#each time I see the “economical” interview I shudder

[alea-jottun]

On dissonance : saying you story did something vs making your story say something

A problem I have noticed with people defending s2 is that they take at face value what the dialogues say (or what the writers have said in interviews), as if it were a complete justification of what happens in s2. But a story cannot simply say it is something, it has to be this thing. Dialogue that is not backed up by the actual content of a story is worthless.

A few examples for instance :

S2 wants to pretend that it has something to say about forgiveness. But what does it do ? Have alternate Silco say that "the greatest thing we can do in life is find the power to forgive" (one of the worst lines of s2 considering the context. I'm not even going to delve into why he was the worst possible character you could choose to prone forgiveness, but let's put aside his character assassination for now) yet never follow through.

That's just a line, said by a character. For it to have value, it has to be backed by the story. But s2 doesn't do that.

The problem is not that s2 wants to prone forgiveness (that was going to come up anyway, because you have to discuss forgiveness in order to put an end to a cycle of violence). The problem is that there is no well-written arc demonstrating the value of forgiveness in s2 : simply characters who suddenly feel bad for what they have done, and other characters who forgive them just like that. The justifications given for their changes of heart are either incredibly superficial (considering the gravity of the Arcane themes. We're talking about forgiving murder, attacks, etc), or absolute crap. The reason being of course that the writers did not bother writing organic, developped character arcs.

No, Caitlyn saying "I know" or fighting Noxus is not her taking responsibility or atoning for her crimes. No, her seeing Vi or being called Cupcake should not be enough to cause a change of heart this radical (and don't say that Caitlyn was feeling bad and was waiting for an opportunity to betray Ambessa, because that's simply not true. She absolutely supported Ambessa through s2. She just suddenly changed her opinion on Ambessa because the writers decided it).

Same goes for instance for the Timebomb subplot (which I have unfortunately seen heralded as another example of how s2 preaches forgiveness) : Ekko goes to an alternate reality and falls in love with an alternate version of a girl who murdered his friends and cursed Zaun, but in his reality Jinx is suddenly sad about what she did to the Council, so boom ! Forgiven with no proper redemption arc, and now Ekko tries to convince her that she can better herself. Even though throughout Arcane Jinx didn't give a damn about Ekko or the Firelights she killed. And no, fighting for Piltover and a fake sacrifice at the end do not count as redemption.

At this point, the writers really feel like a character being sad is equivalent to an entire redemption arc. But forgiveness has to be earned, and it never is in s2.

Another example of constant dissonance which I have evoked in another post, but also fits here :

Caitlyn saying to Jinx "no amount of good deeds can undo our crimes...." .... while the entirety of s2 does just that for several characters, including her and Jinx, ironically.

Again, that's just one line, said by a character at the end of a 9 episodes series. But that's not what s2 says in practice. The reality of s2 is that it keeps trying to downplay Jinx's past actions, it keeps trying to undo her crimes : she does whatever she wants and is seen as a symbol in Zaun, even though she literally prevented the Council from declaring Zaun independant. There is no problem to her presence in Viktor's commune, despite that fact that she killed him, and his dream, and again, cursed Zaun when it was about to be freed. She can literally talk to Viktor without the topic ever being properly adressed.  And then the writers remember that she is a bit more than a troublemaker, so in the last episodes you get half-baked excuses and a tentative to end herself to cause drama (which is incredibly insensitive, but that's not the point of this post).

Same for Caitlyn : despite being the one saying "no amount of good deeds can undo our crimes....", she has one of the happiest ending of s2, without ever taking responsibility for her actions, or going through redemption. She ends up with an even better social position, a girlfriend she mistreated, a victory for Piltover, and never any real punishment or coherent negative consequences of her actions. So yes, her crimes are pretty much undo-ed... and she didn't even do any real good deed.

The dialogue says something, but the whole series contradicts it.

And finally, you have lines that are absolute crap (in the context of s2) and that pretend that s2 was a completely different show : see the "trying to get rid of your imperfections" line (Viktor's so-called quest for perfection doesn't exist apart from a few lines of dialogues, it is never a proper plot point in the show itself). See the "If he had found the letter it would all have been different" line (not even going to go into details with this one because there is so much wrong with it, it's impressive at this point). Or Jayce's "All I want is my partner back" when Jayce is not shown caring about Viktor after he goes back to Zaun (and no, hallucinating him once in the fire does not count. Also it does not help that neither Jayce nor Viktor have much screen time) and then tries to kill him. So what does s2 do ? Have a cheap thirty second explanation in the last episode, introduce the worst "plot twist" of the series, and pretend it did the job.

