#Continental Reformed

[famousinuniverse]

St. Paul's Church, Strasbourg, France: The St. Paul's Church of Strasbourg is a major Gothic Revival architecture building and one of the landmarks of the city of Strasbourg, in Alsace, France. Wikipedia

[whencyclopedia]

Napoleon Bonaparte

Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) was a Corsican-born French general and politician who reigned as Emperor of the French with the regnal name Napoleon I from 1804 to 1814 and then again briefly in 1815. He established the largest continental European empire since Charlemagne and brought liberal reforms to the lands he conquered at the cost of the destructive Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815).

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[communist-manifesto-daily]

Socialism: Utopian and Scientific - Part 10

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To return to our British bourgeois. The French Revolution gave him a splendid opportunity, with the help of the Continental monarchies, to destroy French maritime commerce, to annex French colonies, and to crush the last French pretensions to maritime rivalry. That was one reason why he fought it. Another was that the ways of this revolution went very much against his grain. Not only its "execrable" terrorism, but the very attempt to carry bourgeois rule to extremes. What should the British bourgeois do without his aristocracy, that taught him manners, such as they were, and invented fashions for him – that furnished officers for the army, which kept order at home, and the navy, which conquered colonial possessions and new markets aboard? There was, indeed, a progressive minority of the bourgeoisie, that minority whose interests were not so well attended to under the compromise; this section, composed chiefly of the less wealthy middle-class, did sympathize with the Revolution, but it was powerless in Parliament.

Thus, if materialism became the creed of the French Revolution, the God-fearing English bourgeois held all the faster to his religion. Had not the reign of terror in Paris proved what was the upshot, if the religious instincts of the masses were lost? The more materialism spread from France to neighboring countries, and was reinforced by similar doctrinal currents, notably by German philosophy, the more, in fact, materialism and free thought generally became, on the Continent, the necessary qualifications of a cultivated man, the more stubbornly the English middle-class stuck to its manifold religious creeds. These creeds might differ from one another, but they were, all of them, distinctly religious, Christian creeds.

While the Revolution ensured the political triumph of the bourgeoisie in France, in England Watt, Arkwright, Cartwright, and others, initiated an industrial revolution, which completely shifted the centre of gravity of economic power. The wealth of the bourgeoisie increased considerably faster than that of the landed aristocracy. Within the bourgeoisie itself, the financial aristocracy, the bankers, etc., were more and more pushed into the background by the manufacturers. The compromise of 1689, even after the gradual changes it had undergone in favor of the bourgeoisie, no longer corresponded to the relative position of the parties to it. The character of these parties, too, had changed; the bourgeoisie of 1830 was very different from that of the preceding century. The political power still left to the aristocracy, and used by them to resist the pretensions of the new industrial bourgeoisie, became incompatible with the new economic interests. A fresh struggle with the aristocracy was necessary; it could end only in a victory of the new economic power. First, the Reform Act was pushed through, in spite of all resistance, under the impulse of the French Revolution of 1830. It gave to the bourgeoisie a recognized and powerful place in Parliament. Then the Repeal of the Corn Laws [a move toward free- trade], which settled, once and for all, the supremacy of the bourgeoisie, and especially of its most active portion, the manufacturers, over the landed aristocracy. This was the greatest victory of the bourgeoisie; it was, however, also the last it gained in its own exclusive interest. Whatever triumphs it obtained later on, it had to share with a new social power – first its ally, but soon its rival.

The industrial revolution had created a class of large manufacturing capitalists, but also a class – and a far more numerous one – of manufacturing work-people. This class gradually increased in numbers, in proportion as the industrial revolution seized upon one branch of manufacture after another, and in the same proportion it increased its power. This power it proved as early as 1824, by forcing a reluctant Parliament to repeal the acts forbidding combinations of workmen. During the Reform agitation, the workingmen constituted the Radical wing of the Reform party; the Act of 1832 having excluded them from the suffrage, the formulated their demands in the People's Charter, and constituted themselves, in opposition to the great bourgeois Anti-Corn Law party, into an independent party, the Chartists, the first working-men's party of modern times.

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[cynic-spirit]

Orchid Garden i

Fluff, excessively long

john wick x you

John Wick, born Jardani Jovonovich, stands as an icon in the clandestine world of professional assassins. His career, marked by a relentless string of high-profile eliminations, has earned him the moniker Baba Yaga, the Boogeyman. Known for his lethal precision, impeccable skill, and unwavering determination, John's name evokes both fear and respect across the international criminal underworld.

His demeanor is that of a man molded by necessity and survival. Stoic and serious, John rarely wastes words, letting his actions speak volumes. His few utterances are marked by a strong sense of obligation and commitment to his tasks, reflecting an unshakeable confidence in his abilities. Among his peers and adversaries, John’s reputation is unparalleled; many criminal organizations and assassins regard him with a mixture of awe and trepidation.

In combat, John is a force of nature, methodical and ruthless. His lethal efficiency is matched only by his focus, a trait that has allowed him to survive countless deadly encounters. Despite the violence that defines his existence, there is an underlying code he adheres to, a set of principles that govern his actions. This code, along with his formidable skills, has cemented his status as a legendary figure within the shadowy echelons of the criminal world.

John Wick found himself in a precarious situation, navigating the thin line between his alleged retirement and the ongoing suspicion from those who doubted his departure from the assassin’s life. Despite his claims of having hung up his guns for good, whispers of his continued involvement in clandestine operations persisted, threatening to drag him back into the dark abyss he sought to leave behind.

To dispel these suspicions and convince his skeptics that he was indeed living a normal life, John knew he had to create an illusion of domestic bliss. Having meticulously cultivated the image of a reformed man who indulged in mundane activities like gardening and dog training, it was now imperative to take the final, crucial step: he needed to present himself as a family man.

Yn, a linguistics professor on a work visa, found herself in a dire predicament. With her visa nearing its expiration, the prospect of returning to her homeland filled her with dread. Back home, her family had arranged for her to be married off for financial gain, a fate she was desperate to avoid. Determined to find a way to stay and continue her career, she turned to Winston, an old friend and mentor, for help.

Winston, ever resourceful and always willing to help those in need, suggested a solution that was both unconventional and risky. He proposed that she marry John Wick, on paper, to secure her legal status in the country. While it seemed like an extreme measure, it was the only viable option to prevent her from being forced into an unwanted marriage and to allow her to continue her work.

John Wick, despite his fearsome reputation, had always maintained a sense of loyalty and duty to those he considered friends. When Winston approached him with the proposition, John recognized the gravity of Yn's situation. Although initially hesitant, he agreed to the arrangement, understanding the importance of offering her a way out.

Yn and John met at Winston's bar, The Continental, to discuss the terms of their agreement. The contrast between them was stark: Yn, with her academic background and warm demeanor, and John, the stoic and feared assassin. Despite their differences, they found common ground in their shared need for survival and a desire to help one another.

The marriage was to be purely a formality, a legal arrangement to ensure Yn could stay in the country. They agreed to move in together, presenting a facade of a married couple while allowing Yn to continue her work at the university. For John, it was another layer of his carefully constructed normal life, further dispelling any lingering suspicions about his retirement from the assassin's world.

The transition was not without its challenges. Yn had to adapt to John's silent, disciplined lifestyle, while John had to make room for Yn's academic materials and her penchant for late-night reading and grading papers. Their coexistence was marked by a mutual respect and an unspoken understanding of the stakes involved.

Living under one roof, Yn gradually began to see beyond John's formidable exterior. She noticed the subtle ways he cared for his beloved dog, the quiet moments of reflection he often spent in his garden, and the meticulous nature with which he maintained his home. In return, John found himself appreciating Yn's dedication to her students and her passion for linguistics, a world so different from his own.

The charade required them to occasionally attend social events together, posing as a couple. Yn's warmth and John's silent strength created a convincing portrayal of a married life. Neighbors and acquaintances saw them as an unusual but genuine couple, further solidifying the illusion necessary for their mutual benefit.

Yn was unaware of the true nature of John Wick's past and present. The stoic and reserved assassin maintained an air of mystery, speaking to her only when necessary and keeping their interactions strictly minimal. This suited Yn just fine; she was a naturally reserved woman herself, content to focus on her work as a college professor without prying into John's affairs.

Their shared home was a quiet one. John would often disappear for hours, sometimes days, leaving Yn to her own devices. She spent her time preparing lectures, grading papers, and conducting research. The library became her sanctuary, a place where she could immerse herself in her academic pursuits and find solace in the familiar world of books and learning.

When John was home, their conversations were brief and functional, typically limited to household matters or essential communication. Yn appreciated his respect for her space and his lack of intrusion into her personal life. In turn, she reciprocated by not pressing him for details about his own comings and goings, understanding that some things were better left unspoken.

Despite the minimal interaction, there was an unspoken understanding between them. John ensured that Yn had everything she needed, from groceries to household repairs, maintaining a well-organized and efficient household. In return, Yn made sure to keep to her routine, respecting John's need for silence and privacy.

Occasionally, their paths would cross in the kitchen or living room, and they would exchange a few words—simple pleasantries or necessary updates. Yn would sometimes find herself curious about the enigmatic man she was married to, but she knew better than to ask questions. John's reticence spoke volumes, and she respected his boundaries.

In her classroom, Yn was in her element, engaging with her students and sharing her passion for linguistics. She found joy in teaching, her interactions with students providing a stark contrast to the silent companionship she shared with John at home. Her colleagues often remarked on her dedication and the warmth she brought to her lectures, unaware of the complex and unusual situation that awaited her each day when she returned home.

John, on the other hand, continued to navigate his dual existence. He kept his true activities hidden from Yn, maintaining the facade of a reformed man living a quiet life. Yet, there were moments when he found himself watching her from afar, intrigued by her quiet strength and dedication to her work. He admired her resilience and the way she managed to create a sense of normalcy in their shared space.

Over time, a mutual respect developed between them. Though their marriage was born out of necessity, they found a certain rhythm in their coexistence. Yn's presence provided John with a semblance of normal life, a reminder of what he had lost and what he was trying to protect. For Yn, John represented a shield against the unwanted fate that awaited her in her homeland, giving her the freedom to continue her academic pursuits.

Their lives, though intertwined, remained distinctly separate. Yn never questioned John's silences, and John never intruded on Yn's routines. In their own way, they found a balance, each finding solace in the other's presence without demanding more than the other could give.

As the days turned into months, the unusual arrangement became their new normal. Both Yn and John continued to navigate their separate worlds, bound by an unspoken agreement and a shared understanding. In their quiet, reserved companionship, they discovered a unique partnership, one that allowed them to exist peacefully within the boundaries they had set for themselves.

John, the ever-observant assassin, found himself increasingly drawn to Yn. Initially, their arrangement had been a matter of convenience, a means to an end for both of them. Yet, over time, John's keen eyes began to notice the finer details of Yn's presence and behavior.

Yn was undeniably beautiful, her quiet grace and natural elegance a stark contrast to the violence and chaos that had defined John's life for so long. She was hardworking, dedicated to her role as a professor, and never once complained about their unconventional living arrangement. Her intelligence shone through in the way she approached her work, and her kindness and gentleness were evident in her interactions with others.

As days turned into weeks, John found himself paying closer attention to Yn. He noticed how she hummed softly while preparing her lectures or cooking dinner, a melody that brought a rare sense of tranquility to their home. Her habits, once merely background noise, became points of fascination for him.

John observed how Yn meticulously organized her workspace, her books and papers always in perfect order. He saw the way she cared for her students, often spending late nights grading papers and preparing detailed feedback to help them improve. There was a quiet strength in her, a resilience that John couldn't help but admire.

One evening, as Yn sat at the dining table deep in thought, John noticed the way she puckered her lips, a subtle gesture that she made when lost in her work. It was a small, endearing habit that brought a faint smile to his usually stoic face. He began to look for it, finding a strange comfort in the familiar motion.

Despite his growing awareness of Yn, John maintained his distance, unsure of how to navigate these unfamiliar feelings. He was a man accustomed to solitude, his emotions carefully guarded behind a wall of stoicism. Yet, Yn's presence had a way of chipping away at that wall, revealing cracks he hadn't known existed.

John's protective instincts began to extend beyond mere necessity. He found himself ensuring that Yn had everything she needed, going out of his way to make her life easier. He fixed things around the house before she even had a chance to notice they were broken, stocked the pantry with her favorite foods, and made sure her space was always comfortable and welcoming.

Yn, for her part, remained oblivious to the depth of John's attention. She appreciated his quiet support and the stability he provided, but she was content to respect his boundaries and maintain the peaceful coexistence they had established.

As John continued to observe Yn, he began to wonder what it might be like to let her in, to share more than just the superficial aspects of his life. He knew it was a dangerous thought, one that could complicate their already delicate situation. Yet, the more he watched her, the more he found himself yearning for a connection that went beyond their pragmatic arrangement.

In the quiet moments of their shared life, John started to see a future he had never dared to imagine. It was a future where he could find peace, where he could leave behind the shadows of his past and build something real with Yn. But for now, he kept these thoughts to himself, content to watch and admire her from a distance, his respect and affection for her growing with each passing day.

As the days passed, John noticed more changes around his home, subtle yet undeniable signs of Yn's presence. The lawn behind his house, once a simple patch of grass, had transformed into a vibrant garden. Flowers of various colors and types began to bloom, adding a touch of beauty and life to the otherwise stark landscape. It was Yn's doing, her quiet way of leaving a mark on her surroundings.

John found himself drawn to the garden more often. He observed how Yn tended to the plants with care and patience, her hands deftly working the soil and nurturing the flowers. Orchids, he noticed, were her favorite. Their delicate petals and intricate patterns fascinated her, and she took great pride in cultivating them.

One evening, as the sun dipped below the horizon, John stood at the edge of the garden, watching Yn as she carefully watered the orchids. She hummed a soft tune, lost in the simple pleasure of tending to her plants. The sight was strangely soothing, a stark contrast to the chaos that usually defined John's life.

Yn looked up, catching John's gaze. She offered him a small, warm smile, her eyes reflecting the peace she found in the garden. "I hope you don't mind," she said softly. "I've always loved gardening. It helps me relax."

John shook his head, a rare hint of a smile touching his lips. "I don't mind," he replied. "It's nice."

They stood there for a moment, the silence between them comfortable and unforced. Yn returned to her work, and John lingered a while longer, the sight of her among the flowers a welcome respite from his usual concerns.

As the weeks went by, John began to help Yn in the garden. At first, his assistance was practical—carrying bags of soil, setting up irrigation, and fixing any broken tools. But gradually, he found himself enjoying the process. The repetitive tasks, the feel of the earth in his hands, and the quiet companionship with Yn provided a sense of calm he hadn't experienced in years.

Yn taught him about the different plants, her passion and knowledge evident in every word. She showed him how to care for the orchids, explaining their needs and the delicate balance required to keep them healthy. John listened intently, appreciating the way Yn's eyes lit up when she talked about her favorite flowers.

In the garden, they found a shared space where words were unnecessary. Their actions spoke volumes—John's careful tending to the plants, Yn's appreciative smiles, and the silent understanding that grew between them. The garden became a sanctuary for both of them, a place where they could escape from their respective worries and find a semblance of peace.

John's feelings for Yn continued to deepen. He admired her resilience, her dedication to her work, and the gentle kindness she showed in everything she did. The garden, once a mere patch of grass, had become a symbol of their evolving relationship, a testament to the quiet bond forming between them.

Though John still kept many of his thoughts and feelings to himself, he knew that Yn had become an important part of his life. She brought a sense of normalcy and beauty that he had long believed was out of reach. In the midst of their unusual arrangement, John found himself longing for more than just a façade of domestic life. He yearned for a genuine connection, one that he hoped could eventually blossom, much like the orchids Yn so lovingly tended.

Deep down, John constantly reminded himself that his marriage to Yn was purely a practical arrangement. The terms were clear: they were doing this to secure Yn's stay in the country and to help John maintain the façade of a normal life. Yet, as he found himself increasingly captivated by her presence, he struggled to maintain the emotional distance he had initially intended.

He often found himself in quiet reflection, convincing himself that this was a means to an end, not an emotional entanglement. Every time he felt a flicker of affection or noticed a new, endearing trait of Yn's, he would firmly remind himself of their original agreement. She was married to him only on paper, and their lives were intertwined solely out of necessity.

Still, it was becoming harder to ignore his growing feelings. Yn's presence brought a warmth and tranquility to his life that he hadn't experienced in years. Her gentle humming as she worked in the garden, her quiet dedication to her students, and the way she cared for the orchids—all these small, seemingly insignificant moments had begun to weave themselves into the fabric of his daily existence.

John's internal conflict became more pronounced with each passing day. He told himself that his actions—helping Yn with her garden, ensuring her comfort, and observing her habits—were merely to keep up appearances. But deep down, he knew the truth. He was falling in love with her, despite all his efforts to remain detached.

One evening, as John watched Yn from the kitchen window, tending to her beloved orchids, he felt a pang of something he hadn't allowed himself to feel in a long time: longing. He wanted to be more than just her husband on paper. He wanted to share more than just a practical arrangement.

Yet, the remnants of his old life and the shadows of his violent past held him back. He feared that allowing himself to fully embrace these feelings would put Yn in danger. His world was one of darkness and danger, a stark contrast to the light and peace Yn brought into his life.

