"Remember something! A man looks into the Abyss and there's nothing staring back at him. At that moment man finds his character, and that is what keeps him out of the Abyss."

-- Lou Mannheim
-- Wall Street

Don't get too close to a man you are going to shoot. You get close enough, you can see his eyes, watch him sweat, hear him breathe and while you're taking all that in, he will kill you.

See nothing and see everything.

-- Thomas Luther Price

"People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."

-- Maya Angelou

"Unrestricted immigration is a dangerous thing -- look at what happened to the Iroquois."
-- Garrison Keillor

"Raw capitalism is dead."
-- Henry M. Paulson, Jr. (Secretary of the Treasury)

"A ship in port is safe, but that is not what ships are built for."

- Benazir Bhutto
(June 21, 1953 – December 27, 2007)

"I'm afraid that we're no longer worth the candle, Saul."

-- George Smiley to Saul Enderby (Smiley's People by John le Carré)

“Been far, Pilgrim?”
“Seems like far.”
“Were it worth the trouble?”
“Eh, what trouble?”

-- from the movie “Jeremiah Johnson.”

As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness

-Henry David Thoreau

Toby Esterhase: You're an old spy in a hurry, George. You used to say they were the worst.

George Smiley: Oh they are, Toby, they are.

-- Smiley's People

General

1984
2001 A Space Odyssey
Alas Babylon
American Gods
Animal Farm
A Beautiful Mind
Bell Book and Candle
Brave New World
The Caine Mutiny
Calvin and Hobbes
A Canticle for Leibowitz
Catch 22
Catcher in the Rye
Cat's Cradle
Childhood's End
City
A Clockwork Orange
Contact
The Dead Zone
Death of A Salesman
Delta of Venus
# Dune Series, Herbert
##### Dune (1965)
##### Dune Messiah (1969)
##### Children of Dune (1976)
##### God Emperor of Dune (1981)
##### Heretics of Dune (1984)
##### Chapterhouse Dune, (1985)
Earth Abides
Ender's Game
Fahrenheit 451
Fiddler on the Roof
Flowers for Algernon
#Foundation Series, Asimov
##### Foundation (1951)
##### Foundation and Empire (1952)
##### Second Foundation (1953)
The Godfather
Great Expectations
The Harrad Experiment
Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
The House at Pooh Corner
The House of Seven Gables
The Illustrated Man
Jeremy
Kama Sutra
Lady Chatterly's Lover
Little Women
Lolita
Lord of the Flies
# Lord of the Rings Trilogy, Tolkien
##### The Hobbit
##### The Fellowship of the Ring
##### The Two Towers
##### The Return of the King
The Maltese Falcon
The Man Who Fell to Earth
The Martian Chronicles
# The Merlin Series, Stewart
##### The Crystal Cave (1970)
##### The Hollow Hills (1973)
##### The Last Enchantment (1979)
##### The Wicked Day (1983)
The Mists of Avalon
Mother Night
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
On the Beach
Our Town
The Red Badge of Courage
Sherlock Holmes
Slaughterhouse Five
# The George Smiley Series, le Carré
##### Call for the Dead (1961)
##### A Murder of Quality (1962)
##### Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974)
##### The Honourable Schoolboy (1977)
##### Smiley's People (1979)
Something Wicked This Way Comes
Speaker for the Dead
The Spy Who Came In from the Cold
Steppenwolf
The Story of My Life
The Story of O
A Streetcar Named Desire
A Tale of Two Cities
Time and Again
To Kill a Mockingbird
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?



Books by Robert A. Heinlein

Citizen of the Galaxy
The Door into Summer
Friday
Glory Road
I Will Fear No Evil
Job: A Comedy of Justice,
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
Podkayne of Mars
Starship Troopers
Stranger in a Strange Land
Time Enough for Love



Books by James A. Michener

Tales of the South Pacific (1946)
Hawaii (1959)
The Source (1965)
Centennial (1974)
Space (1982)



Plays by William Shakespeare

Hamlet
Othello
Romeo and Juliet



History

The Age of Jackson
# The Age of Roosevelt Series, Schlesinger
##### The Crisis of the Old Order: 1919-1933 (The Age of Roosevelt, Vol. I) (1957)
##### The Coming of the New Deal: 1933-1935 (The Age of Roosevelt, Vol. II) (1958)
##### The Politics of Upheaval: 1935-1936 (The Age of Roosevelt, Vol. III) (1960)
Ann Frank's Diary
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee An Indian History of the American West
The Cold War A History
Cycles of American History
Escape from Warsaw
The Guns of August
The Good Black A True Story of Race in America
The Imperial Presidency
I Will Fight No More Forever Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce War
Lakota Woman
The Long March
The Master Spy The Story of Kim Philby
The Rise of American Democracy
Schindler's List
Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln


Poetry

Sonnets from the Portuguese
Starved Rock
Whittman the Complete Poems


Spiritual

The Bible
Druid Magic
# The Enemy Papers Series
##### The Talman (fragments)
##### Enemy Mine
##### The Tomorrow Testament
##### The Last Enemy
Godel Escher Bach
The Last Temptation of Christ
A Lesson Before Dying
The Prophet
The Quest for Paradise
The Qur'an
The Satanic Verses
Sex and Spirit An Illustrated Guide to Sacred Sexuality
Siddhartha
Spiritual Polyamory
Stranger in a Strange Land
Thoughts and Meditations

Look upon this moment. Savor it! Rejoice with great gladness! Great gladness! Remember it always, for you are joined by it. You are One, under the stars. Remember it well, then... this night, this great victory. So that in the years ahead, you can say, "I was there that night, with Arthur, the King!!!"

For it is the doom of men... that they forget.

-- Merlin (Excalibur)

"You must be the change you want to see in the world."
- - Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869–1948)

Love, love is a verb
Love is a doing word
Fearless on my breath
Gentle impulsion
Shakes me makes me lighter
Fearless on my breath

Teardrop on the fire
Fearless on my breath

Nine night of matter
Black flowers blossom
Fearless on my breath
Black flowers blossom
Fearless on my breath

Teardrop on the fire
Fearless on my breath

Water is my eye
Most faithful mirror
Fearless on my breath
Teardrop on the fire of a confession
Fearless on my breath
Most faithful mirror
Fearless on my breath

Teardrop on the fire
Fearless on my breath

Stumbling a little
Stumbling a little

Just a word or two of explanation concerning my choice of the video below. My lady has the unfortunate circumstance of coming from a family that has been essentially destroyed by an alcoholic mother. The destruction has reached the point that she has been cut adrift and has no family to which she can turn.

I post the following video in the hope that she will see us and realize that I will be at her side for as long as I live.

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western spiral arm of the galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this, at a distance of roughly ninety million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet, whose ape descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea. This planet has, or had, a problem, which was this. Most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small, green pieces of paper, which is odd, because on the whole, it wasn't the small, green pieces of paper which were unhappy.

-- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

"You only live once. Let's keep trucking. If we don't do that, who's going to do it for us? We have to be happy. Why hate? The world is full of hate, and yet they don't know what they want."
-- Anthony Acevedo
World War II Veteran
Medic
275th Infantry Regiment
70th Infantry Division
Captured January 6, 1945
Liberated April the 23, 1945

"By you actions you have disowned the system that made you. You have placed love above duty. The ground on which you once stood is cut away. You have become a citizen of No Man’s Land. I send you my greetings".

-- George Smiley

I posted the video below, with the dedication that you see, after a very difficult exchange with ☼Sunshine☼. At the time I thought the dedication was appropriate... even now I believe that the behavior she displayed deserved such a dedication. But then that's the point that recent events make... it is often that which we miss which is more important than that which seems so certain.

It is obvious that ☼Sunshine☼ suffered from demons that were probably very similar to the demons that stalked me for the first 45 years of my life. She needed help and instead of reaching out and trying to help, I took what seemed so obvious and turned my back on her. The real tragedy is that I did this after making a solemn vow to find others like me and help them find the treatment and care that saved my life.

It is not what we see that causes so much the pain in this life, it is what we miss... it is that which we don't take the time to understand. I leave the video, and its dedication, as a memorial to my own shortsightness...

As for ☼Sunshine☼ ...

Fare Thee Will M'Lady
The gods speed you to a place of rest, love and understanding

What follows is a blog entry, but blog entries tend to get buried after a few days never to see the light of day again. I feel too strongly about this particular subject so, I am going to keep it current by placing it on my profile page.



We live in a different time... issues that would, a generation ago, have had an angry people in the streets, are greeted with indifference today by too many in American society. While this nation, with the *tacit consent* of the governed, tortures individuals, spys on its own citizens, and destroys evidence of its crimes, many of us sit idly by as the talk and discussion drag on and on... as the very definition of "torture" is debated and redefined!! Security before Freedom... that seems to be the motto of the day.

If anyone who reads these does not believe that these actions do occur with "the consent of the governed" then I ask... *no* I demand!! to know: Where are the great crowds marching in every city of this country shouting with a single voice that the actions of this government *not* be performed in the name of the citizens of the United States of America!! *Where* are our leaders, local and national, stating in voices unequivocal, "This is *not* what we as a people believe in!!! This is *not* what our country stands for!! Let us commit ourselves as a society to stop these actions and to NEVER AGAIN use such filthy, unjust methods in the name of freedom, liberty and justice!!!"