Add that to the terrible interview of the writer who said that they made the story as "economical" as possible (they genuinely thought that if they implied something once, then they never had to mention it again) when a good story is supposed to be the complete opposite : efficient (say as much as you possibly can).

S2 is all filler no substance. I know we're joking about the people defending it with the "micro-expressions" argument, but that's understandable : that's all there is in s2 : micro-potentials of what could have been a great series, drowned in an ocean of incompetence. 

[arcticdementor]

The outdated definition of a liberal is that of a person who is tolerant of others, their thoughts, and their way of life. This traditional definition has been discarded in favour of an increasingly narrow one largely due to Karl Popper’s “Paradox of Tolerance” in which the intolerant cannot be tolerated as an ‘open society’ will eventually be seized by the intolerant. Therefore, Enlightened Despotism is the ‘proper’ way to govern a society.

It is human nature to challenge despotism and authoritarianism, especially as they fall into intellectual, spiritual, economic and personal corruption. So how are those who challenge such a system to be dealt with? Simply label them as ‘intolerant’, which makes them a de facto outlaw in society.

Christopher Rufo is one of these modern outlaws. Initally a documentary maker, his life recently has taken him down another, much more difficult route: challenging the intellectual basis of today’s American elites, that being Critical Race Theory. He has been credited with singlehandedly putting opposition to this trend on the political map by way of influencing President Trump to issue an Executive Order halting its instruction inside of federal agencies. With Biden’s reversal of Trump’s Executive Order, Rufo is now expanding the front far and wide, and winning key battles along the way.

…

All Italians are mafia so your family is definitely connected to at least one of the NYC Five Families, if not the Outfit in Chicago.  You grew up watching Goodfellas and then eventually moved on to The Sopranos.  You and your wop friends picked up the lingo, started talking like mafiosos, and came across as fucking idiots to everyone around you.  You tried to extort a guy down the block who had a pretty strong betting book but he told his mom and his mom told your mom and your dad got out his belt and told you that you're not allowed to be hardcore.  When was your first hit and why wasn't it Rod Dreher?

There is some truth to this. Like most authentic Italian-Americans, I have distant relatives in both countries who operate “family businesses.” Most of it is harmless: off-the-books car parts, bookmaking, loan collection. We had a relative in Philly who made a living hustling mobsters in golf—he would let them win just enough to keep them hooked, then empty their pockets every so often. The business had its ups and downs. Once, he was sitting with the family on a Sunday, watching the news, when his face suddenly went white. A local mob boss had been arrested. Turns out that our relative had made his living the previous few years hustling that mob boss on the golf course. “Goddammit, now I need to find a job!” he said when the news broke. Most of the time, I don’t ask questions.

…

It’s astonishing to me that as recently as the 1960s, interracial marriage was seen, correctly, as a moral cause and a sign of racial progress. Now, for some factions on the Left, interracial marriages, and mixed-race families in general, are seen as a form of oppression, domination, and false consciousness. They see interracial marriages as an expression of “white supremacy” or, for the minority spouse, as an “assimilation into whiteness.” Some lefties famously blasted Amy Coney Barrett as a “white colonizer” for adopting a Haitian orphan. We’ve gone from Loving v Virginia to Ibram X. Kendi in a single generation. And now we’re beginning to see the revival of informal social prohibitions against interracial marriage and actual racial segregation in schools, universities, and public institutions. I recently obtained photos from King County Library, which held a racially-segregated diversity training program, even hanging up signs outside the separated rooms labelled “People of Colour” and “People Who Are White.” It’s like water fountains in 1955, but in the service of 21st-century woke ideology. The new racial politics of the Left is almost parodically regressive.

…

Others have laid out different strategies in fighting CRT.  Some have suggested confronting Corporate HR Trainers either overtly or subtly so that fellow employees would 'see through' its illogic and inherent awfulness.  Why are these approaches either useless or even counterproductive?