As Yn turned and caught his gaze through the window, she smiled warmly at him, and John felt his resolve waver. He managed a small smile in return, but his mind was in turmoil. Could he ever truly allow himself to love her without putting her at risk? Could they ever have a real future together?

The practical side of him insisted that keeping their relationship strictly business was the safest option for both of them. But the part of him that had begun to hope for something more yearned to break free from the constraints of their agreement.

John knew he had to make a choice. He could continue to maintain the façade, keeping his feelings hidden and convincing himself that this was just a practical arrangement. Or he could take the risk, open his heart to Yn, and hope that together, they could navigate the complexities of his past and find a way to build a real future.

John knew, deep in his heart, that he had fallen in love with Yn. Despite his attempts to maintain the practical facade of their marriage, his feelings for her had grown undeniable. Yet, the world's deadliest assassin found himself grappling with an unfamiliar emotion: vulnerability.

Expressing his love was a daunting prospect. John had faced countless adversaries and navigated perilous situations, but the thought of confessing his feelings to Yn left him paralyzed with nerves. He had always been a man of action, preferring to let his deeds speak for him. The idea of putting his emotions into words was something he found profoundly unsettling.

So, for the time being, John kept his feelings to himself. He continued to observe Yn with a mixture of admiration and longing, finding solace in the quiet moments they shared. He marveled at her grace, her dedication, and the warmth she brought into his life. Each day, his love for her grew stronger, yet he remained silent, unable to summon the courage to express it.

John's internal struggle was a silent battle. He feared that revealing his true feelings might disrupt the delicate balance they had established or, worse, put Yn in danger. His past was a constant shadow, and he worried that involving her in his emotional world could jeopardize her safety.

Despite his reservations, he showed his affection in subtler ways. He made sure Yn's favorite flowers were always blooming in the garden, took care of household tasks without her needing to ask, and provided support in ways that demonstrated his deep respect and care. His actions spoke volumes, even if his words remained unspoken.

Yn, for her part, continued with her life, unaware of the depth of John's feelings. She appreciated the stability and support he provided and valued their quiet companionship. She sensed that something had changed, but she respected John's reticence and focused on her work and her garden.

John's love for Yn remained a guarded secret, a powerful force that shaped his actions and decisions. He knew that someday, he would need to find the courage to speak his heart. For now, though, he settled into the role of a silent admirer, hoping that, in time, the right moment would present itself for him to reveal the truth and, perhaps, find a way to build a future together.

John's love for Yn grew into a silent expression of care that manifested in the smallest, yet most meaningful ways. Without ever voicing his feelings, he began to make thoughtful changes around their home to enhance her comfort and happiness.

He noticed the clothes she wore and began subtly updating her wardrobe. New dresses, elegant heels, and cozy sweaters began appearing in her closet, each item chosen with careful consideration. John ensured that her favorite snacks and treats were always stocked in the kitchen, anticipating her cravings before she even mentioned them.

John's meticulous nature extended to every detail. He observed that Yn used a particular pen for her work, and without her noticing, he refilled it with her favorite ink, ensuring it was always ready for her next project. He took care of household chores, fixed things around the house, and made sure everything was in order before Yn even realized there was an issue.

Yn, absorbed in her own world and focused on her work and garden, often didn't notice the extent of John's gestures. She saw them as acts of kindness and graciousness, a sign of his respect and consideration. To her, John was a quiet, supportive presence who seemed to take care of her needs without fanfare or expectation.

She occasionally marveled at the little things—like the perfectly stocked pantry or the fresh clothes that seemed to appear just when she needed them—but she attributed them to John's generous nature. She appreciated the effort he put into making their living arrangement comfortable, never suspecting that these gestures were born from a deeper affection.

John's actions were his way of expressing the love he couldn't yet verbalize. Each thoughtful detail, from the clothes to the ink in her pen, was a reflection of his feelings. It was his way of showing that he cared, even when words failed him.

The small, consistent acts of kindness became a quiet testament to his affection. While Yn remained unaware of the full extent of John's feelings, she sensed that their arrangement was more than just a practical necessity. John's gestures spoke of a deeper connection, one that was expressed not through words but through the meticulous care he took in ensuring her happiness.

In this delicate dance of unspoken love and silent support, John found a bittersweet solace. He hoped that one day he would find the courage to reveal his heart, but for now, he was content to show his love through the everyday acts of kindness that filled their home with a gentle warmth and unspoken understanding.

Yn remained blissfully unaware of the profound impact she was having on John. Wrapped up in her own world of academia and gardening, she focused on her work, her students, and the small joys she found in tending to her plants. The subtle changes John made around their home—new clothes, stocked snacks, and thoughtful details—were to her just tokens of kindness and generosity.

She saw John as a quiet, supportive presence who maintained a respectful distance. His thoughtful actions were appreciated, but she never suspected they were driven by anything beyond a genuine desire to help. To her, their arrangement was a practical one, a mutually beneficial setup that allowed her to continue her work while avoiding an unwanted fate back home.

Yn continued to immerse herself in her daily routines, grateful for the comfort and stability John provided. She enjoyed her time in the garden, where she found solace and peace. The small, considerate touches—like the pen refilled with her favorite ink or the neatly organized pantry—were seen as part of the unspoken agreement they had made, rather than indications of deeper feelings.

John’s growing affection for Yn went unnoticed. She didn’t see the subtle signs of his care or the way his actions were carefully designed to bring her happiness. To her, John’s acts of kindness were simply part of the dynamic of their unusual arrangement, a reflection of his nature rather than a signal of his emotional investment.

In her interactions with him, Yn remained courteous and appreciative but did not probe into his personal life or feelings. She respected his silence and privacy, believing it to be part of his personality. She was content with the companionship they shared and continued to focus on her work and the things that brought her joy.

John’s unspoken love, expressed through his meticulous care and attention, remained a private sentiment. Yn’s obliviousness to its depth allowed John to continue his silent devotion, navigating his feelings through actions rather than words. For now, this delicate balance maintained their peaceful coexistence, each finding solace in their shared yet unspoken understanding.

For John, Yn had become more than just a part of his life; she had become an object of profound admiration and reverence. To him, Yn was like a goddess who had appeared in his world and saved him from the darkness of his solitary existence. Her presence, though unassuming and unaware of the impact she had on him, had transformed his life in ways he had not anticipated.

John observed Yn with a kind of awe that went beyond mere affection. The way she moved with grace through their home, the calmness she brought to the garden, and the dedication she showed to her work—all of these aspects seemed almost divine to him. He saw her as a beacon of light in his otherwise shadowed life, a gentle force that counterbalanced the violence and chaos he had endured for so long.

Every gesture of hers, no matter how small, was significant to John. Her humming as she worked in the garden, the way she pored over her academic papers, and the quiet moments she spent lost in thought—all of these became sacred in his eyes. He cherished these moments, understanding them as gifts that illuminated his world.

John’s admiration was so profound that it bordered on reverence. He felt that Yn had given him a reprieve from the loneliness that had defined much of his life. Her presence was a source of solace and purpose, a reminder that there was beauty and peace even in the most unexpected places. The way she had seamlessly integrated into his life, bringing warmth and calm to a home that had previously been defined by solitude, was nothing short of miraculous to him.

In the quiet of his thoughts, John often reflected on how Yn had become his sanctuary. He viewed her not just as a partner in their practical arrangement but as a savior who had provided him with a semblance of normalcy and hope. His feelings were a mixture of deep respect, gratitude, and a love so profound that it was almost sacred.

Though he kept these emotions hidden, they influenced everything he did. His meticulous care for Yn, his thoughtful gestures, and his silent support were all manifestations of this deep-seated reverence. To John, Yn had become a goddess of sorts, embodying the salvation he had never believed he could find.

John had long ago familiarized himself with Yn's daily routine. Her days were marked by a series of predictable actions, a comforting rhythm that had become an integral part of their shared existence. Each morning, she woke early, slipping out of bed with a quiet grace that never disturbed his rest. She would make her way to the kitchen, where she brewed a pot of coffee, the rich aroma filling the house. John had observed that Yn had a particular way of sipping her coffee: a small sip, a pause to savor the flavor, and then another sip as she read through her emails or papers.

After her coffee, Yn would prepare for her day, dressing in a carefully chosen outfit, often a combination of professional attire that was both elegant and practical. She would then gather her things and head off to the college where she taught, her day filled with lectures, meetings, and grading assignments. By late afternoon, she would return home, her steps slightly wearier but her spirit undiminished.

Typically, Yn’s first stop upon returning was the kitchen, where she would make herself a light snack and another cup of coffee. She would then sit at the dining table, flipping through her notes or reading a book. Only after this quiet interlude would she venture out to her beloved garden, tending to her plants with the same meticulous care she applied to her work.

However, today was different. As soon as Yn walked through the door, John sensed a change in her demeanor. There was a tension in her posture, a subtle heaviness in her steps. Instead of her usual routine, she bypassed the kitchen entirely and headed straight for the garden.

John watched her through the window, his senses heightened by a vague unease. Yn moved among the flowers with a distracted air, her usual serenity replaced by an unfamiliar restlessness. She knelt by the orchids, her hands moving mechanically as she watered them.

Concern gnawed at John. He had come to know Yn’s habits so well that any deviation felt significant. He decided to approach her, driven by a need to understand what was troubling her.

Quietly, he stepped out into the garden, the evening air cool against his skin. He walked over to where Yn was crouched, her back to him. "Yn," he said softly, careful not to startle her. "Is everything all right?"

She stiffened slightly at his voice but did not turn to face him immediately. "It’s nothing, John. Just... nothing," she replied, her voice barely more than a whisper.

John’s instincts told him she was lying. Her tone, the way she avoided his gaze, and the unusual change in her routine all pointed to something being amiss. But he knew better than to push her. Yn was a reserved person, and pressing her for answers would only make her retreat further.

"All right," he said gently, respecting her need for space. "If you need anything, I'm here."

Yn gave a small nod, but her focus remained on the plants before her. John lingered for a moment longer, hoping she might open up, but when she didn’t, he turned and walked back to the house. Inside, he felt a growing determination to find out what was wrong. He couldn’t bear the thought of Yn being troubled and not being able to help her.

John returned to the kitchen, his mind racing. He considered all the possibilities: something at work, an issue with her visa, or perhaps a personal matter she hadn’t shared. He decided to start with what he could control. He checked the kitchen for any signs of what might be wrong, making sure everything was in order, hoping to find some clue.

Then, he moved to her study area, scanning her papers and notes for anything unusual. He found nothing out of place, but the sense of unease lingered. Finally, he went to his own study, determined to figure out what was troubling Yn.

As John sat at his desk, he realized how deeply he had come to care for her. It wasn't just about maintaining their façade anymore; it was about her well-being. He knew that whatever was bothering Yn, he would find a way to help, even if she wasn’t ready to tell him yet.

John was sitting in his study, still trying to piece together what might be troubling Yn. The quiet evening was broken by the faint sound of Yn’s voice from another room. She was talking on the phone, her tone hushed and strained. John’s finely tuned instincts as an assassin kicked in, and he found himself listening intently, picking up on every nuance of her conversation.

"...Diana, I just don’t know what to do," Yn was saying. "He's been making me so uncomfortable. I've tried to ignore it, hoping he would stop, but today... today he crossed a line."

John's grip tightened around the pen he was holding. He recognized the name Diana. Yn often spoke to her, a colleague from the college. Diana had always seemed supportive and trustworthy.

Yn continued, her voice trembling slightly. "He’s another professor. He’s been trying to flirt with me for weeks, and I’ve brushed it off, but today... he touched me. It was just a moment, but it felt so wrong. I... I didn’t know how to react. I just left as quickly as I could."

John’s heart pounded in his chest. Fury began to build inside him, a cold, controlled rage that he hadn’t felt in a long time. The idea that someone had made Yn feel unsafe, that someone had dared to touch her without her consent, was intolerable. His protective instincts flared up, and the darkness of his past, the skills he had tried to leave behind, surged to the forefront of his mind.

"...I know, Diana," Yn continued, her voice barely above a whisper. "But I don’t want to cause trouble. I just want to do my job and be left alone. I can’t afford to lose this position, especially now..."

John could hear the fear and frustration in her voice, and it only fueled his determination. This wasn’t just about protecting her from discomfort; it was about safeguarding her dignity and ensuring she felt safe in every aspect of her life.

He stood up quietly, moving closer to the door to hear more clearly. Every word she spoke cut through him like a knife, each one a stark reminder of his failure to protect her from this threat. The man who had violated Yn's personal space, who had dared to touch her, had no idea of the storm he had unleashed.

John waited until the conversation ended, listening as Yn exchanged a few more reassurances with Diana before hanging up. He could hear the weariness in her movements, the subtle sound of her feet shuffling as she probably made her way back to her study.

He knew he had to act, but he had to be careful. Yn didn’t know about his past, about what he was capable of. He couldn’t afford to scare her or reveal too much. Yet, he couldn’t let this slide. The professor who had harassed her needed to be dealt with, and John knew just how to handle it without leaving a trace.

Stepping back into the shadows, he formulated a plan. He would gather information about this professor, find out everything he could about him, and ensure that he never posed a threat to Yn again. John’s old skills, honed through years of being one of the deadliest assassins, would come into play. He would handle this with the precision and stealth that had earned him his fearsome reputation.

As he moved through the house, making sure not to alert Yn to his intentions, his mind was a whirl of controlled fury and meticulous planning. Yn was more than just a part of his life now; she was the light that had saved him from his darkest days. He would protect that light at all costs, even if it meant reverting to the shadows of his past.

The next steps were clear: he would gather intel, identify the man, and make sure he understood the consequences of his actions. John would ensure that Yn could go back to her routine, her peace undisturbed, her safety guaranteed. And he would do it all without her ever needing to know the lengths he went to protect her.

For now, he reigned in his anger, focusing instead on the task at hand. Yn had given him a reason to fight again, and he would not fail her. As he set his plan into motion, John felt the cold determination of his old self return, but this time, it was fueled by love and a desire to protect the woman who had become his everything.

John knew exactly what to do. Once Yn had fallen asleep for the night, he quietly slipped out of the house, his steps silent and purposeful. The moonlight cast shadows that danced across the yard, but John moved with the confidence of a man who had navigated darkness his entire life.

Finding the professor wasn’t difficult. John had already done his research, using his old network of contacts to gather information. The man’s name, address, and routine were all laid out before him like pieces on a chessboard. John moved swiftly, his mind focused and cold, his heart burning with the need to protect Yn.

He arrived at the professor’s house, a modest two-story building in a quiet neighborhood. The street was deserted, the only sounds the rustling of leaves and the distant hum of traffic. John approached the house with the stealth of a predator, his movements fluid and silent. He picked the lock with ease, slipping inside without a sound.

The interior was dark, but John’s eyes quickly adjusted. He moved through the rooms like a shadow, his senses alert. He found the professor in the study, slumped over a desk littered with papers and empty coffee cups. The man looked up, startled, but before he could react, John was upon him.

John’s hand clamped over the professor’s mouth, silencing any cry for help. His other hand pressed a blade to the man’s throat, the cold metal a deadly promise. The professor’s eyes widened in terror, his body trembling beneath John’s iron grip.

“Listen carefully,” John whispered, his voice a low growl. “You’re going to resign from your position at the college. You’re going to disappear, and you’re never going to come near Yn again. Do you understand?”

The professor nodded frantically, his eyes pleading. John’s grip tightened, the blade pressing harder against the man’s skin. “If I ever hear that you’ve bothered her again, I’ll find you. And next time, there won’t be a warning.”

With that, John released him, stepping back and watching as the professor gasped for breath, his hands shaking. John’s presence was a looming threat, a silent reminder of the consequences of his actions. The professor quickly began to pack his things, his movements frantic and disorganized.

John stood there, a dark sentinel, ensuring that the man followed his instructions. Once he was satisfied that the professor understood the gravity of the situation, he turned and left as silently as he had arrived. He walked back to his car, the night air cool against his skin, his mind already shifting back to Yn.

By the time John returned home, the first light of dawn was beginning to creep over the horizon. He slipped back into the house, making sure everything was as he had left it. Yn was still asleep, her breathing steady and calm. John felt a sense of relief wash over him, knowing that she was safe.

The next day at the college, Yn went about her routine, unaware of the events that had transpired. She noticed the absence of the professor, hearing whispers among the staff about his sudden resignation. It was a mystery to them, but to John, it was a mission accomplished.

The man was never heard from again. John’s actions ensured that Yn’s peace was restored, her safety guaranteed. She continued with her life, oblivious to the lengths John had gone to protect her. To her, he remained the quiet, supportive presence she had come to rely on.

John, for his part, returned to their home, his heart filled with a fierce protectiveness. He knew that his love for Yn had driven him to act, and he would continue to do whatever it took to keep her safe. In the quiet of their home, he found solace in knowing that she was free from harm, and he vowed to remain her silent guardian, watching over her with a love that was as deep as it was unspoken.

n was perplexed by the sudden disappearance of the professor who had been making her life difficult. She had confided in Diana, hoping for some advice, but never expected such a swift and definitive resolution. The news of his abrupt resignation spread through the college like wildfire, leaving everyone baffled. Yn couldn’t fathom what had happened. She had never mentioned the harassment to anyone but Diana, and now the man was gone without a trace.

