him. He will adapt one of my novels, a story about brothers and illness and the body as it approaches death. It will be like a circle closing twenty years later.
I discover that absence has a consistency, like the dark water of a river, like oil, some kind of sticky dirty liquid that you can struggle and perhaps drown in. It has a thickness like night, an indefinite space with no landmarks, nothing to bang against, where you search for a light, some small glimmer, something to hang on to and guide you. But absence is, first and foremost, silence. A vast, enveloping silence that weighs you down and puts you in a state where any unforeseeable, unidentifiable sound can make you jump.
And as I said: I had no desire to escape. Later, this desire will invade and overwhelm me. It will begin, in the classic way, with an urge to travel to new places, destinations selected from maps and picture postcards. I will take trains, boats, planes, I will embrace Europe, discover London, a youth hostel next to Paddington Station, a Bronski Beat concert, thrift stores, the speakers of Hyde Park, beer gardens, darts, tawdry nights, Rome, walks among the ruins, finding shelter under the umbrella pines, tossing coins into fountains, watching boys with slicked-back hair whistle at passing girls. Barcelona, drunken wanderings along La Rambla and accidental meetings late on the waterfront. Lisbon and the sadness that’s inevitable before such faded splendor. Amsterdam with her mesmerizing volutes and red neon. All the things you do when you’re twenty years old. The desire for constant movement will come after, the impossibility of staying in one place, the hatred of the roots that hold you there, *Doesn’t matter where you go, just change the scenery,* says the lyric to a song.
The Truth About A&W's Third-Pound Burger and the Major Math Mix-Up
By now you've probably heard the story: once upon a time, A&W Restaurants released a third-pound burger that failed to catch on thanks to a misunderstanding of fractions. Just how accurate is this tale of math mistakes and fraction flubs? Read on for the scoop.
In the 1980s, then-owner A. Alfred Taubman launched the "Third is the
"You’ll discover, once underway, that you know more than you know you know."
(Yola çıktığınızda, bildiğinizden daha fazlasını bildiğinizi keşfedeceksiniz.)
Sayfa 42Kitabı okudu
Düşüncenin Gücü
"A little more than thirty years ago, Edwin C. Barnes discovered how true it is that men really do THINK AND GROW RICH."
(Uzun yıllar önce Edwin C. Barnes, insanların gerçekten düşünerek zengin olabildiklerinin ne kadar doğru olduğunu keşfetmişti.)
Sayfa 9