You can’t persuade zealots with logic, facts, and clever argumentation; they only understand the language of power. That’s why the campaign to prove that you’re “the real liberal” or “more antiracist than the antiracists” is doomed to failure. Like it or not, Critical Race Theory is the driving force of the modern intellectual Left; they’re not going back to the philosophy of FDR, LBJ, or MLK. And they scrupulously follow the old dictum of “no enemies to the left”—they will dispatch the centrist liberals with even more vitriol and brutality than they dispatch the conservatives. This is also the core dilemma of the IDW crowd: many of them cannot imagine aligning with political conservatives; they operate under the delusion that they can “recapture the centre” and convince the planet of the virtue of Enlightenment values. That’s not how politics works. We live in a polarized political system—one winner, one loser. You’ll remember that the Girondins went to the guillotine. If, metaphorically speaking, the centrist liberals want to avoid the same fate, they will have to make an alliance with Trump-loving, truck-driving, gun-toting Middle Americans. That’s reality. We’ll see if they heed it.

…

Ibram X. Kendi is a human fortune cookie. His intellectual output is an endless buffet of word salad and phony wisdom: “Denial is the heartbeat of racism”; “In order to truly be anti-racist, you also have to truly be anti-capitalist”; “Whiteness is literally posing an existential threat to humanity.” In my investigative reporting, I’ve noticed something quite interesting: the core demographic of Kendi readers is liberal, white, middle-aged women who work in public institutions. On one hand, this is a surprise: Kendi embraces a radical vision of Black Power-style revolution. On the other hand, it makes perfect sense: Kendi’s politics provides a vicarious thrill, but is completely in line with conventional wisdom. It’s revolution without risk; it’s liberation without leaving the house. That’s really the best way to understand what he’s doing. He’s not a revolutionary; he’s a self-help guru for white liberals and a reputation-laundering mechanism for multinational corporations. He is an apostle of anti-whiteness, but a mouthpiece for elite white opinion. He preaches anti-capitalism, but accepts Visa, Mastercard, and American Express.

…

The dirty secret about Critical Race Theory and, to a certain extent, the New York Times, is that they are both extensions of the state. Critical Race Theory was incubated in public and publicly-subsidized universities and then operationalized in public agencies and public school systems. In reality, Critical Race Theory has very little organic support—it’s an artificial ideology that has the illusion of support because it has commandeered the public bureaucracy and prestige media. But you’ll notice that the Critical Race Theorists are regularly ratioed on Twitter, juice their book sales with institutional purchases, and collect corporate handouts to do their work. The New York Times is similarly situated. It’s the mouthpiece of the permanent state no matter who is in office. Its purpose is to manufacture the narrative and enforce ideological discipline. But here, too, the New York Times is less powerful than it appears. Its authority rests on its historical reputation and prestige, which is rapidly being squandered with each bogus story, newsroom tantrum, and Taylor Lorenz article. I’ll admit: I was momentarily frightened when the Times was putting together a piece attacking my work on Critical Race Theory. But it turned out to be a great coup for me: the Times made a sloppy accusation, so I quickly owned them on Twitter and generated 100 times more social media engagement in my rebuttal than they did in their attack. To top it off, conservatives consider it a badge of honour to get that first NYT hit piece, so I enjoyed a round of attaboys, high-fives, and small donations from my tribe.

…

How much do you shudder when you hear Capicolo pronounced "GABBAGOOL"?

The last time I heard that pronunciation, I shuddered so hard I threw out my back. It’s more than hate speech—it’s actual violence.

[bryonysimcox]

You've Got to Look for the Good Stuff: Week 14, Spain

Like light is to darkness, this week has been an antidote to the last. My mood has lifted and the days have flown by, as lockdown continues and we do too.

Sunshine is a simple remedy. Each day this week has been warm and dry, if not bright and sunny too. It’s allowed us to live more inside-outside, which not only makes life easier but lifts my mood. It’s been a stark contrast to the constant rain and cold which dominated last week’s blog post.

I’ve also loved seeing pictures of children out in the streets and parks again, as Spain slowly lifts its coronavirus measures. It’s almost incomprehensible to imagine what it must be like for all these youngsters, many of whom have been cooped up in city-centre apartments with their siblings and parents for weeks and weeks. Even with the generous garden we have here and our weekly walks to the supermarket I’ve been going borderline insane, so I shudder to think how isolation has affected kids and their mental health.

Gaba Podcast live streams continue to punctuate my week. Adam Martin, whose podcast I mentioned in Week 10’s post, shares breathwork and meditative practices that have really helped me ease my busy mind. One of the things Adam talked about this week was what we consider to be ‘exercise’, in light of zealous Brits moaning that people sitting in the park, standing still in public and seemingly staring into space are breaking government-imposed controls around exercise. Adam argues that we consider sport and movement in open space an essential part to looking after our physical health, whilst ignoring the ‘exercise’ or psychological nurturing that our mental health deserves.