In her mind, there was no logical explanation. She couldn’t even begin to imagine the connection between John and the professor’s sudden departure. John Wick, to her, was just a man who had offered her a lifeline in a foreign country. Their marriage, though on paper, was a practical arrangement—one that allowed her to stay and continue her work, and perhaps helped him maintain appearances for his investors.

From her perspective, John was reserved and kind, but distant. He didn’t talk much, rarely engaging in conversations beyond the necessary pleasantries. He was meticulous in his habits, and while he often showed small acts of consideration, like ensuring her favorite snacks were stocked or fixing her ink pen, these gestures seemed to be part of his orderly nature rather than indications of deeper feelings.

Yn continued her daily routine, grateful for the newfound peace at work but troubled by the mystery of the professor’s resignation. She wondered if it was a coincidence or if perhaps Diana had somehow intervened. But even Diana seemed surprised by the abruptness of the man’s departure.

One evening, as Yn sat in the garden, tending to her beloved orchids, she found herself lost in thought. The garden had become her sanctuary, a place where she could reflect and find solace. The air was filled with the sweet scent of blooming flowers, and the gentle rustling of leaves provided a soothing background melody.

John watched her from the kitchen window, his heart aching with unspoken emotions. He could see the questions in her eyes, the lingering confusion. He wished he could tell her everything, explain how he had protected her, but he knew it would only complicate their delicate arrangement. He feared revealing his true nature, the darkness that lurked beneath his calm exterior. Instead, he chose to remain silent, hoping that his actions had spoken loud enough.

As Yn watered the orchids, she tried to push her doubts aside. She reminded herself that John had been nothing but kind and respectful towards her. He had never pried into her personal life, never made her feel uncomfortable. In fact, his quiet presence had been a source of stability. She felt a growing sense of gratitude towards him, though she couldn’t fully understand the depth of his care.

That night, as they sat together at the dinner table, the silence between them was comfortable, yet charged with unspoken thoughts. John observed Yn with his usual attentiveness, noticing the slight furrow in her brow, the way she absentmindedly twirled her fork. He knew she was still puzzling over the professor’s resignation.

“Yn,” he said softly, breaking the silence. “Is everything all right?”

She looked up, startled by his sudden question. “Yes, John. Everything is fine,” she replied, forcing a small smile. “Just... a lot on my mind, I suppose.”

He nodded, his expression unreadable. “If there’s anything you need, you can always tell me.”

Yn felt a warmth spread through her at his words. Despite the distance between them, she realized that John genuinely cared for her well-being. “Thank you, John. I appreciate it.”

After dinner, as she prepared for bed, Yn’s mind wandered back to the mystery of the professor. She couldn’t shake the feeling that there was more to the story, but without any evidence, she had no choice but to accept the situation as it was.

John lay awake long after Yn had fallen asleep, his mind racing. He replayed the events of the previous night in his head, the adrenaline still coursing through his veins. He had acted out of love, a fierce need to protect Yn from any harm. Yet, he knew that his actions would remain hidden, a secret he would carry alone.

In the quiet darkness of their home, John made a silent vow to continue protecting Yn, to be her guardian from the shadows. He would do whatever it took to ensure her safety and happiness, even if it meant keeping his true self concealed. For now, that was enough. Knowing that she was safe and at peace, John allowed himself to drift into a restless sleep, his dreams filled with the image of Yn’s gentle smile.

Part 2

[desognthinking]

the pier. 9.3k. (or, more from the haunted house designers au.)

ava & (her new) co. have one and a half years to construct three groundbreaking, mindblowing, prestige haunted houses around the country, all in time for halloween. this is scouting/teambuilding trip numero uno. it's not going well so far.

---

Ava sees her at the end of the pier, a dark figure in the already-dark; a smudge of barely-moving ink on the line between wind and water. Barely, indeed – wavering less than the yearning swallow and swoop of the waves interrupted by pillars of wood, and, further back, stone. 

At night, after everything’s shut, this place is quiet until the fishermen get out in the early morning. In the off-season, even more so. Rain slings down frequently, and it’s not warm enough for balmy walks by the rocks. Not many come out, if any. Ava’s one.

She calls out as she walks down the planks, only thinking belatedly that perhaps she might not want to be disturbed. Out here behind the motel, unmoving under the preliminary drizzle of rain, embraced and cocooned by temperamentally warping air. It is, after all, that tremulous transitory phase between spring and summer that borrows its faces from both, and switches its masks sharply in the slit-time of blinks.

Bian lian, Beatrice had murmured, not even looking up from her laptop. Face-changing, literally, in Sichuan opera. A flick of a wrist, a deft flourish, and an elaborate face falls and reforms in the fraction of a second. 

This was in the motel’s breakfast room, the one with the dubiously cleaned burgundy felt chairs where they served a  modest continental breakfast. Mostly cleared out after said breakfast, the air was stained with lingering cigarette smoke from the lounge next door, and the smell of cheap canned ham. The plastic display vases on each table had been stowed away, and in their meager place someone – probably Beatrice – had stuck a crinkly, disposable plastic bottle containing a bunch of freshly picked yellow flowers.

It was not an especially private space, what with the pale pink bellies sunning themselves right outside the glass panels, but it wasn’t as if the conversation had progressed to anything especially private. Legally speaking. Or productive, for that matter.

For the fast forty-five minutes Ava and Lilith had been busy prodding, pacing, and sending small metaphorical pockets of firework powder across the room to burst and splatter all over each others’ skin. Skating them like over wet ice so they would knock against each others’ ankles and bruise upon detonation. Camila, who’d been trying, at least, to keep the situation under control, had gone to pick out some maps and free guides, leaving them simmering in the quickly-warming confines of the space.

A lot of trivial inconsequential things, and a lot of hard, serrated words. First it was an argument of how transformative a depiction of folklore ought to be, theoretically, to balance originality and faithfulness. Then they’d snapped at each other over their personal choices of A24 horror, and Ava’s awfully ignorant lack of exposure to some obscure ‘60s Romanian indie production that Lilith really liked.

And in the corner Beatrice was curled up into a chair, laptop sitting on the flat plane formed by the side of her folded knees. 

She was strangely quiet, considering the poorly-veiled spats being undertaken just a couple feet away. By Beatrice Standards, however, this was possibly normal, as Ava was learning. When, riled up, she’d gone around to get a glass of water from the lightly stained dispenser, she’d found her watching an unlisted YouTube video from a couple years ago featuring an in-house presentation Ava had given at Disney. It was about scary rides and storytelling; translating horror into immersive park experiences. A singular earbud was stuffed into her left ear. 

She didn’t make any attempt to minimize or pause the video as Ava went by. 

“What are you doing?” she blurted, interrupting Lilith going on and on about something or another.

Beatrice hummed. “Camila sent it to me.”

Ava waited, but that seemed to be the end of Beatrice’s explanation. Pixelated tiny Ava on the laptop screen sputtered and spread her arms out as the powerpoint slide behind her belly-rolled to its successor in a kitschy transition.

“Wait,” Beatrice said, before Ava could awkwardly walk the rest of the way to the dispenser. She bent down to scoop something up. “Here.” She held up a can of Pepsi to Ava, still cold enough that the scant condensation on it had not yet beaded up into little pearls. Ava saw that underneath her chair she had stowed a rectangular cooler box of canned drinks, with two or three more cans left in it. 

Ava took the can with a soft thanks. 

Beatrice quirked her head and murmured something that sounded like you’re welcome.

Beatrice said the damnedest things sometimes, amidst her quiet. Appropriate, sure, but unexpected unless you were looking out closely for the tell-tale flicker at the corner of her eyes, a horizontal dart-to and sometimes a shutter-quick sly twitch of her mouth that indicated she was preparing for an interjection.

Amused, if hardly full-blown entertained. Sharp, but never cruel. Indirect, and three layers deep. Oftentimes three planets away. Ava found it less than scrutable, and more than fascinating.

Bian lian, when they were talking about transitions between spaces and narrative divisions within Houses, which was a convoluted way to say that Lilith was getting evasive over the psychology and philosophy of putting fucking walls and doors in a haunted house. Just when the pressure was about to burst, Beatrice had piped up, and Lilith had turned around, her fists gradually unclenching. 

Later, Ava repeatedly scrubbed back and forth through the timeline of a video, mesmerized and marveling by the Chinese art. A minor flourish, or a glance of a cheek and – thwp – an entranced audience guided to look wherever the artist led.

The changing of faces. The fuzzy in-between of seasons. Here on the coast it is even more stark, this time of year. 

She calls out to Beatrice as she walks down the planks, and Beatrice turns around. Her hair is bunned up loosely, low and unresistant to ocean-blown stragglers

Ava walks closer when Beatrice turns around, calmly, and hovers a distance away so that Beatrice can keep a cushion of space between them, if she likes.

“It’s drizzling.”

“I know.” Beatrice doesn’t take Ava up on the offer to –leave? To chase Ava back in and away? To reassure Ava that she’d prefer to stay out here, alone? She pauses, though. Looks up, as if there was anything to see up in the sky, too dark for the clouds to distinguish themselves in plumes or pillows. Ava looks up too, just in case, but it’s a mess of splotched black-gray. 

Over their heads the apertures in the sky are widening into gulfs, and the dribble of water turns into sheets. 

Like the crepe streamers they used to hang up on the doorways in St Michael’s, fluttering maddeningly out of reach. The nuns had thought it was some kind of sick kindness to drape them from low enough beams that their papery ends would lap at and blow into Ava’s face as they wheeled her back and forth down the corridor like the monotone automation of a fucking metronome. Each blue and yellow and pink streamer touched her cheeks like a slap. Ava’d wanted to grip them with her teeth and pull them down. 

The rain, Ava reminds herself, is cold and uncaring and holds no such malice. 

Beatrice keeps staring into the ocean. “It’s beautiful out here.”

There’s words on the tip of Ava’s tongue but she holds them there and thinks; considers for once, before replying. Something about Beatrice, without saying anything aloud, asks this of her. If she recites a pun it must be good.

“It is.”

Beatrice hums. She turns her head back and inclines her head slightly as she regards Ava. Ava holds her breath. 

It occurs to her faintly that she’s never spoken one-on-one with Beatrice, ever. Of her three new coworkers, Beatrice feels the most faraway. She refolds Ava’s strewn, barbeque sauce-stained maps while Ava’s in the restroom, and plugs her wired earphones into a Spotify daylist full of musicians Ava’s never heard of. She has a phone widget on her homescreen tracking migratory birds,  and she goes out to the pier alone under ten-thirty p.m. rain. 

Ava studied Beatrice’s folders – all their folders – back at the office, once this whole thing was confirmed. Before even they’d found out. It felt almost prying, in a way, even if Suzanne herself had invited her to sit at the desk and passed her the papers. Sure, the Houses they detailed were long public; analyzed and reviewed to death, but this was different. This seemed private. Creativity and creation, to Ava at least, were wild creatures; bounding and bold on the outside, raw and sensitive and prone to clawing themselves apart on the inside.

She switched on the reading light and thumbed through the dossiers. Lilith’s had pen gashes through each iteration, angry and decisive, her documentation otherwise sparse and terse. Camila’s included scrapbooks of fabric and postcard-sized paintings, image references taped on each page.

The shells that Beatrice left behind were schematics and scripts in perfect order and format. Comments typed out formally along margins left deliberately blank, and mechanics illustrated in labeled figures, which were different from tables and clarified as such in the appendix. Without effusion or exaggeration, and with only harshly limited information to be gleaned from a couple of drily humorous notes thrown unexpectedly into the handwritten rightmost column of her change logs.

Amendment for review: section 7d entryway from section 7c now to be approached from visitors’ 9 o’clock, she’d written. Do remind reviewer S. Masters to be awake for it.

Said jester herself stands with her back still facing Ava, just out of reach, on the pier. Her hands dig into the pockets of her oversized windbreaker as her feet dig into the wood under them. Rogue strands and locks of dark hair follow the course of the wind. It’s beautiful out here, she says, just loud enough over the waves for Ava to catch.

Beatrice takes one and a half steps, precisely, so that she’s partially, intentionally, facing Ava. She says something, blown to the wind – about the facts of this place, maybe. Ava hears the name of the town crunched around the round Rs of Beatrice’s accent, and feels her feet willed, as if by that same wind, to step closer. 

Closer, closer, until she’s but an arm’s length from Beatrice, close enough she could reach out and adjust on her shoulder the crooked hood of her windbreaker, long blown off the top of her head. 

Then Beatrice turns back to face the pier, and she cranes her neck to look at Ava wordlessly, and Ava finally, finally, steps up beside her.

They got to town by car yesterday afternoon, a coastal place long salted by tourism when the tides were right, and only recently rejuvenated very slightly in biology circles when a couple of the further-flung waters got identified as hotspots for particularly unique marine ecosystems. 

Beatrice tells her there’s a small new outpost set up from newly-won grant money, although it’s far away from where they’re staying. She glances at Ava. There was a book at the information center, she quickly explains.

Ava knows what she’s talking about – said information center is a ten-minute walk inland, in the town center, and it’s more of a weatherbeaten cubicle with yellowed pamphlets and dusty books than a living, breathing tourist pitstop. It’s battered on all sides by the elements and seems to be standing only because it’s too difficult to dislodge from where it’s wedged between an ice cream shop and a postbox. Beatrice, all the same, peered through every peeling poster on the wall. 

They’d gone there yesterday after picking up some groceries while exploring the little town. Ava reached for an easy word to describe the town and found ‘fatigued’, and then she thought some more and concluded that it was drowned in a weird heavy-light emptiness. 

The time of the year did it no favors. Nobody goes island hopping in the rain, and it’s not dive season at the reefs. The fishing spots are browbeaten for everyone but the seasoned local fishermen, so the commercial tourist pontoons are netted up and fenced off. 

As a matter of fact, it had been so hard to get a ride to the caves, Ava had had to pay extra out of her own pocket. Lilith, of course, had nonetheless taken offense at her ‘poor planning’. Whatever. They have a ride. It leaves before dawn.

Now, side by side, Ava can’t tell if Beatrice is swaying lightly or rocking to the rhythm of the waves, or if it's just an illusion of movement on the pier.

“Sadly a lot of places are shut,” Ava states the obvious, “but at least the rooms were cheap.”

Beatrice tips her weight onto her heels, and this time Ava’s sure of it. It’s easy and balanced. 

“No,” she says, after some thought. “I didn’t know much about this town before, but it was a good choice to come here. Especially now during the offseason, when it’s quieter.” 

She skews her head oceanward as if trying to listen for something, and Ava follows suit, engrossed to the point of almost being bowled over by the jar of a wave hitting the wooden poles of the pier with a crunching thud. 

“It’s strange,” Beatrice says very seriously, “to be congested in so much stillness and silence.” 

There is nothing still or silent about the roar of the waves and the rain.

Beatrice’s work, Ava knows, has been increasingly skewing towards exploring a sort of apprehension and anxiety generated by the opposite of a traditionally suffocating enclosed-space experience. It’s strongest in her recent projects; Ava can spot it immediately – bleakly open space, elements of naturalism and realism manipulated with great technical care to subvert expectations and stir up something deeply uncomfortable and primal. 

Three years ago, Supermarket Massacre had had her fingerprints all over it. The year after that, the award-winning Aquarium, with Lilith and Camila and that one guy Vincent who’d apparently slacked off then ran off. Last year she took point on her own set for the first time. And in all three, like a bloody fingerprint, the opening scenes – the first sets located immediately past the entrances –  were all so characteristically, deceptively normal. Regular, in an unsettling, skin-crawling way. This was only the prelude, of course. Slowly the knife would be driven in and twisted unforgivingly.

It’s funny, because Beatrice insists, time and time again, that she doesn’t see herself as an artist or a creator. She wrote a guest article on a blog describing herself as merely an engineer organizing a space and Ava wryly thought the prose itself, elegant and clear, had given away the lie. What does a haunted house mean? How do we execute a nightmare into something feasible and tangible? Questions that had a myriad of answers and I do not believe we have yet exhausted them. There are many themes and concepts I’d like to reinvigorate beyond their traditional face value.

Subtlety, Ava sees, in last year’s factory-set After Hours. Movement, in increasingly sophisticated ways, beyond simple towering puppetry or rattling machinery or killer clowns scaring people into scurrying down claustrophobic pre-marked corridors. Soundscapes and landscapes that teeter on the brink of too-real, sped up or slowed down or taken one inch rightwards. Of course, unsettlingly unassuming opening scenes. Fear, Beatrice wrote, must be given time and space to breathe and self-propagate.

In a way, if this weekend getaway is a scouting trip less concerned with laying down concrete narrative groundwork and cultural research, and more concerned with opening a door into how each of Beatrice, Lilith and Camila see the world creatively, this bare coastal town is right up Beatrice’s alley. 

The least supernatural place in the world. And yet in Beatrice’s eyes it is a town that has dotted perforation lines across its torso tempting her endlessly to tear it open to unearth something deeper and darker that adheres to the inner surfaces of its pleura.

She speaks too-softly but almost excitedly against the thunder. Underneath the reserved, controlled demeanor there’s a glint of a thirst and challenge hidden underneath her tongue. 