While this pandemic takes lives, we need to keep in mind the impact that social distancing is having on our psyches.

I titled this week’s digital diary entry ‘You’ve Got To Look Out For The Good Stuff’ because I’ve realised that there’s plenty of good stuff around, but quite simply, you’ve got to look for it. That might sound pretty obvious, but in comparing this week to the last, I can see that the main thing that’s changed isn’t my situation, but more so my mindset. Admittedly, the sunshine has made a huge difference, but apart from that, we’re still stuck in lockdown in Spain in the same physical, geographical and financial situation that we were in last week.

What’s caused this shift in mindset? Honestly, I don’t know. I think life in lockdown is making us act in all kinds of strange ways, cycling through an emotional spectrum so extreme we’ve rarely experienced it before and yet now feels like the norm. Tears, laughter, smiles and frowns easily paint my face in a matter of hours. So maybe my mood this week has just been luck. But as my shifted mindset has worked its magic, somehow I’ve seen and experienced little nuggets of ‘good stuff’. I hope that some of you have seen and enjoyed those nuggets too, wherever you are.

After rain left the road to the supermarket blocked, we finally made it to the shops this week, when the water subsided.

Perhaps fearful of another rainfall, this time we piled the trolley high in the local Aldi and returned home to stock up the cupboards. A plentiful fridge has resulted in some more cooking adventures - this week including George’s new specialty, Spanish omelette, and a new fave of mine too, veggie paella.

We picked and podded the final batch of broad beans this week, and helped to dig up the patch where they were growing to make way for the vegetables of the coming season: tomatoes, courgettes, cucumbers and peppers. One of the inadvertent blessings of being ‘marooned’ here in Catalunya has been to see and enjoy the changing of the seasons, and my interest in food growing and land management increases with them. George and I have always said we’d like to live in Spain in a self-built tiny house with a bit of land, and somehow we’ve landed in a situation right now that’s not far off! In addition to the vegetables we can get from the garden, I’ve been buying fresh eggs from the neighbour (often still warm from the coop!) which is a real treat.

(images, left to right) ‘Why simple changes [like growing food] are really profound’ a lovely illustration I discovered from Brenna Quinlan, George prepping the soil for tomatoes, and my new favourite thing to cook, veggie paella.

Food isn’t the only ‘good stuff’ to be grateful for. Since I mentioned Simon Mair’s article in my post from Week 11, I’ve been researching ‘Ecological Economics’ and its potential to lead us towards more just and sustainable ways of living. That research finally came to a head this week, when I had the pleasure of interviewing not only Simon himself but also friend and futures thinker from Mumbai, Mansi Parikh.

Making a video about alternative economic futures which address some of the challenges posed by Covid-19 is turning out to be a bit of a challenge in itself!

The interviews with Simon and Mansi were utterly fascinating, and I was so grateful to be able to talk to two super knowledgeable folk, who like me, are passionate about the future and how we can make it better. They shared their time and their insights, and now I’m left with over 150 minutes of recorded zoom calls to make sense of!

I want to use these interviews to make a video which engages people who perhaps wouldn’t usually be interested in economics, without ‘watering down’ the message or intent of the film. It’s such a hard balance to strike, to create something which is at once accessible and engaging but also rich with ideas. As the week progresses, I’ll start editing the footage and hopefully the narrative of the video will reveal itself.

One of the best things about making a new video is the chance to do loads of research! There have been so many articles which have got my brain buzzing, from ‘no-growth’ economics to deliberative democracies, and I’ve also just started reading ‘Fully Automated Luxury Communism’ which is a manifesto for a post-Capitalist future. Even if this research doesn’t directly inform the video I’m working on, it serves to inspire me. I’ve actually found myself a few times this week almost overwhelmed by how much interesting media there is out there to consume, and often just resort to adding thing to my ‘read later’ list, or quoting my favourite gems on Twitter.

(images, left to right) Recording interviews with Mansi and Simon, and my latest reading project...

The realisation of a project we began in January, ‘Place Portraits: Episode 1’ was finally released this week.

George had the idea a while ago to create a video series exploring cities and places through analogue photography. Whilst it was a super simple idea, we thought these short, laid-back videos would contrast with some of the longer-format stuff or more informative films we’re hoping to upload on the Broaden YouTube channel.

Back at the start of our trip we shot on a roll of Kodak Portra 400 and Fujifilm C200, using the trusty Pentax that was once George’s dad’s camera. We’d had the photos back from the processing lab for a while, but have only just completed the edit and got the film online, which is such a nice feeling. We’ve had some lovely responses to the resulting four-minute video, and I’ve especially valued constructive feedback so we can start to think critically about what Episode 2 might look like.

(video) Place Portraits: Episode 1 - Paris

Since ‘The Hundred Miler’ hit 90K views this week (which in and of itself is pretty nuts), I knew I had to temper my expectations about how many views we’d get with Place Portraits. Even though it’s not far past 200 views, each and every one of those views counts and I’m chuffed to see it finally online. Watching Broaden’s audience slowly grow has also served as great motivation to submit The Hundred Miler into film festivals, a process which we started this week.

There’s probably plenty more good stuff which deserves to be celebrated, but the one which can’t go unmentioned is of course the company of others.

Embracing what has become a routine activity for many of us these days, I’ve spent some cheerful hours on phonecalls and videochats to others across the globe.

This week included a three-way call between Ireland, Australia and Spain with dear friends that George and I used to live with catching up on career plans, cats and newfound hobbies. I also enjoyed a game of movie charades (which involved some impressive commitment from some people!) and even attended an evening of ‘drag queen bingo’. These digital hangouts leave me asking ‘Would I be connecting with friends and family this much if the world wasn’t in a global pandemic?’ and I think the answer would be no.

(images) Just some of the beautiful humans that feed my soul.

I’m grateful that these human connections are now much more of a priority. In being restricted to a simpler and more isolated way of living, we’re certainly reassigning value to the things that matter. That’s something which I��ve found from making the economics video and learning about the idea of value, but also something I’ve felt in a visceral way when a phone call with my parents or a friend leaves me beaming.

There’s so much good stuff out there, you’ve just got to be open to it.

[treasure-my-aurora]

We’ve got Tonight

• Summary: I’d known Felix since before he was born. My tiny preschool hand would often press flat against his mother’s round belly while I looked up at her with surprised innocent eyes as the baby inside kicked against my hand. Known him as a brother, a best friend and a rock to lean against through my whole life. But now, in just a month, he’d be going away to train with some of the best in the industry, and with time running out, perhaps there is more than just platonic feelings between us… something that would bring up more pain, jealousy and sorrow than we could ever imagine.