“The park in the middle of town,” she says, “desire paths all through the long grass and not a footfall on the real ones. There’s a tape that stretches across the pavement with a warning sign dated two months ago.”  Her hands have crept up their sides to prod out at waist level, tangling and twirling in the air like dancing with the rain. Or making the rain dance and twist around them. 

They freeze in awareness, and the rain slaps down on them. 

“Go on”, says Ava. It comes out like a request, coiled up at the end and disappearing into the air.

She thinks Beatrice smiles a tiny bit at that, her eyes unreadable, but she doesn’t go on, and Ava is disappointed. 

“Well,” Beatrice’s tone is steady and tells Ava that the door is shut for now, “perhaps we’ll speak more about it after the caves.”

She says this matter-of-factly as if they’re all going to come back on that boat after sunset, sit down cross-legged in a circle with notepads and laptops, and excitedly paint a mural across the ceiling with lime-sharp ideas and skin-crawling narratives. This isn’t going to happen. Lilith nearly put a fist through the glass panels of a cabinet mere hours earlier. 

Beatrice is usually the most brutally pragmatic and unsentimental of the four, and here she is talking about the future like the present is a bubble that will undoubtedly pop and reveal a rose-tinted world. Ava doesn’t know what to think of it.

The coldness of the rain is starting to gnaw at and numb her fingertips. She breathes, strange and short. The words come out too easily: “You were watching my presentation from two years ago.”

Beatrice nods. “I was, yes. I finished it over afternoon break.”

“Can I ask why?” 

When Beatrice turns, Ava can’t see her face all that clearly. “Well, I wanted to know your principles and approach to designing fear experiences.” In the first flutter-crack of her composure Beatrice coughs twice. “It seemed, at least, something productive to do. And it’s important if we are to work closely together.”

The wind, walloped and fickle so that the rain beating down on Ava’s face seems to change its direction of attack every ten seconds or so, does not seem to pull them closer together, like in fanciful, romantic stories. It just tugs Ava about at her shoulders and knees like a ragdoll and makes her dizzy.

Beatrice pulls her jacket close. She gestures for Ava, shivering harder, to pull her sleeves down her elbows. Ava hadn’t even noticed, and does so now, but she’s still cold – damp-cold then air-frozen from salty windspray. She puts her hands as far as they can go in her pockets. Shifts her weight.

Beatrice’s face twists with – perplexion? Concern? 

In the meager light Ava sees her glance back behind them and cock her head towards the light from which they came, questioning. 

Ava shakes her head, and Beatrice doesn’t push. She doesn’t sigh out loud but her shoulders follow the trajectory of its motion as she peels off her outer layer, quickly and without fanfare. Underneath she is wearing a thick hoodie that only now begins to darken everywhere except for its already-exposed hood. Clearly, she’d planned to come out to walk, unlike Ava. 

Who’d stumbled out late after dinner, full of thoughts that had nowhere to stew and nowhere to run.

They’d had a big fight over the dinner table, boiled over from where it had been bubbling the last two days. There was a slamming of fists on the table, and Ava had torn her napkin from the tablecloth and went to sit alone at the bartop. 

What exactly do you want? What’s your structure? Churning in her head like an infinitely turning contraption, mixed fiercely over the anger of being asked to prove it and being goaded harder and harder towards standards that Camila and Beatrice never seemed to be asked to meet.

Full of feelings and other weird, warped rumblings that were difficult to thoroughly unpick as usual. And the messy sensation of all the air in her chest compressed from pushing frustratedly and hopelessly against a wall. Hoping the nebulous concept of Outside might put it into place or at least shove it all into boxes for her to sort out later. Ava, head hot and too-bright, lightheaded and needing to have it tamped down by the physical weight of darkness, had stumbled out into the night. She’d thought only of draining off the alcohol slightly and having it evaporate, along with everything else, from her scalp into the cool air.

It has, now, in any case. 

Burned out rapidly from the initial buzz, and then she’d seen Beatrice at the edge of the ocean. 

Beatrice holds her windbreaker out,  pinched between her fingers. Her hands curl neatly on both sides over the shoulders, and she brushes it once, twice, to chase away the little droplets accumulating on the water resistant surface. They smooth away into a flat of smaller droplets, and she offers it up to Ava.

“Here,” she says softly, “I have a few layers on already.” 

Ava hesitates, but Beatrice simply dusts off some water again and turns it with the change in the direction of the wind so that the rain doesn’t get inside. “Before the lining becomes soaked,” she urges in a whisper. 

The windbreaker is soft and lined with fleece, and it slips from Beatrice’s hands as Ava takes it and turns away to shrug it on. Beatrice watches her as she pulls her hands out of the sleeves; it is large already on Beatrice’s frame, and on Ava it is almost swallowing, like a ghost encumbered by its drapes. She fumbles with the zipper,  pulling it up to her neck eventually before straightening the collar and turning it up. 

“Thanks.”

“You’re welcome,” Beatrice says. She puts her own hands into her hoodie and looks very warm. Wet strands of hair drip down now and cling to her face, but she looks settled. 

“So, why did you come to the OCS?” she asks. It doesn’t sound cutting. 

Ava pouts and takes the bait. She deliberately shifts backwards onto a foot and crosses her arms so that her sleeves meet and zip with a rubbery drag.

“And what did you learn from my presentation?” Please don’t let this come off as rude please don’t let her take this the wrong way please don’t let her take offense–

“--Guilty,” Beatrice shrugs, a motion that looks almost foreign on her. “But I asked first.” She takes her hands out of her hoodie pocket and wrings them together absently, then lets them fall back down and tucks them back, relaxed, snugly into the pouch. 

She looks younger, like this, with her hair mussed by the weather and comfy in her hoodie. Like the windbreaker it is oversized and of indiscernible color. Ava can almost convince herself that it’s bruised lilac or dark blue. More likely it is some shade of plain gray.

Ava exhales, and feels more than hears the wood creak beneath her feet. The water is opening up and closing shut endlessly and Beatrice is looking at her, waiting, watching, and suddenly Ava needs to move; needs to curl her toes and stretch her fingers and get somewhere else. Move somewhere. 

And somehow, somewhere inside, needs also –hopes also, for Beatrice to move with her. 

Ava nods quickly. The wind changes yet again and her throat is dry. Instinctively she licks her lip and finds it salty. 

“How about the path behind the airstrip?”

Beatrice smiles tentatively. “Okay.”

They retreat from the water to concrete. The motel is built on part of an old private airstrip. There’s no longer sand here, just rocks and gravel petering out into the water. Behind the airstrip, though, there is a path that inclines upwards, lit by lamps until it reaches a boarded-up platform that drops harshly down into foam. 

Hands in windbreaker pockets, Ava leads them farther from shore. She doesn’t know if it’s the temperament of the sky or an illusion of distraction but the drizzle is slowing down now until it is in comparison barely noticeable as they head up the slope by the lamplight.

“So, why I joined this place,” Ava huffs. Beatrice hums in acknowledgement.

“A few things, I guess. You’ve watched the video,” Ava goes on, and Beatrice nods. “It was about storytelling, and scares, and honestly there’s some truth to how much you can do behind squeaky clean Disney barricades. I said it the first day – I love horror and what the OCS has done with it.”

She tells Beatrice about the first time she went to an OCS House, years ago; they must both have been in college at the time. University, she rolls her eyes, as the corners of Beatrice’s mouth dance upwards, whatever. She’d taken two days off class with a bunch of friends just to travel, because it was the only major independent place that had good wheelchair access back then.

Ava’s not using a cane now but she’d had it with her yesterday after getting out stiff and sore after the long car ride. Beatrice doesn’t ask. 

“That halloween, with all the houses – it blew me away. God. No kitschy carnival music, no colorful performers prancing around giving candy out to children at the doors. The food stands?” she gestures, “All outside the gates. No fucking carousels in the scare zones.”

Back then there were fewer Houses, and the compound was significantly smaller. Already it was a carefully calibrated maze, ready to scare in every weather contingency, with traps that would move and performers that would sit very still on steel chairs and, back then, the services of expensive external contractors to beef up the outdoor scenic design. 

“But d’you know what’s scary?” Ava turns to Beatrice and stops. Beatrice doesn’t startle, like Ava had feared in the split second after she’d spun around. “Traditionally, you don’t talk about a House, right? It’s rude to put spoilers in reviews or whatever. I loved that. I thought it made it fun, like a secret you’re all in on.”

“Then the OCS comes along and says: No, actually it’s important that people have access to our Houses, and the full extent of that means discreetly available trigger warnings and official spoilers, anytime.  We’ll make it a keystone of our design that every House has easy Outs in every section, and advertise it front and center.”

Ava knows Beatrice knows this, of course. 

“Which people thought was stupid, right? A terrible business move at best, if not a betrayal of the values of the art.”

Everyone knows what happened next. The move turned out wildly successful: a careless, confident vaunt that the OCS could afford to go to such daring lengths and still terrify people.  Daring would-be visitors, almost, to try and stay unaffected. We’re different, it said. Fucking try us then. They were free then, too, to do the worst possible things, in the safest possible environment. And nobody who didn’t need to have a look at the trigger warnings did so, while the number of first-time haunted house visitors shot up.

“Psychology,” Ava nods fiercely, “which is, as everyone knows, at the heart of manipulating fear.”

She leans forward, finally, looks Beatrice in the eye. It’s honest, and it’s terrifying. “I want that – to break the rules. All of them.”

Is that a controversial thing to say? To someone whose modus operandi famously is carefully twisted and controlled restraint, compared to the overflow and excess of most Houses. Who calculates, psychologically, the impact and ideal-slash-worst-case reactions to each moment in the House cascade, as if the mind is a kind of a machine and the House is a code passed through its system. Ava’s read what her critics say of her – that she’s cerebral to a fault. Technically masterful and horrifying; nauseating, in that cold, disturbing way, but that sometimes she fails to recognize that bombast is not a bad thing. That some excess does not the route suboptimize, or that instinct can give rise to flair and not undercooked loose ends.

Frigid, aloof. Beatrice tugs her from where she was headed towards a dead end off the slope, and nudges her up towards where the gradient beneath their feet tapers off. The back of her hand, where it brushes accidentally along Ava’s wrist, is warm.

They’re standing on an outcropping now. The rain has stopped fully and the path is more clearly illuminated by the higher density of lamps on the ground. They’re paid for by the motel, presumably, and somehow dug into the earth. There’s a bench here, too, and in sync Ava and Beatrice wordlessly sit down. The stone surface is wet, the kind that will soak into their dark jeans and leave the seats damp. 

They sit, anyway, the bushes crudely truncated so that the view looks out to dark water. 

Ava is one of them, now, no matter how much it doesn’t feel like it. Yet, a telltale voice quietly hopes. 

The business of haunted houses is a cyclical thing, isn’t it? Unlike working in the park year-round. Sure, there are two permanent fixtures that run through the year and get refreshed every year or so to keep the base revenue going and the OCS name in people’s mouths, but ultimately that’s the side show. It’s a seasonal business and so now the main seasonal campus is dark, strewn with work lights and scaffolding and blueprints.

But even if the OCS as the upcoming season’s visitors will know it is primordial now, with nothing even to show for it yet, she’s one of them. Even if she feels out of place, knee deep in viscous fluid. 

In Disney they’d hardly ever travel, because the rides she worked on were drawn from existing fictional worlds and their stories. Perhaps if she was lucky they would visit the place from which the fictional world was mined. Many other haunted house production companies, too, mostly drew inspiration from local or regional folklore or culture. Currently, the trend was, in fact, to camouflage the House itself into the very environment and location on which it stood.

Not many production companies would have her here, in a scraggly nowhere town of her own choosing, filmy with rain-gunk and algae, roofs discolored by harsh caustic cleaning sprays. Dipping her toes into somewhere unknown and parsing out something to bring back to the city and its bad 24-hour coffee vending machines and paint spills on uneven concrete and rough graffitied walls. There is, ironically, something fresh, new and strange about it all. 

And it’s why Ava’s here, really. To eat food from different places. Run her toes through grass in every country. Put her tongue out to the breeze and bring it back in the form of twisting walls that cave down around the people within. To behold nothing the same way twice, and to insist on nothing as sacred. Break all the rules. 

The waves are distant but the sound carries up and towards them.

“That’s what I gathered,” Beatrice says, wistfully, or thoughtfully, “from the presentation.” She sits a little way away on the bench, her hands crossed at her wrists and fingers peeking out from the thick sleeves. Under Ava’s hands, pressed down on either side, the seat is rough. And Beatrice, back straight and so calm, is soft. Like her eyes.

Beatrice looks down and runs her fingers over the grain of the bench too, coarse and stuck together, although smoothened with time. She seems to sigh, soak the air around her into her pores, and relax. Rise, like foam in a glass. 

“In the beginning of the video,” she starts, “You compare a good ride to a good haunted house.” She puts up three fingers and duly counts them off. “Both tell an immersive story. Both twist away from what the audience knows to be reality. Both break convention to surprise.” 

Her voice, Ava finds, is endlessly different from the only times she’s heard it at length, over a stuttering video call. Far away from the stricturing of bad connection and Zoom audio, it sounds different – just as modulated and thoughtful, but full of something, contained, yet to overflow. Ava thinks of a pot with a lid with hot, rich soup in it, sizzling lightly with a fragrance that perfuses the whole kitchen.

She talks through the presentation – Beatrice, that is, in her own words, and Ava’s maybe-kind of-perhaps bewitched. It’s the way she fits Ava’s points gently into a structure and perspective that even Ava hadn’t thought of; the way she spins Ava’s hamfisted tangent on dueling flight-or-hug-tight instincts into a dizzying fifteen-second suckerpunch insight into isolation versus community in group horror experiences. Or the way she recites her favorite of Ava’s bad jokes, word-for-word, from memory, and looks genuinely pleased by it too.

Ava doesn’t know for sure. She’s still reeling when Beatrice simply pauses and settles. She bobs her head, a tiny, barely-there smile on her face. “So yes,” she says, “that’s what I’ve learned about your design outlook.” 

Her expression changes in hints and tiptoes to something more considering. “But about you, and how we – I,  will work with you – that’s not so easily gleaned from one video.”

Ava laughs at that, almost speechless. Still breathless and oddly naked, in a way she’s not used to feeling. “No, no it isn’t.” 

She looks up and away, registering suddenly and overwhelmingly the indistinct shapes of trees. Grass. Path markers. 

It’s true. They don’t know her, and she doesn’t know the three of them. Not like they know each other, twisting like moss and creepers around each others’ spines. There is something there that’s old and impenetrable and bound in the covers of a book in a different language she doesn’t speak. And she speaks a whole bunch of languages, yes, but none like this one.

“We need to learn how to work together,” she admits. This is an understatement, Ava knows, and grossly so. She thinks about Lilith, but also about Camila and her expansive imagination, its rhythm slightly out of sync from the drumbeat of Ava’s mind, and her easy physical affection that masks an unspoken space between them. She thinks about Beatrice and her uncanny wordlessness and then her uncanny wordfulness that Ava hasn’t had the chance to learn how to anticipate. To everyone that’s not her closest circle Ava thinks she must seem like a pendulum that’s always being chased, and never getting caught, her thoughts running and pivoting a hundred miles ahead. 

And together they are musical lines in a contrapuntal piece, and hell, Ava knows only four chords on a guitar.

“We will,” Beatrice decides, suddenly. Ava’s mind has slipped from the conversation, but the bite of it snaps her to alert.

“What will we– what?” 

In her alarm their eyes meet. She watches Beatrice’s fingers stretch out towards her on the bench instinctively, and then quickly retract into a half-fist, drumming once, twice on the seat before slotting into her pocket to slide her phone out to sit loosely in her palm. 

She wrinkles her nose apologetically. A hairball of worry in Ava’s chest untangles itself.

“I.. just know that you’ve googled us like we’ve googled you.”

As Beatrice talks she turns over her phone slowly, hypnotically. Long fingers press and flip it in a well-worn sequence: the screen forwards and over twice, then clockwise along its side, before repeating in the opposite direction.  

“Earlier on you said that Lilith locks herself in a room to brainstorm.” 

Huh? Oh yeah, she did. When they were arguing over timeline flexibility for their project and the frequency of check-ins. Lilith said she was flighty and ill-disciplined. Ava told her she was out of her mind and a cold-blooded reptile who’d lost touch with all shreds of human needs and interactions. She’d made a snarky joke about Lilith’s grotesquely fancy ensuite bathroom and finding someone else to try and shit on.

“Well, that piece of trivia is only found in an interview from two years back that’s out of print. You can only find its scans on some niche member-only forums.” 

Ava shrugs – this is what you do with new co-workers, is it not? You do your part. And Ava is doing the best she can.

“Yeah, sure,” she concedes, “but that’s not – it’s not–” plainly, it’s not the same. What can Ava do except shrug again?

Beatrice makes a small noise. 

“I know,” she reiterates, and the deep furrows of her forehead release and smoothen, like she seems to have come to a realization. 

She offers cautiously, hesitantly, “the article does say that. But it’s not true.” She inhales sharply.

“Lilith appreciates her independence, yes, but she knows better than to entirely isolate herself anymore.” Clearly, there’s a story in that. “But the deadline was at midnight, and the editor wanted to add something else in the copy they sent. Lilith was grouchy, we were drunk, and Camila made it up in the return email without telling her.”