♥ Pairing: Bang Chan/Reader/Felix

♦ Chapter: 4/9

♣ Words: 3253

♠ Genre (in this one): Fluff, angst, teasing

“So, I came to visit you yesterday, but you were…uh… occupied” Felix rolled his eyes and bit his tongue, a look of disbelief on his face as he tried to hide the embarrassed smile that tugged on his lips, “So that’s what Jeongin meant when he mentioned that I probably shouldn’t try to contact you” My brows furrowed in confusion, “No, that’s exactly the opposite of what I said” He shrugged and pursed his lips, watching his feet instead, “Maybe he misunderstood” ‘Or maybe he saw the look I had on my face and decided that I needed a breather before I saw my best friend again’ I thought and was suddenly glad that the younger had taken the decision to not listen to me. It was sunny today too and we sat on a picnic blanket in a park, snacks spread out around us. Weather still warm but the big tree above us had started to change from luscious green to bright yellow and I pulled my light jacket closer around my body as a gust of wind blew through it. “Well, was it something you wanted?” Felix asked, ears slightly red from the confession that I’d heard things yesterday, that he probably wanted to keep private and I paused. Picked on the grass just beside the edge of the blanket to collect my thoughts. There were so many things that I wanted to ask. Why? How did the two of you meet? Was she just a random encounter? Was it good? Did she spend the night? Did she sleep next to you like I usually do? Did she held onto you as you pressed kisses on her body? Did you close your eyes the moment you entered her? Did you think of me when you came? Because you feel the change of air between us as well? Could you even guess that you’d been in my thoughts as my body shuddered from the little death, way, way too many times these past days? I sat up more properly, legs folded underneath me in a lotus position and sighed out an exhale, fiddling with my fingernails instead, “Nothing really, I just wanted to spend time with you, that’s all” I said with a small smile and he met my eyes from underneath his fringe, one eyebrow raised as he heard the tone in my voice and I quickly looked away again but knew that I’d been busted the second he opened his mouth again. “What are you not telling me?” He asked, softly and reached out to touch my hand but paused his movements when I flinched slightly from his touch, and the small inhale of surprise that left his lips only made me hang my head lower. I had never, ever flinched away from him, and I could see in my peripheral that his eyes searched for mine as he paused for a few seconds before he scooted closer, slowly, like he was approaching an injured animal. Reached out again, carefully this time and half expecting that I’d flinch again; thankful that I didn’t though and interlaced our fingers. His other hand moved back my hair from my neck in an innocent gesture since it partly covered my face, and the gulp that followed as he saw of the marks that I knew were there made my heart flip uncomfortably in my chest. I didn’t protest when he slipped his fingers into the neckline of my shirt. Only chewed nervously on the inside of my cheek when I felt his touch on the red indents of fingertips, some new and some that had turned into bruises over the last few days. I refused to meet his eyes when he checked the other side and confirmed to himself with a hum that a similar mark were there as well. His body tensed up as he swallowed hard, and I took a deep breath, not realizing that I’d held it when he touched me. “Good or bad?” His voice was strained, and I sighed deeply, “Both” “Both?” His voice dropped an octave and I flinched at the annoyed tone in it. I squeezed the hand that still held mine to reassure him and shook my head, stroking over the lines on his thumb while I cleared my throat. “We’ve fought and fucked basically every day. I don’t know if we’re ever going to be able to bounce back to the way we used to be… I mean- If there was ever a time like that… I-” Felix scooted closer, our knees bumping together when he placed my hair behind my ear and I sighed again, my breath hitching slightly as the feeling of content sent a rush of happiness through my body from his touch. So gentle that I wanted to cry. “He is… obsessed with the thought that I have… feelings for you” I mumbled and felt how Felix froze beside me. The skin on my hands tickled as his fingers twitched in mine and I feared for a moment that he’d let me go and just walk away because of the weirdness of the situation. “That’s a bit strange” He said with a small tilt of his head, eyes watching our interlaced fingers with the same sudden interest as I. “I know, right? I’ve spent, well, all your life with you and now, for the first time ever, you’re not going to be there anymore. It’s not that tough to understand that I want to spend time with you then, right? And because of that, because I choose to spend so much time with you… he is jealous. Feels left out. Paranoid that I’m sneaking behind his back” I cleared my throat and Felix just nodded back, a bit stiff and I felt my heart drop. He was uncomfortable with the situation and I didn’t blame him. “Sorry, that was my TMI for the day… who uh-” I cleared my throat again, more pronounced this time to lighten up the situation and finally looked up again, wetted my lips as my tongue flicked out and he did exactly the same. Copying my movements like I sat in front of a mirror, his legs folded as well, holding his body in the same position as I did, with his right hand holding my left, my right hand resting on my right knee, his vice versa, and the image, the realization, struck my heart and made me fall out of balance for a second. “A girl from my class. We’ve never talked. Barely even seen each other and before I know it, I’m pressed up against a wall after dance practise, pushed into a janitor’s locker and gets my life sucked outta my dick” I hold back a laugh, and his cheeks flush pink as he rolls his eyes again, ashamed of the words that just slipped out of his mouth, and pressed the back of his hand, that wasn’t occupied, on the heated area, like the motion would force the heat away. My heart felt heavy at the bottom of my stomach when I imagined the process of someone else giving him everything that I wanted to do, but I couldn’t help the small giggle that bubbled out from my chest anyway. Because Felix smile was so great that his eyes were like two crescent moons over a sea of freckled stars. - It was a calm day, rain smattering the window facing the bar and I sighed deeply as I looked out before glancing at the digital clock in the corner of the cash register screen, catching my boss’s eyes when I looked back up. A small embarrassed blush on my cheeks when I realised that she’d seen that I checked how much time I still had until closing “How are you feeling?” She asked as I picked up a cloth, wet it with water and began cleaning the work area under the rows of syrup and sweet sauces to buy time. She was a gentle woman in her mid-forties, with the same passion for coffee and personal connection with our patrons that I had and we kind of clicked when I did my appliance interview nearly 6 years ago. She was fond of me, often referred to me as her eldest daughter since she didn’t have any of her own, only a gang of three boys in middle and high school. I paused for a second when her question threw me out of balance. I was used to being asked deep questions and often talked to her when something bothered me since my parents lived in a few towns over and I so rarely met them nowadays. She did, however, usually asked me questions when we were alone. I couldn’t help but notice a slightly intrusive patron nearby, acting like they weren’t curious at all by my answer and I wet my lips, a bit nervous. Hesitated and pondered if I wanted to tell her the whole truth. “I uh… I’m fine… it’s… tough with, you know what” I answered as vaguely as possible and the snooping patron pursed their lips, looking almost disappointed when she answered with, “I know” I had told her nearly everything months ago, from the fact that Felix would be going away to my confusing feelings and she’d just placed a hand on my shoulder when I asked her what I should do. Just like she did now as well, “You’ll know what to do when you stand at the airport with the two of them. First then, you’ll be able to make a decision with who you want to stay with” I’d smiled at her then, knowing that I couldn’t leave my home, my work, to