Beatrice pauses and tilts her head. Up the curve of her chin to her cheeks, dimples reveal themselves shyly and momentarily.

“Lilith was furious. She only found out when the article was released. The only reason she grudgingly refrained from further action was because, I believe, the falsified information fit into the image of how she wanted to present herself to the world.” 

She gazes straight at Ava then, curious and the most open that Ava’s ever seen her. “Nobody’s ever brought it up again,” she remarks, searching Ava. “Well. Not until you.”

Beatrice’s hands still; she wipes her phone against her shirt, and looks carefully at Ava. Ava’s intelligent; far more than people give her credit for. She knows what Beatrice is doing – trying to do, in her own way. 

After a long pause, during which the drone of the waves becomes deafening and then recedes, “I won’t pretend that Lilith is merely aloof, or that the things she has said are not unkind or unfair. She’s treated you poorly.”

Ava resists a scoff, and scrambles instead to clear her throat noisily. She doesn’t bring up again the simple fact that, foremost amongst a host of reasons, Lilith is why they’re here. The last straw. The final trigger.

Beatrice regards her like she isn’t fooled.

“She is less coarse to those she’s close to, but has been known on occasion to be rather prickly, even then.” Beatrice, as if remembering something then, chuckles lowly. Gorgeously. “She’s very particular about safety standards and protocols, for example.”

“Once, she yelled at me in front of the whole crew for taking a nap on the floor of  an unfinished room in a maze in the dark during lunch. She was angry, and worried, but still. I needed to get away from everyone for a break, and as you might expect, it backfired.”

“I’ll try not to do that,” Ava offers. “I’ll break into her trailer and sleep on her desk instead.”

“Oh dear,” There’s palpable mirth in it. Ava’s poker face shatters into a beam.

Beatrice probably can’t see it. It’s dark. 

“Ava?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m sorry. I don’t expect you to be alright with any of it.”

Ava breathes. 

“Okay,” she replies, finally. “Thank you. I appreciate that.”

She lifts the palms from where they’ve been pressed tightly to old, uneven rock. The soft flesh of the heel is kissed with the pattern of the grain.

So Ava turns, on the bench, and her feet squelch most uncomfortably in the wet shoes as she adjusts herself to face Beatrice – not directly,  but at the slight angle from which the light of the moon and the light at their feet call out to each other and meet on the tip of her nose.

Beatrice tucks her phone carefully in her lap and turns to Ava too.

And slowly, in dribs and drabs that spill out like the corners of dough sheets cut out from metal molds, Ava introduces herself to Beatrice. 

No, not the dramatic, tragic moments – the accident, the orphanage, all that. The night is transient and thinning fast into its wee hours, and it’s the little things first, you know? 

The one-coffee-one-energy-drink-one-juice combo routine that gets Ava through long days and overtime hours. The overnight movie marathon treat she grants herself at the culmination of each project. The lucky Super Mario Bros. spoon and bowl set that she’s got to eat out from the day before a big pitch. 

Her hiring, Ava thinks, is still a dry and excoriated topic, and so she tries to skim over it. She tries to avoid going into detail on how she got poached, and then how she’s painstakingly combed through all their archival documents and notes, so as to understand. She doesn’t mention the fan content and critic reviews she’s pored over, the world beyond OCS doors she’s tried to immerse herself in to grasp the scale of the project and the context of her addition.

Beatrice narrows in on it, anyway. It looms, Ava supposes, far too large to avoid.

It’s sometime after one A.M. when she puts her head down slightly, and Ava feels the shift. 

“You know, I’ve seen some of the forums,” Beatrice strokes down the damp strands of hair that have come loose over her ears.  “They’re – not entirely true. I don’t dislike working with others.”

Ava had seen the forums too, and the flint-tipped speculation that slithered about the different pages. Usernames pockmarked with numbers, an argot of acronyms and the slang of self-proclaimed megafans. Posts that didn’t have Beatrice’s name in them but that were transparently about her, describing with vulgar flippance a cool, isolated oddness that locked crew members out from the indecipherable machinations of her mind. 

Beatrice’s hands tighten over her phone. “It just takes me some time –” she forces out, and then bites her lip.

Ava thinks about Camila in the corridor this afternoon, after Beatrice had wordlessly entered her own room and shut the door – now, she knows, to watch the video. Ava had stopped for a second too long, looking puzzled after her, when Camila had brushed breezily past.

“Oh, don’t worry,” she’d laughed, “she’s like this. Once she opens up, she’s a completely different little beast.”

Ava hadn’t doubted that – there was evidently a Beatrice that bantered with Lilith and Camila in branching links of long chains that she couldn’t understand; a Beatrice that must have climbed up the towering tree at the back early in the morning to pluck yellow flowers from its crown. 

This Beatrice had been ready to go ahead to the counter before Camila and Lilith had even sat down at yesterday’s lunch to place their orders on their behalf.

She hadn’t even needed to check in with them, but came over to Ava’s seat and looked over her shoulder. “What would you like?” she’d asked, and Ava rushed, panickedly, to look over the menu. She traced each line with her index finger, and looked up to find Beatrice, eyes wide and patient.

“This one, please, the burger,” she’d jabbed the flimsy laminated paper, “and a Pepsi.” Beatrice had strode off before a waiter could come over. She’d refused to let any of them pay her back, and when Ava had tried to send her money on her phone she raised her eyebrows very questioningly and Ava melted back into the plastic-backed seat.

In the end, Ava can only personally vouch for the epipelagic – the shallowest fraction of ocean pierced by sunlight. The parts of the person allowed tentatively to surface in every halting, hesitant attempt forward as a quartet. As of now, too, in the drizzly shadows of tonight. 

Perhaps the light can reach only fingertip-deep, but Ava wagers there has to be water all the way down. The rest is gut feeling and instinct; slowly glowing embers like a fist in her chest.

“Beatrice,” Ava says, once it’s clear she’s still working her way out of a labyrinth of word finding, “Listen. I believe you.”

Tense shoulders quieten and flatten into a horizontal plane. Ava feels Beatrice’s eyes scan her face, go past her ears and her messy hair and the tip of her nose and then settle, finally, with a helpless little smile. 

Ava calls out on the boardwalk. She listens to Beatrice whisper on this stone, and Beatrice listens back. There’s sunlight, hours away, on the horizon but at this moment there’s only secret shades of moonbeam, and those shades are all for them. It’s not enough, still. It’s not enough. Ava wants more.

She wants, she finds with some desperation, to be inside of the invisible circle. There is nothing worse than dragging her feet outside, half a step offbeat, unable to reach in and with nobody reaching out. A ghost, intangible and aware of it, when all she wants is to feel the hot flames of real life – to have Lilith’s sharp tongue lash out and scald her in the way it does Camila or Beatrice – with blunt honesty and easy comfort instead of probing malice. To have Camila’s name light up on strings of text notifications as it buzzes constantly on Beatrice and Lilith’s phones almost the moment they are apart. Beloved, joyful, alight. To have Beatrice… to have Beatrice —

The phone in Beatrice’s hands lights up, too bright, and it makes her squint. A flash of numbers – time – sears itself into Ava’s eyes before Beatrice frowns and puts it away into her hoodie. It’s late, Ava thinks, considering the boat is coming by early to bring them out for sunrise. But Beatrice doesn’t move to go back, and neither does Ava. 

Of all the things Beatrice finds terrifying – enough, she’s always been quoted, to transplant them into the nightmare fuel of haunted houses – the dark now doesn’t seem to be one of them. Ava agrees, she thinks: there is no place safer now than where they are, on a rock one measly wooden fence away from a dizzying drop into rock and rushing depths. It feels, for once, and for maybe the first time –

(since the start, after that final infuriating video call when she screamed into her duvet and yelled into her shower and limped to the computer where she bit her lips raw and booked the tickets here and told a trio of uneasy still-strangers that she might struggle to pull them out their homes with her own hands and nails but they would be getting out and traveling to a coastal nowhere-town and fucking sitting down to get this partnership going –)

–it feels like she’s making headway. 

Not on the Houses, not on the inspiration for them or the mechanisms and processes with which to put them together, no, although all those, too, in their own ways.

Here, far off from home, next to choppy waters, shorn into grass and trees readying themselves to be busted up by summer storms, amongst flowers somehow poking up through the salt and sand, a breath away from the touch of waves and the tiny crawling organisms that besiege it, (beside an odd girl in the giddy, open air,) – here.

Solid ground.

And maybe Beatrice is right, you know? Maybe life is more similar to the business of soul-sucking fear-buildings than people believe. 

Ava’s always had, she thinks, an incredibly lucid understanding on what makes good haunted houses tick. It’s trust, essentially, and safety. How do you enter a situation that frightens more viscerally and wholly than a movie or even a 3D dark ride – and then keep walking? 

Headway. The only thing that gets you out of a haunted house is burrowing deeper within.

Arms outstretched, palms open, into its guts and chest. There’s extensive academia on thrill rides: on how much of the atmospheric and storytelling work goes into the sections of the experience that precede the ride, because once the carriage croaks to life, it’s easy to close one’s eyes and lose all clarity.

Haunted houses aren’t like this.

Since she got out of St Michael’s, Ava’s gotten by on a brand of fearlessness, a reputation built on a willingness to try almost anything. But fearless perhaps isn’t the word. She’s scared, still, with every step forward. Worried out of her mind of having to work from scratch all over again. Terrified of going back to before. But this, unfortunately, or blessedly so, is life: the only way out, Ava’s found, is further in.

She doesn’t want to be here. She wants to be there, already there.

Ava wants so badly to be elbow deep in the mud and wires of bringing stories to life far more fully and physically than in almost any other medium. She wants it so bad and so bare that she doesn’t even really know how to spell it out on a cloudy spring-summer night in a way that won’t chase Beatrice away with the breathless depth of her desperation to make people feel in a way they will never forget. Or frighten her with the too-much, too-fast of it all. 

She wants to flood people’s imaginations and send adrenaline through their arteries; have them wrap themselves around each other until the impression of lovers’ arms are engraved around the frame of each other’s bodies, shared warmth and solidity the only things keeping them upright through the maze. 

And Ava doesn’t need someone to hold her through a haunted house – god, she’s the one with her fingers tugging the strings that shift and twist its spine in circles around its terrified visitors – but it would be nice for once to stand in the control tower, eyes alight, heart racing, with hands as bloodstained as her own. 

To run through second-by-second early test run footage and data with another pair of eyes over early morning coffee and buns, discussing furiously the corners where the tourniquet can be tightened or loosened. To have conversations over the mixing console worth muting the scream track for. Even if – no, especially if they have nothing to do with work; conversations past awful awkward shop talk and instead all-in on the minutiae of home furnishings and dream pets and eschatology.

There was an impermanence to the constant shuffling of working groups, the fast paced turnarounds at Disney, but truthfully, she hadn’t been unhappy there. But then the email came through to her inbox on the rare once-fortnightly day that she would sit in her office, cartoonish vampire mug in hand, daydreaming with her laptop open, and that was it.

She flew down to headquarters to meet Suzanne in December. It was quiet in the office, with everyone off on final scouting trips and finalizing plans and sourcing materials and manpower. Suzanne had therefore been able to give her a private tour, and Ava did everything to pretend her mind hadn’t been made up long before.

First there was her personal office, which was the downright coolest room Ava’d been in for a while, forest green and quietly centered around the unassuming framed family picture on the desk. Cabinets of fossils with extra labels in a child’s scrawled handwriting: Terry the trilobite :D and spoonface and illustrated stickmen with swords. Delicate, beautiful, floral watercolor diagrams mounted on the wall and a soft, thick rug with complicated, beautiful depictions of scenes from the Tempest. 

Suzanne showed her the generous pantry, which would have sealed the deal if it hadn’t already been set in stone, and then they passed the meeting rooms into the archive gallery. 

This was, essentially, a museum of past mazes. A large, dark place of glass and thin, sharp panes of burnished golden light. Suzanne brought her, wide-eyed, through its displays of early Houses. 

“You’ve been visiting our Houses, on and off, over the last few years, correct?”

Ava nodded. Since that college trip, really, and whenever she could spare the time and the money.

“Good,” Suzanne said. “If you accept this offer, you will be joining a team of some of our best young designers, so you may be familiar with some of their work.”

Indeed, within the glass cases sat Camila’s famed dioramas, fixed in place now but ready to stir to life once hooked up to a battery. Detailed, hand-painted and assembled, its parts sliding apart into modular sections that could be split open and shifted around.

Lilith’s meticulous blueprints too, and ruthless postmortems and analyses she’d done of her own work, although those were sealed away. “I had to demand that she hand them over and not keep them pinned up at her desk hanging over her head,” Suzanne remarked beside Ava, looking up into the glass at the nondescript manila folder. 

“If not you, it would have been her.”

Unsurprising. Disney had used Lilith Villaumbrosia-masterminded sections of mazes in case studies for scene-setting and scare actor interactions. And Ava had entered her House two years ago. She knew.

“I will be honest with you, Miss Silva.”

“Ava.”

“Ava. Lilith is not what you may be expecting, and it may be difficult to get across to her at first. She is as acerbic as she is brilliant.”

That was the twist that was coming, of course: that they were all good friends. That the three designers that Suzanne had long had in mind to join Ava already knew each others’ minds and neural pathways so keenly that they could probably unzip the gyri of each others’ brains like a ribbon and then put them back together. 

“They don’t know it yet,” Suzanne warned, “and they will not like it at first, but I see it.” She opened up one of the cases with a key to remove a polaroid of three grinning faces, arms looped together. She held it to the light. “You’re the missing piece to the puzzle.” 

But what about everything she’s still missing?

The gravelly ground is solid beneath their feet, and Ava doesn’t feel the vibrations of the waves. The world appears still and frozen even as everything is changing and morphing and blooming, and gaping thirstily for something more she can’t put a finger to. 

The water could flood and Ava’s eyes might smart with exhaustion in the morning, or she might try to get two or three hours of sleep and wake up after one anyway, screaming as usual, and all the same Ava thinks she would still be chasing. Running. 

There is nothing in her mind resembling gory sets and the creak of animatronics, then, as she looks to her right at a girl she can scarcely even see in the dark, yet that she finds she cannot look away from. Ava can see why the magazines call her a mystery: Beatrice says she’s always on heightened alert, and yet – and yet –

She’s gazing back at Ava in a blanket of complete calm.

The wind from the ocean is blowing, the darkness feels safe. Ava and Beatrice, on a stone bench, talking, close. Easy steps, Ava thinks. Small steps, small questions. Maybe this is how it starts.

She takes a chance. Asks.

Beatrice closes her eyes, exhales, and begins to answer.

(Here are some requirements for a successful haunted house, or a horror film, or a heart-pounding roller coaster: it must evoke emotion that travels in icy ringlets down your spine, and it must stay indelibly in your mind.)

[guitarhappyman]

What the Trump Nominees Have Not Done—And Will Not Do

5 Comments / December 5, 2024

Victor Davis Hanson

American Greatness

Deflated by the resounding November defeat, the left now believes it can magically rebound by destroying Donald Trump’s cabinet nominees.

Many of Trump’s picks are well outside the usual Washington, DC/New York political, media, and corporate nexus.

But that is precisely the point—to insert reformers into a bloated, incompetent, and weaponized government who are not part of it.

Trump’s nominee for FBI director, Kash Patel, is already drawing severe criticism.

His furious enemies cannot go after his resume, since he has spent a lifetime in private, congressional, and executive billets, both in investigations and intelligence.

Instead, they claim he is too vindictive and does not reflect the ethos of the FBI.

But what will Patel not do as the new director?

He will not serially lie under oath to federal investigators as did interim FBI Director Andrew McCabe, a current Patel critic.

He will not forge an FBI court affidavit, as did convicted felon and agency lawyer Kevin Clinesmith.

He will not claim amnesia 245 times under congressional oath to evade embarrassing admissions as did former Director James Comey.

He will not partner with a foreign national to collect dirt and subvert a presidential campaign as the FBI did with Christopher Steele in 2016

He will not use the FBI to draft social media to suppress news unfavorable to a presidential candidate on the eve of an election.

He would not have suppressed FBI knowledge that Hunter Biden’s laptop was genuine—to allow the lie to spread that it was “Russian disinformation” on the eve of the 2020 election.

He will not raid the home of an ex-president with SWAT teams, surveil Catholics, monitor parents at school board meetings, or go after pro-life peaceful protestors.

Decorated combat veteran Pete Hegseth is another controversial nominee for secretary of defense.

What will Hegseth likely not do?

Go AWOL without notifying the president of a serious medical procedure as did current Secretary Lloyd Austin?

Install race and gender criteria for promotion and mandate Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion training?

Insinuate falsely that cabals of white supremacists had infiltrated the military—only to alienate that entire demographic and thus ensure the Pentagon came up 40,000 recruits short?

Oversee the scramble from Kabul that saw $50 billion in U.S. military equipment abandoned to Taliban terrorists?

Watch passively as a Chinese spy balloon traversed the continental United States for a week?

Allow the chairman of the Joint Chiefs to promise his Chinese communist counterpart that the People’s Liberation Army would first be informed if the President of the United States was felt to issue a dangerous order?

Rotate into the Pentagon from a defense contractor boardship and then leave office to rotate back there to leverage procurement decisions?

Oversee the Pentagon’s serial flunking of fiscal audits?

Health and Human Services nominee Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is certainly a maverick. He may earn the most Democratic hits, given his former liberal credentials.

But what will RFK also not do as HHS secretary?

Oversee his agencies circumventing U.S. law by transferring money to communist China to help it produce lethal gain-of-function viruses of the COVID-19 sort—in the manner of Dr. Fauci?

Organize scientists to go after critics of mandatory masking and defame them?

Give pharmaceutical companies near-lifetime exemptions from legal jeopardy for rushing into production mRNA vaccines not traditionally vetted and tested?

Leave office to monetize his HHS expertise and thus make millions from the pharmaceutical companies?

Trump’s nominee for Director of National Intelligence, former congressional representative and military veteran Tulsi Gabbard, will soon be defamed in congressional hearings.

But what has Gabbard not done?

Joined “51 former intelligence authorities” to lie on the eve of the 2020 election that the Hunter Biden laptop “had all the hallmarks” of a Russian information/disinformation operation”—in an effort to swing the election to incumbent Joe Biden?

Lied under congressional oath like former DNI James Clapper, who claimed he only gave the “least untruthful answer” in congressional testimony?

Encourage the FBI to monitor a presidential campaign in efforts to discredit it—in the manner of former CIA Director John Brennan, who lied not once but twice under oath?

Fail to foresee the American meltdown in Kabul, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel, or the Houthis takeover of the Red Sea?

We are going to hear some outrageous things in the upcoming congressional confirmation hearings.

But one thing we will not hear about are the crimes, deceptions, and utter incompetence of prior and current government grandees.

The current crew, not their proposed Trump replacements, prompted the sick and tired American people to demand different people.

Voters want novel approaches to reform a government that they not only no longer trust but also now deeply fear.

[gifts-of-heimdall-runes]

The manuscript, called 'Galdrabok', containing a selection of magical formulas, began to be compiled in Iceland in the second half of the 16th century. Therefore, it is a product of the Reformation era. The manuscript is no different from the thoughtful composition: it is simply a collection of magical techniques that follow each other more or less randomly. The Galdrabok collection has been growing for a century; it had four compilers.

The magician, who worked in Iceland in the second half of the 16th century and started this meeting, wrote charms No. 1-10. Soon, the manuscript passed to another Icelander, who added charms No. 11-39. After a while, the third Icelandic compiler finished charms No. 40-44. This Galdrabok was painted in cursive font of the seventeenth century. What is particularly remarkable about his contribution is the abundance of references to old gods and myths - and yet it was in the middle of the seventeenth century, when the fateful Thing of 1000 has passed about 650 years! Soon after this third scribe added his conspiracies, the manuscript made its way to Denmark, where some local magician finished its last section. Apparently, this Dane used some other Icelandic books on magic (now lost), from which he borrowed charms No. 44-47.

In 1682, the manuscript was acquired by the Swedish philologist Johan Gabriel Sparvenfelt, from whom it was bought a little later (between 1689 and 1694) for an extensive collection of "Gothic" writing monuments. Eventually, she entered the Academy of Sciences (State Historical Museum) in Stockholm, where she remains to this day.

The religious worldview, reflected in the precepts and conspiracies of Galdrabok, is of utmost interest. The book contains twenty-one spells based on non-Christian or overtly pagan (or even devilish) views. This is not surprising because, since the adoption of Christianity, magic has been associated with the pagan past and with devilish powers. But nine of the forty-seven charms can be called "Christian" - in the sense that they mention characters in Christian doctrine or use Christian formulas. Eight recipes contain Gnostic roots (Nos. 5, 10, 11, 12, 31, 37, 39, and 42). They use Gnostic formulas of Jewish or Greek origin, probably borrowed from the continental tradition (along with "purely" Christian formulas). In addition, five recipes are particularly interesting because they mix openly pagan (Germanic) content with openly Christian content. It should be noted that four of them were added by the last two compilers. This may indicate that by the mid-17th century, Catholic Christian formulas had moved to the category of "forbidden" knowledge, following pagan formulas, and as a result, were more commonly used in magic formulas.

The objectives of the magical operations described in Galdrabok can be roughly divided into six categories. Most often, apotropean (protective) formulas are found: there are at least eighteen of them. In addition to such conspiracies designed to protect the magician from active malicious actions aimed at him (for example, from the "troll arrow" or from the "anger of those in power," a group of nine beneficial general conspiracies is found, designed to bring the magician good luck or make circumstances in his favour. The magicians who made 'Galdrabok' were clearly concerned about catching thieves, with six charms on the subject. They are interesting because they suggest a kind of clairvoyance or magical knowledge (in English, kunnátta; see No. 44), allowing the magician to 'see' the image of the person who robbed him. The last recipe (No.47) is intended to become invisible.

In addition to all these protective and other "passive" formulas, the collection includes a fairly extensive group of spells dedicated to more aggressive varieties of magic. There are ten of them, and four of them, in addition, are intended for such malicious pranks, the likes of which will not be found in any other magic book in the history of witchcraft. If Icelandic magicians did use them in practice, it is not surprising that they had to spend so much time and effort defending themselves against the 'anger of those in power'.

Quoted from Stephen Flowers

Original English prose was translated into Russian and back to English by my smartphone 🙂

Source: Яблоки Идунн [VK com]

[lira456]

Naruto failure of hokage in every front like his ancestors

Many things needed fair conclusions which were overlooked so what naruto did what kind of reform he enforced regarding clan laws and treatments because of uchiha tragedy, regarding reformation of child soldiers and anbu matters becuase of rin and itachi, regarding reforming continental laws and regulation if invasion of small coutries and villages happening and their rebuilding and reparation because of wrongdoings 5 NATIONS AND KAGE have caused in the past,

also how he gonna bind all shinobi villages and even countries in the mutual trust and common ground so that nothing unlawful conclusion happen like that of shikimaru shinden and who gonna maintain or correct it in future that's why you need solid effective laws that equally and equitably benefit and treat and question everyone( author only just blink of some years bring phone,computer and video games but still maintains feudal sytem does not have international laws we have under UN so that no one can easily go to war even israelis are condemned against by UN but in naruto we don't have any such organization,laws,platform for time to time problem which can connect all shinobi countries and villages on the continent, even villages can not oppose their daimyo's order meaning they have no alternative source of income so naruto did not find another way for complete econmical survival without shinobi missions on 80 percent level such as using chakra and exporting chakra tech not for warfare especially and chakra natures lol feels like he still wants to maintain system in 60 percent ground: pure bad writing to continue boruto),

also what about orphanage system for other villages especially orphan from small villages or destructive land or from remote area like that of ryogi and kabuto and kara children and ame child how did not naruto send no shadow clone or shinobi for such purpose as he always preach about how he understand everyone's pain so called messiah or any welfare like system for poor shinobi from impoverished village shinobi or even his own village especially their widows and orphans did not shown or pension like something for shinobi especially who lost their body parts such as guy or some especial payment for shinobi like kawaki's father and give him alternative employment becuase of being war hero could have saved kawaki feels like villages abandoned many remaining shinobi or why not give them alternative employment because of their past service (just simply dispose of them if they lost value so cruel, just how pain said), by checking all the shinobi they could have but becuase they don't have correct and effective database like system even without tech that's how inaffective their shinobi system is because it's only focus on deciphering stupid message that would do no good for average shinobi and their family, collect tax from people building hiring,build some stupid building, maintain shinobi academy and its doctrination and missions and ranks and secret non transparent scheme meaning they don't have any citizen or shinobi benefit only jonin and upper echelon have that luxury even nothing special fund for orphan that's why ryogi doest not send to kabuto nothing specific, only all connected to glrifying and worshipping their anscestor that's why they don't have effective database maintained because of that after the war they lost track many shinobi and who knows how their family survived not shown not even regarding the other villages saddening, also about their individual desire or dream for that can they stop being shinobi suddenly or leave the village, did not shown regarding such issues especially how they panicked when mitsuki left and send their kids to die really sad.

it seems they even don't have unique trade that could connect all in a way that not one can lie or go to war meaning kakashi did not create any trade system only how they can rebuild and maintain ninja system which was in threat because lack of manpower(losing most of the shinobi in the war) meaning focused mostly making buildings,transportation,long distant upgraded message device and sharing shinobi missions with other villages, so kakashi did not change any political,children curriculam,ideological and law related issues in the village, naruto not even focused on changing of dangerous social struture in kiri village and lack of resources problem in iwa country and village, even we did not see how sand village's lack of resouce problem and how they solved it under gaara, really half baked, so many things overlooked,

so even did not even focus on what law or regulation he would establish to maintain clan's inner environment and conflicts becuase hyuga slavery( ther are maybe no large clans left in konoha anymore because in boruto we never see any clan meeting like that of hyuga or many clan fighting together like sarutobi and akimichi only showed some yamanaka power but not said whether they are members of yamanaka or not that's likely most died in the war, ony maybe at bare minimum members around 20 to 30 and they maintain no more clan positive harmonious tradition like clan meeting and practice just stop the heritage as we are not shown, meaning some cultural genocide, naruto as hokage could have celebrated each clan's power as culture festival making it show in public like we see chinese,european cultures etc. in many carnival and festival, in this way he could have connected and create harmony and pleasure for these lost heritage clans because naruto was suppose to be a hope that connect people it seems he has forgotten his own theme in boruto cooperation through understanding and sharing pain lol he is not doing that kind of effort to maintain harmony,peace and love among village,clan and outsider instead he is busy in collecting more power and benefit from amado and eida and katasuke and even from kawaki, that's strategic why both kawaki and boruto remained in konoha and not in other village, so much for mutual trust lol.

This is why naruto as a hokage and MC is complete bulshite and loser especially kishimoto's false half baked writing surrounding lack of insight of political atmosphere felt so underserving and hypocritical because i felt so much ideological and behavioral difference between zabusa arc naruto and ending &boruto naruto, really dissapointing.

[booklovershouse]

Oi oi, booklovers!

Lembram do Exploda seu Kindle, que aconteceu lá em agosto? Pois é, agora no finalzinho de outubro temos outro evento literário na mesma pegada: o Reforme seu Kindle!

Sim, eu mencionei ele no post do Exploda seu Kindle e finalmente chegou o momento de dar mais informações!!!

Mas Mara, o que é isso?

O Reforme seu Kindle é um evento onde vamos ter vários e-books gratuitos e em promoção na Amazon. Entretanto, diferente do Exploda seu Kindle, ele é exclusivo para e-books de ficção cristã. Inclusive, tem esse nome para homenagear o dia da Reforma Protestante (31/10).

Se é de ficção cristã, pq eu deveria participar?

Opa, opa, calminha aí! A ficção cristã não se refere apenas a livros religiosos. Ela se refere a histórias com princípios cristãos. Por exemplo, Orgulho e Preconceito, da Jane Austen, é considerado por muitos como uma ficção cristã. E dentro dessa categoria, temos vários gêneros, vou até citar uns exemplos:

Obs: esses livros não estão necessariamente envolvidos no evento do Reforme seu Kindle, são apenas para exemplo!

• Corajosas: os contos das princesas nada encantadas (Maria S. Araújo, Queren Ane, Arlene Diniz, Thaís Oliveira) - releitura moderna dos contos de fadas com valores cristãos.

• As Andorinhas de um Continente em Chamas (Gabriela Fernandes) - distopia cristã

• Os Clãs da Lua (Sara Gusella) - ficção científica cristã

• Deixa Nevar (Camila Antunes) - romance cristão

• Cidades Pequenas não Guardam Segredos (Kézia Garcia) - cozy mistery (mistério sem muita violência) + whodunnit (vários suspeitos, criminoso revelado no finalzinho) cristão

Obviamente, você não deve esperar hot/palavrões e às vezes nem tem beijo nos romances. Mas isso não significa que a história é chata.

Todo mundo pode participar?

Claro que sim, você não precisa ser cristão pra participar, basta ter uma conta na Amazon! Também não precisa ter Kindle ou algo do tipo, vc pode ler seus e-books pelo navegador ou pelo app do Amazon Kindle.

⚠️ Assim como no Exploda Seu Kindle, é importante lembrar que nem todos os e-books da lista estarão gratuitos, então sempre confira o preço!

Quem está organizando isso aí?

Vocês já ouviram (leram) o nome dela aqui: Kézia Garcia! Isso mesmo, a autora de Entre Flechas e Sapatos de Cristal, Brilhante como Ouro, As Viagens de Amara e Cidades Pequenas não Guardam Segredos.

Assim que a Kézia liberar o link, eu coloco aqui pra vcs, mas quem quiser pode ficar de olho no Insta dela tbm.

O que eu faço depois do evento?

Além de ler os 9182827 que vc vai pegar, não se esqueça de avaliar, pq os autores são nacionais e a grande maioria é independente. Você pode fazer sua resenha no Skoob, Amazon, Tumblr, Instagram, comentar com um amigo ou sei lá, mas avalie! Precisamos apoiar a literatura nacional!

Então, em resumo:

• O que? E-books de ficção cristã gratuitos e em promoção.

• Quando? Quinta-feira (31/10)

• Onde? Na Amazon.

• Como? Vai ter uma página com os e-books todos separadinhos (coloco o link aqui no blog dia 31 🙃). Vale lembrar - de novo, pq todo cuidado é pouco - que tem e-books gratuitos mas tbm em promoção, então confira o preço antes de sair comprando!

E é isso, booklovers, partiu aumentar a TBR?

Obs: o post de Leituras de Outubro vai sair dia 30/10 ou dia 01/11, depende da minha velocidade pra escrever e terminar o livro q tô lendo 😅

Bjs e boas leiturassss <3333

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Nick Anderson

* * * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

January 6, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JAN 7, 2024

Today, three years to the day after the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol to prevent the counting of the electoral ballots that would make Democrat Joe Biden president, officers from the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested three fugitives wanted in connection with that attack. 

Siblings Jonathan and Olivia Pollock, whose family owns Rapture Guns and Knives, described on its Facebook page as a “christian owned Gun and Knife store” in Lakeland, Florida, and Joseph Hutchinson III, who once worked there, are suspected of some of the worst violence of January 6. The FBI had offered a $30,000 reward for “Jonny” Pollock, while the other two had been arrested but removed their ankle bracelets in March 2023 and fled. 

Family members of the fugitives and of other Lakeland residents arrested for their involvement in the January 6 attack on the Capitol insist their relatives are innocent, framed by a government eager to undermine their way of life. The Pollock family has gone so far as to erect a monument “in honor of the ones who lost their lives on January 6, 2021.” 

But it does not honor the law enforcement officers who were killed or injured. It honors the insurrectionists: Ashli Babbitt, shot by a law enforcement officer as she tried to break into the House Chamber through a smashed window (her family today sued the government for $30 million for wrongful death), and three others, one who died of a stroke; one of a heart attack, and one of an amphetamine overdose. 

The monument in Lakeland, Florida, is a stark contrast to the one President Biden visited yesterday in Pennsylvania. Valley Forge National Park is the site of the six-month winter encampment of the Continental Army in the hard winter of 1777–1778. After the British army captured the city of Philadelphia in September 1777, General George Washington settled 12,000 people of his army about 18 miles to the northwest. 

There the army almost fell apart. Supply chains were broken as the British captured food or it spoiled in transit to the soldiers, and wartime inflation meant the Continental Congress did not appropriate enough money for food and clothing. Hunger and disease stalked the camp, but even worse was the lack of clothing. More than 1,000 soldiers died, and about eight or ten deserted every day. Washington warned the president of the Continental Congress that the men were close to mutiny. 

Even if they didn’t quit, they weren’t very well organized for an army charged with resisting one of the greatest military forces on the globe. The different units had been trained with different field manuals, making it hard to coordinate movements, and a group of army officers were working with congressmen to replace Washington, complaining about how he was prosecuting the war.  

By February 1778, though, things were falling into place. A delegation from the Continental Congress had visited Valley Forge and understood that the lack of supplies made the army, and thus the country, truly vulnerable, and they set out to reform the supply department. Then a newly arrived Prussian officer, Baron Friedrich von Steuben, drilled the soldiers into unity and better morale. And then, in May, the soldiers learned that France had signed a treaty with the American states in February, lending money, matériel, and men to the cause of American independence. When the soldiers broke camp in June, they marched out ready to take on the British at the Battle of Monmouth, where their new training paid off as they held their own against the British soldiers.

The January 6 insurrectionists were fond of claiming they were echoing these American revolutionaries who created the new nation in the 1770s. The right-wing Proud Boys’ strategic plan for taking over buildings in the Capitol complex on January 6 was titled: “1776 Returns,” and even more famously, newly elected representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO) wrote on January 5, 2021: “Remember these next 48 hours. These are some of the most important days in American history.” On January 6, she wrote: “Today is 1776.”

Trump has repeatedly called those January 6 insurrectionists “patriots.” 

Biden yesterday called Trump out for “trying to steal history the same way he tried to steal the election.”  

Indeed. The insurrectionists at the Capitol were not patriots. They were trying to overthrow the government in order to take away the right at the center of American democracy: our right to determine our own destiny. Commemorating them as heroes is the 21st century’s version of erecting Confederate statues.