follow my best friend. But she’d only smiled back, talking as if she could read my thoughts. “I’ll support you no matter what. You will always have work here and if you need economical support if you decide to go-” I protested loudly, making a few patrons look up with surprised expressions but she only shook her head to silence me, “I say that as a friend and a mother. I might not have been there all of your life, but you truly are a treasure, my daughter. I will always be there for you” - “Would you ever want to get children?” “That’s an interesting question from a 19-year-old, do you have a little something to confess?” I asked and gave Felix a wink. He looked away quickly, a small smile tugging on his lips. “No, I-” He lost his thoughts to the pouring rain outside instead. The same kind of weather we’ve had for the last couple of days. The smell of coffee and sweets laid heavy in the air. We were at one of the bigger and busier cafés in town and new patrons constantly entered, huffing and shivering from the bad weather as they brushed off their shoes on the carpet at the entrance way before making their way to the cashier. The queue was long, and I felt a bit bad for the new girl that was taking the payments. Her voice stammered slightly when an older man demanded that he should get a lower price since he’d been waiting for so long. I turned away from the scene, a bit agitated just as a person that looked like the manager stormed up to the queue. “I just… I was curious, since-” Felix was stalling, fingers tapping on the mug of hot chocolate in his hands. “Are you calling me old?” I asked with fake annoyance and he smiled before sticking out his tongue. Squinting his eyes at me like a four-year-old, “No. It’s just- just a question” I sighed. Looked away again as I pondered on the question for a few minutes. Chris had talked about children about a week ago and I must say that it was the first time I’d been really thinking about it. I was nearing my mid-20s. A few people that I knew, mostly over social media, had kids already and I knew that the years passed quickly after reaching 25. That’s what I’d been warned about at least. I wanted children. I knew that. Knew that there was no better time than now too. I had a man I trusted. Despite the struggles we’d gone through this week, I still loved him to bits. I had a home. An income. Chris would be finished with his studies in spring next year and pretty much locked in a secure job since he collaborated with a company that had expressed their interest for him to start working fulltime and not just as an apprentice, as soon as he was done with uni. We could literally get me pregnant right now and the child would be born into a secure and safe environment. With two parents that would love them. I tried to imagine it. Me, Chris and a baby. Us walking around the park next summer with a carriage stroller. Us nurturing, feeding and raising a child. Us living as a family for the rest of our lives. It worked, the fantasy of it being reality. Worked until every picture of that perfect future family was changed and it wasn’t Chris that imagined, but instead the best friend that sat in front of me. Felix standing behind me, his hands over mine on the swell of my belly, swaying softly together to indie music in a whole other apartment. Felix that walked through a park with me, that bright smile on his lips as we held around each other’s waist with one arm and pulled the carriage stroller forward with the other. A kid that we raised with his eyes. His curly brown hair. His smile. His freckles. I swallowed hard. Crossed my arms over my chest, almost in a self-hug. Felt how my stomach twisted and turned so hard I almost felt sick. Refused to meet my best friend’s eyes. “I’m sorry. I know that you and Chris have had problems this week. I shouldn’t have said anything” I saw the regret in his eyes. In the way his lips pressed into a thin line. In the way his whole face fell, and he slumped a little in his chair. Couldn’t help but to reach out. Felt how my heart caught fire when I interlaced our fingers. “Someday. I know that for sure” I smiled, and he sighed deeply while looking down at the place where our bodies, and souls, connected. “I’m already jealous of the man that will share that experience with you” He muttered, sounding like he hoped I didn’t hear but could keep it inside of him either and I felt my breath hitch in my throat. Almost hoping that I’d heard wrong because it would hurt less that way. - I was free from work the following day and took the opportunity to do laundry and clean around the house since Chris would be at school the whole day, and then spend some extra hours in the studio. I had headphones in, not even changed out of my sleeping clothes and my damp thighs rubbed together in the way too short soft gym shorts I wore. A tee that I’d stolen from Felix about two years ago shielded my upper body, washed out and accidently in a temperature way too high a few months ago. Just long enough to barely cover my stomach. Sweaty from aggressively vacuum cleaning spots of food and drink in our sofa and the rug underneath, cursing our gang of rowdy friends while dancing along with the music that played loudly in my ears. I was in the middle of cleaning underneath the kitchen table when I felt the floor underneath me rattle as a door closed and turned around towards the hallway with a bright smile, fully expecting Chris to stand there. But froze with surprise when I recognized the person to be someone else entirely. He was screaming at me and I took out my headphones and turned off the vacuum cleaner to be able to hear. “What?” I asked and Felix excessively rolled his eyes with keys in his hand. Stumbled slightly as he hurriedly took off his shoes in the corridor that connected the rooms in the apartment, and I tilted my head in confusion when he rattled the key ring as he walked. “I was 10 seconds from calling the police when I remembered that I had a spare key” He paused a little as he got closer, glancing down with eyebrows raised, as if he first now realised what I was wearing, and my breath hitched when I realized how I must look. With my hair in a messy (“messy” as in messy, not movie, “perfect” messy) with way too revealing clothes and sweat covering me like a thin sheet. Thanking my lucky star that I at least put on deodorant before I pulled out the vacuum cleaner, felt how my face heated up, and looked away when he swallowed hard. Let a few seconds pass but felt him staring still, probably thinking that I looked as ridiculous as I felt and I awkwardly scratched the back of my head while clearing my throat. “Why were you going to call the police?” I asked and he looked up to meet my eyes again, a wrinkle between his brows as he looked confused for a second, wondering what I was talking about. “Oh, I’ve been trying to call you for the past hour and when you didn’t reply I got worried, which only elevated when I knocked on the door-” “and I didn’t answer… because my phone is charging in the bedroom…” I fished out the ancient mp3 player I’d stuck into my bra, “Sorry” I finished, and he nodded again, brows raised, and lips pressed together with a mixture of annoyance and amusement. “So, you tried calling me to tell me…? “I just wanted to grab a coffee, or well, a hot chocolate- whatever you feel like” He seemed nervous, constantly flicking his eyes between mine and my clothes and I wanted to hide, so ashamed that we were still talking with me looking like a complete wreck, “Is that my shirt?” He asked all of a sudden with a tilt of his head and I pursed my lips as my fingers hooked around the hem of it and I pulled, looking down, as if I was surprised to what I was wearing while he glanced at my boobs and the way that I’d just made them even more pronounced with the action. “It is… What are you going to do about it?” I asked with a teasing voice and maybe, just maybe, wanted him to start fighting over it. To try and take it off me and that things would just escalate after that. Maybe, just maybe, he saw the way my eyes clouded over, but mistook the squinting for anger and decided that it wasn’t worth fighting over it. “From the looks of it, I’ve outgrown it. So, you can keep it. I just wished I’d known, I always wondered where it went. “Sorry” I flinched slightly but he just shook his head. Hand twitching slightly as he crossed his arms over his chest, “I… uh- gimme a few minutes. I just need to rinse off” I said, and he just nodded as I brushed past him and into the bathroom.