The January 6th insurrectionists were nothing like the community at Valley Forge, made up of people who had offered up their lives to support a government pledged, however imperfectly in that era, to expanding that right. When faced with hunger, disease, and discord, that community—which was made up not just of a remarkably diverse set of soldiers from all 13 colonies, including Black and Indigenous men, but also of their families and the workers, enslaved and free, who came with them—worked together to build a force that could establish a nation based in the idea of freedom.  

The people at the Capitol on January 6 who followed in the footsteps of those who were living in the Valley Forge encampment 246 years ago were not the rioters. They were the people who defended our right to live under a government in which we have a say: those like the staffers who delayed their evacuation of the Capitol to save the endangered electoral ballots, and like U.S. Capitol Police officers Eugene Goodman, Harry Dunn, Caroline Edwards, and Aquilino Gonell and Metropolitan Police officer Michael Fanone, along with the more than 140 officers injured that day. 

Fanone, whom rioters beat and tasered, giving him a traumatic brain injury and a heart attack, yesterday told Emily Ngo, Jeff Coltin, and Nick Reisman of Politico: “I think it’s important that every institution in this country, every American, take the responsibility of upholding democracy seriously. And everyone needs to be doing everything that they can to ensure that a.) Donald Trump does not succeed and b.) the MAGA movement is extinguished.”

Unlike the violence of the January 6th insurrectionists, the experience of the people at Valley Forge is etched deep into our national identity as a symbol of the sacrifice and struggle Americans have made to preserve and renew democracy. It is so central to who we are that we have commemorated it in myths and monuments and have projected into the future that its meaning will always remain at the heart of America. According to The Star Trek Encyclopedia, the Federation Excelsior-class starship USS Valley Forge will still be fighting in the 24th century… against the Dominion empire.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[nordleuchten]

La Fayette's Opinion on Court Martials

Tl;dr: La Fayette was much opposed to court martials.

This was intended as a post about La Fayette’s opinions on the death penalty and the reform of penal law – however, I think it is worthwhile to have a look at his opinion on court martials and the different systems used by different nations (France, England, America and to some extend Poland)

Now, La Fayette expressed his opinion for the first time in a written document that we knew of in a letter to George Washington on January 13, 1778. Although that is his first time expressing such notions to Washington, by the points that he raises it is evident that he has held these believes for some time. The trigger for La Fayette writing this letter was the court martial of two of his subordinate officers:

At the same [General] Court held 6th instant Captain Flagg charged with “neglect of duty 1st in suffering the Marquis de la Fayette, when Major Genl of the day to come in the night to the center of his Picquet, without being stopped or challenged; 2nd for permitting his sentries to have fires in his sight” was tried and acquitted by the unanimous opinion of the court. The Commander in Chief approves the sentence.

At the same Court held 7th instant Captn Laird, charged with “Neglect of duty, in suffering the Major General of the day to surprize him at his picquet in the night”—was tried & found guilty and sentenced to be dismissed from the service. The Commander in Chief approves the sentence.

“General Orders, 13 January 1778,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-13-02-0180. [Original source: The Papers of George Washington, Revolutionary War Series, vol. 13, 26 December 1777 – 28 February 1778, ed. Edward G. Lengel. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003, pp. 214–216.] (10/24/2023)

And here a screenshot from the notes beneath this letter to give some biographical information on the two men in question.

La Fayette wrote his letter the same day and described the situation as follows:

There were two gentlemen, same rank, same duty to perform, and same neglect of it who have been arrested the same day by me—as I went in the night around the piquets I found them in fault, and I gave an account of it the next day to your excellency—you answered that I was much in wrong not to have had them relieved and arrested immediately—I objected that it was then very late for such a changement, and that I did not know which was the rule in this army, but that the gentlemen should be arrested in that very moment—the last answer of your excellency has been, “they are to have a court martial, and you must give notice of it to the adjudant general”—therefore major nevill made two letters in order to arrest them, one for having been surprised in his post and the other, for the same cause and allowing his centrys to have fires which he could see in standing before the picquet. I give you my word of honor that there was not any exageration.

“To George Washington from Major General Lafayette, 13 January 1778,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-13-02-0186. [Original source: The Papers of George Washington, Revolutionary War Series, vol. 13, 26 December 1777 – 28 February 1778, ed. Edward G. Lengel. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003, pp. 222–225.] (10/24/2023)

Beside his recalling of the situation, it can also be noticed that La Fayette was unfamiliar with the system of court-martials in America and used to different proceedings from his time in the French army.

Before we address La Fayette’s grievances with the court martial system in the Continental Army in general and with these cases in particular, here is his account of the proceedings in France:

(…) in france an officer is arrested by his superior, who gives notice of it to the commanding officer, and then he is punished enough in being deprived of going out of his room in time of peace, of doing his duty in time of war—no body knows of it but his comrades—when the fault is greater he is confined in a common room for prisonner officers and this is much more shamefull—notice of it is immediately given to the general officer who commands there—that goes too to the Kings minister who is to be reimplaced here by the commander in chief—in time of war it goes to the general in chief.

Soldiers are punished the same or next day by order of proper officers, and the right of punishing is proportionate to theyr ranks. but when Both officers and soldiers have done something which deserves A more severe punishement, when theyr honor, or theyr life, or theyr liberty for more than a very short time is concerned, then a court martial meets, and the sentence is known—how will you let an unhappy soldier be confined several weeks, with men who are to be hanged, with spies, with the most horrid sort of people, and in the same time be lost for the duty, when they deserve only some lashes—then almost no proportion in the punishements.

Now, his first problem were the punishments – or better; lack thereof. You recall that Captain Ebenezer Flagg was acquitted:

now I See in the orders the less guilty punished in a manner, much too severe indeed, and dismised from the service (it is among all the delicate minds deprived of his honor) when he was only to be severely reprimanded, and kept for some time under arrest—but it can be attributed to a very severe discipline.

This acquittal was not only bothersome for La Fayette because Captain David Laird, who committed a less serious crime in La Fayette’s eyes, was so harshly punished. Part of the problem laid also in his perception of a gentleman’s word of honour:

what must I think of the same court when they unanimously acquit (it is to say that my accusation is not trüe) the officer who joins to the same fault, entirely the same, this of allowing his centrys to have fire in his own sight—for in every service being surprised or being found in the middle of his picquet without any challenging or stopping centry, as major nevil riding before me found him, is entirely the same thing—and mjor nevil riding before me when I was busy to make a centry pull off his fire, can swear that such was the case with that officer—he can do more than swearing, for he can give his word of honor—and I think that idea honor is the same in every country but the prejugées are not the same thing—for giving publickly the best of such a dispute (for here it becomes a trial for both parties) to an officer of the last military stage against one of the first, schould be looked on as an affront to the rank, and acquitting a man whom one other man accuses, looked upon as an affront to the person—it is the same in poland for count de pulaski was much affronted of the decision of a court martial entirely acquitting Colonel molens—however as I know the english costoms I am nothing else but surprised to see such a partiality in a court martial.

We read that La Fayette was not alone in his perception here and that other foreign officers, in this case Kazimierz Pułaski, were of the same opinion. His comment on the “english costoms” will be of some important later on.

But beside the critic he mentioned specifically in context of this affair, there were still more general points of criticism that La Fayette had – there were three points in total:

how is it possible to carry a gentleman before a parcel of dreadful judges at the same place where an officer of the same rank has been just now cashiered, for a trifling neglect of his duty, for, I suppose, speaking to his next neighbour in a maneuvre, for going into a house to speack to a pretty girl, when the army is on his march and thousand other things—how is it possible to bring to the certainty of being cashiered, or dishonored, a young lad, who has made a considerable fault because he had a light head, a too great vivacity, when that young man would be perhaps in some years the best officer of the army, if he had been friendly reprimanded and arrested for some time, without any dishonor. the law is alwaïs severe, and bring with it an eternal Shamefull mark—when the judges are partial as in this occasion, it is much worse, because they have the same inconveniences as law itself. in court martials men are judged by theyr inferiors—how (mutilated) to discipline I do’nt want to say—the publication exposes men to (mutilated) despised by the least soldier—when men have been before a court martial they schould be or acquitted or dismissed—what do you think can be produced by the half conndemnation of a general officer—what necessity for all the soldiers, all the officers, to know that general maxwell has been prevented from doing [h]is duty by his being drunk. Where is the man who will not laugh at him if he is told by him you are a drunkard and is it right to ridicule a man repectable by his rank, because he drank two or three gills of rum. there are my reasons against court martials, when there is not some considerable fault to punish—according to my affair I am sorry in seeing the less guilty being the only one punished however, I shall send to court martials but for such a crimes, that there will be for the judges no way of indulgence and partiality. With the most tender respect I am Your excellency’s the most obedient servant

While La Fayette sounded almost a bit rebellious in his last sentence, it was not that he was entirely against court martials, he simply wanted them reserved for more serious offenses.

your excellency will certainly approuve my not arresting any officer for being brought before a court martial, for any neglect of duty, but when they will be robbers, or cowards, or when they will assassinate, in all when the[y] will deserve being cashiered or put to death.

The American system of court martials was molded after the English system and La Fayette was not quite happy with that either. Again, in the same letter to Washington from January 13, 1778 he wrote:

give me leave, to tell your excellency how I am adverse to court martials—I know it is the english costom, and I believe it is a very bad one—it comes from theyr love of lawers, speakers, and of that black apparate of sentences, and judgements—but such is not the american temper, and I think this new army must pick up the good institutions, and leave the bad ones where ever they may be (…)

Since I picked the letter so much apart, I will put a full and continuous version beneath the cut. :-)

Washington was not the only person, nor this the only incident where La Fayette expressed his displeasure about court martials. He wrote in a letter to Henry Laurens in his official position as President of Congress on March 20, 1778:

There as been a court martial for desertion which I din’t approuve of, but as among other men I have found sentenc’d of death, I beg from Congress to be empowered to relieve the man.

Idzerda Stanley J. et al., editors, Lafayette in the Age of the American Revolution: Selected Letters and Papers, 1776–1790, Volume 1, December 7, 1776–March 30, 1778, Cornell University Press, 1977, p. 365.

Despite being against court martials, La Fayette was naturally involved in a number of trials one way or another. He for example took part in two famous court martial cases, the cases of Charles Lee and Major John André. In Lee’s proceedings, La Fayette was a witness and wrote to Henry Laurens on July 6, 1778:

You have heard good deal, I dare say, of the court against Gal. Lee. I am very unwillingly an evidence in it but am happy enough as to have nothing material to say. This Gal. Lee is very much prejudic’d in favor of his english nation. If he is condemn’d, certainly he must be guilty of some thing very ugly.

Idzerda Stanley J. et al., editors, Lafayette in the Age of the American Revolution: Selected Letters and Papers, 1776–1790, Volume 3, April 27, 1780–March 29, 1781, Cornell University Press, 1980, p. 99.

Even in this short abstract La Fayette clearly states his opinion of General Charles Lee. It was not a very high opinion. He thought that Lee had acted badly during the battle, that he was prejudice, and that Washington was in the right when giving him a dressing down. Still, La Fayette was not in favour of the court martial and much resented being a part of it. We can see that his aversion for court martials, was not based on personal sympathies. He rejected these proceedings no matter the circumstances or the person accused.

Another great, but more complex, matter was the court martial of John André. La Fayette sat from September 29 to September 30, 1780 on the court martial of John André and was therefore among the men who found him guilty. He wrote to the Vicomte de Noailles (the husband of his sister-in-law) about his role in the proceeding on October 3, 1780.

But what has truly afflicted me is the necessity of hanging the adjutant general of the British army, a charming man who conducted himself throughout, and died, like a hero. This severity was necessary; the enemy acted very stupidly on this occasion, and since they lost that unfortunate man, the soul of their army, they have not written one letter that had common sense. Andre was executed yesterday. General Clinton’s anger does not frighten us, but this man's death, although inevitable in my opinion, left me with a feeling of sadness and respect for his character. I truly suffered in condemning him; but he was an officer under disguised clothing and name, passing within our posts with papers full of intelligence for the enemy, and he himself did not hesitate to recognize himself as a spy.

Idzerda Stanley J. et al., editors, Lafayette in the Age of the American Revolution: Selected Letters and Papers, 1776–1790, Volume 3, April 27, 1780–March 29, 1781, Cornell University Press, 1980, p. 182.

La Fayette’s aversion to court martials meets here his personal sympathy and respect for John André and his opinions (although they were still very much developing at this point in time) about the death penalty.

Out of the recorded 3315 court martials recorded in the continental army during the War of American Independence, La Fayette was involved in a number of them. We dissected the cases of Flagg, Laird, Lee and André. A forage master under his command was tried on February 19, 1778:

At a General Court-Martial whereof Col. Cortlandt was President (Feby 19th 1778) Mr Edward Bennett Forage-Master in the Marquis La Fayette’s division tried for repeated neglect of duty in suffering the horses of the division to remain three days without Forage when there was Forage in the General Forage yard, and all the divisions in the Army drew, for neglecting to draw hay when to be got and for trusting to others what he should himself perform by which many horses in the division have perished and the whole of the teams rendered unfit for duty. (…) The Court are therefore unanimously of opinion that Mr Bennett has been neglectful of his duty in not getting forage for the horses of the division to which he belongs when it could have been procured whereby many of them have perished for the want of it, being a breach of Article 5th Section 18th of the Articles of War and they do sentence him to be dismissed from his employment in the forage department.

“General Orders, 24 February 1778,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-13-02-0555. [Original source: The Papers of George Washington, Revolutionary War Series, vol. 13, 26 December 1777 – 28 February 1778, ed. Edward G. Lengel. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003, pp. 652–653.] (10/24/2023)

He also ordered the court martial of Lieutenant William Mills on September 15, 1780:

At a division General court martial the 15th instant by order of Major General Marquis de la Fayette, Colonel Swift President Lieutenant William Mills of Colonel Gematt’s regiment of Light Infantry was tried for “Disobedience of Orders” and unanimously acquitted.

“General Orders, 18 September 1780,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-28-02-0160. [Original source: The Papers of George Washington, Revolutionary War Series, vol. 28, 28 August–27 October 1780, ed. William M. Ferraro and Jeffrey L. Zvengrowski. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2020, pp. 222–223.] (10/24/2023)

He further ordered a court martial for Captain Wilkin on September 12, 1781:

At a General Court Martial assembled at Williamsburgh September 12th 1781 by order of Major General the Marquis de la Fayette Colonel Vose President—Captain Wilkin of Colonel Stewarts Battalion of the Pennsylvania line, charged by Col Stewart with riotous behavior in his tent at an unseasonable hour of the Night; with disobedience of orders in not desisting when ordered so to do by the field Officer of the day through the Adjutt Captain Vanhorn and for using language and conduct subversive of good order and Discipline, was tried and acquited.

The Commander in Chief approves the Opinion of the Court. Captain Wilkin is released from his Arrest.

“General Orders, 25 September 1781,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/99-01-02-07015. [This is an Early Access document from The Papers of George Washington. It is not an authoritative final version.] (10/24/2023)

La Fayette also was asked by General Wayne to approve a verdict by a court martial ordered by Wayne himself. The soldier in question, James Grant, was from Virginia and La Fayette was popular with the Virginias and Wayne not. Wayne wrote on August 10, 1781, the day after Grant’s trial:

Inclosed is the proceedings of a Genl. Court Martial. Was it held on a soldier belonging to the Pennsa. Line I should not have the least difficulty or a moments hesitation in Confirming it because if this Culprit should pass with Impunity-it may open a door to worse [occurrences?]. But as it is a private of the Virginia Line I beg leave to commit it to your Decission.

Idzerda Stanley J. et al., editors, Lafayette in the Age of the American Revolution: Selected Letters and Papers, 1776–1790, Volume 4, April 1, 1781–December 23, 1781, Cornell University Press, 1981, pp. 309-311.

Grant was found guilty of shooting Captain Abraham Kirkpatrick whom he allegedly found in bed with his wife.

This list is by no means intended to be conclusive, there were probably many more cases La Fayette was involved in, these were just the ones I could present after a relatively quick search. This is more meant to give you a felling for La Fayette’s behavior in such situations.

Marquis de La Fayette to George Washington, January 13, 1778:

dear general I Schall make use in this particular instance of the liberty you gave me of telling freely every idea of mine which could strike me as not being useless to a better order of things. There were two gentlemen, same rank, same duty to perform, and same neglect of it who have been arrested the same day by me—as I went in the night around the piquets I found them in fault, and I gave an account of it the next day to your excellency—you answered that I was much in wrong not to have had them relieved and arrested immediately—I objected that it was then very late for such a changement, and that I did not know which was the rule in this army, but that the gentlemen should be arrested in that very moment—the last answer of your excellency has been, “they are to have a court martial, and you must give notice of it to the adjudant general”—therefore major nevill made two letters in order to arrest them, one for having been surprised in his post and the other, for the same cause and allowing his centrys to have fires which he could see in standing before the picquet. I give you my word of honor that there was not any exageration.

now I See in the orders the less guilty punished in a manner, much too severe indeed, and dismised from the service (it is among all the delicate minds deprived of his honor) when he was only to be severely reprimanded, and kept for some time under arrest—but it can be attributed to a very severe discipline.

what must I think of the same court when they unanimously acquit (it is to say that my accusation is not trüe) the officer who joins to the same fault, entirely the same, this of allowing his centrys to have fire in his own sight—for in every service being surprised or being found in the middle of his picquet without any challenging or stopping centry, as major nevil riding before me found him, is entirely the same thing—and mjor nevil riding before me when I was busy to make a centry pull off his fire, can swear that such was the case with that officer—he can do more than swearing, for he can give his word of honor—and I think that idea honor is the same in every country but the prejugées are not the same thing—for giving publickly the best of such a dispute (for here it becomes a trial for both parties) to an officer of the last military stage against one of the first, schould be looked on as an affront to the rank, and acquitting a man whom one other man accuses, looked upon as an affront to the person—it is the same in poland for count de pulaski was much affronted of the decision of a court martial entirely acquitting Colonel molens—however as I know the english costoms I am nothing else but surprised to see such a partiality in a court martial.

your excellency will certainly approuve my not arresting any officer for being brought before a court martial, for any neglect of duty, but when they will be robbers, or cowards, or when they will assassinate, in all when the[y] will deserve being cashiered or put to death.

give me leave, to tell your excellency how I am adverse to court martials—I know it is the english costom, and I believe it is a very bad one—it comes from theyr love of lawers, speakers, and of that black apparate of sentences, and judgements—but such is not the american temper, and I think this new army must pick up the good institutions, and leave the bad ones where ever they may be—in france an officer is arrested by his superior, who gives notice of it to the commanding officer, and then he is punished enough in being deprived of going out of his room in time of peace, of doing his duty in time of war—no body knows of it but his comrades—when the fault is greater he is confined in a common room for prisonner officers and this is much more shamefull—notice of it is immediately given to the general officer who commands there—that goes too to the Kings minister who is to be reimplaced here by the commander in chief—in time of war it goes to the general in chief.

Soldiers are punished the same or next day by order of proper officers, and the right of punishing is proportionate to theyr ranks.

but when Both officers and soldiers have done something which deserves A more severe punishement, when theyr honor, or theyr life, or theyr liberty for more than a very short time is concerned, then a court martial meets, and the sentence is known—how will you let an unhappy soldier be confined several weeks, with men who are to be hanged, with spies, with the most horrid sort of people, and in the same time be lost for the duty, when they deserve only some lashes—then almost no proportion in the punishements.

how is it possible to carry a gentleman before a parcel of dreadful judges at the same place where an officer of the same rank has been just now cashiered, for a trifling neglect of his duty, for, I suppose, speaking to his next neighbour in a maneuvre, for going into a house to speack to a pretty girl, when the army is on his march and thousand other things—how is it possible to bring to the certainty of being cashiered, or dishonored, a young lad, who has made a considerable fault because he had a light head, a too great vivacity, when that young man would be perhaps in some years the best officer of the army, if he had been friendly reprimanded and arrested for some time, without any dishonor.

the law is alwaïs severe, and bring with it an eternal Shamefull mark—when the judges are partial as in this occasion, it is much worse, because they have the same inconveniences as law itself.

in court martials men are judged by theyr inferiors—how ⟨mutilated⟩ to discipline I do’nt want to say—the publication exposes men to ⟨mutilated⟩ despised by the least soldier—when men have been before a court martial they schould be or acquitted or dismissed—what do you think can be produced by the half conndemnation of a general officer—what necessity for all the soldiers, all the officers, to know that general maxwell has been prevented from doing [h]is duty by his being drunk. Where is the man who will not laugh at him if he is told by him you are a drunkard and is it right to ridicule a man repectable by his rank, because he drank two or three gills of rum. there are my reasons against court martials, when there is not some considerable fault to punish—according to my affair I am sorry in seeing the less guilty being the only one punished however, I shall send to court martials but for such a crimes, that there will be for the judges no way of indulgence and partiality. With the most tender respect I am Your excellency’s the most obedient servant

The mquis de lafayette

“To George Washington from Major General Lafayette, 13 January 1778,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-13-02-0186. [Original source: The Papers of George Washington, Revolutionary War Series, vol. 13, 26 December 1777 – 28 February 1778, ed. Edward G. Lengel. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003, pp. 222–225.] (10/24/2023)

[scotianostra]

St Andrews CathedraL

The remains of St Andrews Cathedral, which was Scotland’s largest cathedral and most magnificent church, show how impressive it used to be.

St Rule’s Church, (the remains are seen in the pics, the square tower beside the tree) was likely built around 1130, as the first place of worship in Scotland for the newly arrived Augustinian canons. This Continental reformed order supplanted the existing clergy.

The 33m tall St Rule’s Tower may have been a beacon for pilgrims heading for the shrine of St Andrew.

The cathedral was begun in 1160–2 by Bishop Arnold. Work continued over the next 150 years, but was stalled by a storm in 1272, which blew down the west front, and by the first War of Independence against England.

When the cathedral was finally dedicated in 1318 – in the presence of Robert the Bruce, by then king – it was by far the largest church in Scotland. So it was fitting that St Rule’s became the headquarters of the Scottish Church.

In June 1559 during the Reformation, a Protestant mob incited by the preaching of John Knox ransacked the cathedral; the interior of the building was destroyed. The cathedral fell into decline following the attack and became a source of building material for the town.

[whencyclopedia]

Napoleon Bonaparte

Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) was a Corsican-born French general and politician who reigned as Emperor of the French with the regnal name Napoleon I from 1804 to 1814 and then again briefly in 1815. He established the largest continental European empire since Charlemagne and brought liberal reforms to the lands he conquered at the cost of the destructive Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815).

Continue reading...

[churchblogmatics-blog]

Books for spiritual formation

Books that have left an indelible mark on my understanding of God or the Christian faith in some way. My spiritual development is unfinished, so this list is unfinished - I'm always open to suggestions

Soren Kierkegaard

The Sickness Unto Death - Explained how sin works psychologically, illustrates how it can be its own punishment

Works of Love - What it means to love, what it costs, what it gives us

Fear and Trembling - What faith means, its miraculous nature

Karl Barth

Evangelical Theology - What theology actually means, how the gospel is good news

The Epistle to the Romans - Shows the need for continual reformation of thought within the church, introduced (to me) the idea of God's freedom in communication to man

Church Dogmatics II.2 - Election is good news! It is God willing to choose humanity despite sin - universal reconciliation can and should be hoped for

The Journal of John Woolman

What undying commitment to justice means, what it looks like

Martin Luther King Jr

Letter from a Birmingham Jail - Made me understand how Romans 13:1 can be integrated into radical politics

A Gift of Love - Brought to life 1 John 4:20

A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving

A narrative illustration of unwavering faith

The Imitation of Christ, Thomas Kempis

What we're saved to, salvation has a telos

Flannery O'Connor

Wise Blood - Life without Christ, the perils of sola scriptura

A Good Man is Hard to Find - Shows grace as an intrusive lived experience

Marilynne Robinson

Gilead novels (Gilead, Home, Lila) - Rich illustration of Imago Dei

When I Was a Child I Read Books - Bolstered my understanding of the 8th commandment (reading with charitable intent, in interactions with others in life and on the page)

What Are We Doing Here? - Illustrates what the glory of God means in daily experience

Garry Wills

What Paul Meant - Paul and Jesus were of a unified mind, stop reading Paul as a bible thumper, start reading him as a man who loved dearly and wrote with urgency on live issues

Religio Medici, Thomas Browne

Ecumenism is a beautiful thing and should be strived for in all Christian communities

The Seven Storey Mountain, Thomas Merton

The gospel brings peace of mind and soul, searching for peace is a valid epistemology

Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt

Wickedness is not inevitable, it arises from moral and intellectual sluggardliness

The Cost of Discipleship, Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Learn to love the church, it is the arms of Christ; great exegesis of the Sermon on the Mount; great companion to the book of James

White Evangelical Racism, Anthea Butler

Evangelicalism did not emerge from theological first principles, it is a diseased expression of the faith informed by racism at the root

Jesus and John Wayne, Kristin Kobes du Mez

Evangelicalism did not emerge from theological first principles, it is a diseased expression of the faith informed by misogyny at the root

C.S. Lewis

The Great Divorce - Eternity begins now, sin is its own punishment and grace is its own reward

Till We Have Faces - God has compassion and patience for those who wrestle with him, to summon the boldness to contend with God can be a blessed thing

The Courage to Be, Paul Tillich

The dynamics of Christian faith explained in the abstract

As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner

The thinness of intellectual assent, the richness of faith

The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker

Explanation of the existential need faith meets in the language of continental philosophy

Confessions, St. Augustine

The most theologically and philosophically rich testimony besides that of St. Paul

An Unpublished Essay on the Trinity, Jonathan Edwards

What is the trinity, why is it important

John Milton

Areopagitica - Enforced virtue means nothing

Paradise Lost - Human beings are worth saving even if they aren't deserving of God's favor

Civilization and its Discontents, Sigmund Freud

Illustrates the necessity of grace by exploring a world through the assumption of its absence (excellent foil to A Gift of Love)

[centrally-unplanned]

I think George Washington is a good ask here because there's a variety of different perspectives to evaluate him from, as well as insights into how each is considered to matter. Like, did he make the British colonies in North America more or less likely to become independent? Did he make the new state more or less secure? Was it a good or bad thing that the 13 colonies became independent? How good of a job do you think he did at whatever goals he personally had in mind? What did he have in mind, anyway - just rent-seeking for Virginian aristocrats or some more idealistic definition of "good" that bears resemblance to something we'd appreciate?

George Washington is a very interesting figure, because he is a classic "consensus leader" in some ways, but in an era where "consensus" is in fact very hard to come across and takes unique talent to be forged. I think we can bucket him: As a military leader he is only "fine": not bad, don't get me wrong, but he has no core tactical innovations or operational finesse on display. He certainly does deserve credit for his "wait them out" approach, and its true that he received political pressure from groups like the Continental Congress that he resisted. But this is a classic VOR moment: of course the distant, political actors demanded infeasible military action that the on-the-ground, faced-with-the-consequences-of-defeat guy would resist. That is a classic dynamic. Other generals in the war faced similar demands and similarly resisted. Again, he was an able commander, just nothing amazing.

I don't view him as being overly crucial in the core "state making" moments for the US in forming the constitution and all that- essentially the dynamics of the war of independence, the strength of their state rivals, and how the colonial economy functioned made a unified state the natural course. So here its not controversial to claim his VOR is pretty low.

However, I give him very high VOR for his presidency in the core process of interpreting that constitutional foundation through the lends of a strong federalized government with legalist, cohesive norms. He is not an innovator (people like Hamilton are doing that work) but he really was the One Guy In The Room who could bring the crazy factions together and stake his prestige on necessary tax reforms, financial reform, and crushing rebellion. VOR here matters - someone would have done something in the face of these, but the alt timeline is that states gain more and more autonomy. I think few people but Washington could have set the the federal government up as well as he.

So overall I would give him... lets go with A-, he plays a similar role as Lee Kuan Yew, if via very different tactics.

Demerits though for his lack of future planning on things like political parties & strong electoral politics. In that category he is pretty much VOR-less, he did what the default man would do and failed to exert any agency over it.

As for his own goals, he is very idealistic, and was actually, truly concerned with the idea of a strong, independent republic - he was born rich, he could afford to do that of course. And vis a vis slavery the strength of the union and the federal government was the only way it would be ended in the south on the timeline it was. The process of abolition in the south was very much a product of northern abolitionists forcing change onto resisting foreign polities. Colonizing them, if you will, with their own culture & systems. So he was a net good for this cause, even if it was not at all his own personal agenda.

[atinylittlepain]

Mr and Mrs Mountain: In Conversation with Steve and Jo Harrington

(National Geographic, 1993)

I sit down with the Harringtons on a sunny day in December in the living room of their Boulder Colorado home. They’ve just moved in, and they apologize for the few stray boxes still littering the dark wood floors.

“We’re not used to having all this space,” admits Steve Harrington, going on to describe how he and his wife spent most of the last three years living in sublets, tents, and the errant hostel, jumping from Boulder, where they’ve decided to call home, to various parts of the world for an awe-inspiring roster of expeditions. But their most frequently-visited location is Everest, of course.

“We leave around mid-March and can usually expect to be back in June. It’s become a pretty well-oiled machine by now.” What Harrington is referring to is their expedition outfit, Summit Trek, that has been in business since 1991. It’s 1993 when I sit down with the Harringtons, and they’re confirming their client list for an Everest expedition… in 1996. The next three years have already been all booked up. Why, you ask, does this young yet affable couple have a veritable waitlist to join their outfit? It’s simple, they’ve never lost a single client on any of their ascents, a rare feat for repeat Everest expedition guides. 

“We really take a lot of pride in the safety of our trips. There’s more and more outfits every year that are willing to take clients up Everest, but it’s always been the getting back down that’s the tricky part,” says Jo Harrington, sitting on the arm of their worn leather couch, her arm draped loosely over her husband’s shoulders. She carries herself with a great deal more poise than her twenty-six years may allow her, a sort of wry steel to the way she speaks, chin tilted down, daunting and demure at the same time, as if Catherine Hepburn and Clint Eastwood had a lovechild with a particular athletic prowess. She wears her hair in two short braids, flyaways framing sharp eyes and dark brows. In a pair of rumpled khaki cargo pants and a thermal with the patagonia logo stitched into the chest (she has been sponsored by the brand for four years now), there is still a strange elegance to her, carried in quick hand gestures and a permanently rasped voice. First brought into the climbing world’s consciousness at the age of sixteen for taking home gold in the 1983 Climbing National Championships in her age division, Harrington, nee Taylor, would go on to rack up an impressive resume of climbs. She currently has conquered five of the seven continental summits, and still holds the women’s speed record for climbing El Cap. 

“I’m going for Steve’s record the next time I get out to Yosemite,” quips Jo while her husband grins up at her. He currently holds the men’s speed record on El Cap. 

Indeed, the Harringtons have become darlings of the climbing world, meeting in 1990 on both of their first ascents of Everest, and falling into a whirlwind relationship that would see them going into business together within the year as co-guides of their very own expedition outfit.

“I just wouldn’t leave her alone, basically. Asked her where she was going after Katmandhu and she said Boulder, and I said alright, I’m going to follow this woman wherever she leads me.”

“He was easy to be around. To climb with, to talk with, to suffer with. I knew that I could trust him as my partner from the start.” And that trust Jo speaks to seems to be the secret ingredient to what has made their outfit so successful. 

“For an ascent to go as well as it can, there has to be almost seamless communication between guides. There can’t be any doubt that you have each other’s backs, that you’re going to do your job to the best of your ability because that’s the level of care and respect you have for each other,” says Steve, tucking a long brown lock of hair behind his ear. He is the picture of a dirtbag, reformed (his words), with his long hair and single silver hoop in his ear, a perpetual tan to his skin from all the years spent out in the weather, a ruggedly bright smile and dark eyes that crinkle knowingly as he speaks. He plays with the wedding band on his left ring finger, spinning it around as he talks with a quiet confidence. Harrington rose up in the climbing world through a sort of scrappy perseverance, spending his teen years hoofing it around the United States and climbing whatever he could get his hands on as fast as he could. Besides El Cap, he currently holds the speed record for the Moose’s Tooth in Alaska, as well as for Kings Peak in Utah. These days, he’s less interested in speed than he is in altitude. 

“There’s no going fast on something like Everest, not if you want to come back down in one piece.” Jo nods at her husband’s words, and it is clear that this couple holds a deep respect for the mountain they summit every year, with a group of nine people that pay them to lead them to the peak. It would seem this respect is also part of what has brought them so much success as expedition guides, with Outside Magazine declaring Summit Trek as the “premier” Everest outfit for climbers who want the best of the best experience on the mountain. The going rate for an individual to join one of their expeditions certainly reflects this reputation. Excluding airfare and personal equipment, it will run you $75,000 to join a Summit Trek expedition. For context, this is almost double what most outfits charge, and $10,000 more than what Adventure Consultants, one of the other more reputable outfits, ask. When asked about this price point, Jo smiles.

“We understand that it’s a steep price we’re asking, but it reflects the quality of the experience we provide. People also have to understand that a good portion of that money is put right back into the business for permits and equipment. You get what you pay for, and when it comes to something like Everest, I’d like to think people are willing to pay more in order to get more out of the experience.” Her argument certainly seems to stand. Currently, with the additional help of infamous climber Eddie Munson as their other co-guide, respected mountaineer Robin Buckley running base camp communication, and climber-turned-physician Nancy Wheeler, the Summit Trek team has successfully taken 27 people to the Everest summit and brought them back down safely, with plans to take another 27 up in the next three years. 

I asked the couple, who have now been married for just shy of a year, what it’s been like working together in such a dangerous context. They both seem to find this question amusing, sharing a quick 

glance between them before Jo answers the question.

“I know I wouldn’t do this work with anyone else. We’re partners in every sense of the word and I love getting to do this work with my best friend.” Steve rests a hand on her knee, nodding and adding his own thoughts.

“Yes, it’s dangerous, but we’re a particular kind of people that seek out that kind of danger. We get to see and do crazy things together, it’s amazing.   I think we’re very lucky to get to do this.” 

My last question for the seemingly invincible couple, do they see themselves slowing down any time soon? Jo laughs.

“Well, you can only go up that mountain so many times before it takes its pound of flesh from you. We’re certainly not going to do this forever, and I think we’re definitely starting to think about putting down more roots for the future. But for now, we really love the work we do.”

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