[byuneebuns]

Fenced In

Chanyeol x Female Reader College Roommate AU

Rated: M for Smut

Tags: College AU, Slow Burn, Eventual Smut, Eventual Angst, Eventual Fluff Author’s Note: My first real Idol x Reader fic, be kind please. Mature smut in subsequent chapters. Tags and description will be updated as story progresses to prevent spoilers. Fenced In Mini Masterlist

“Good morning,” Chanyeol mumbled groggily from in between bites of cereal. He stifled a yawn and lifted one lanky arm half-heartedly in greeting. His soft hair was tousled from sleep and he was dressed plainly in a white t-shirt and gray joggers (which he most likely slept in). “Good morning!” You replied cheerfully. “Would you like some coffee?” “No, thanks though. I’m running late for my Economics class and I can’t be afforded the luxury of getting to be fully awake for it.” He sighed melodramatically, yawning again as he stood up and stretched. “You can leave the bowl there Yeollie, I’ll grab it on my way out. My first class isn’t for another two hours.” Chanyeol only smiled and nodded gratefully in response as he pulled on a windbreaker and sneakers and hurried off to class.

It had only been three months since you had put in an ad for a roommate in your off-campus apartment, and an even shorter two months since Chanyeol had claimed the position. Your previous roommate had taken a year to study abroad and left you in the awkward position of being unable to afford to live alone but without a replacement for her. You had initially been put-off by the prospect of a male roommate, especially a stranger, due to obvious safety concerns but there had been an overwhelming lack of female applicants which forced your hand. The apartment was a few miles away from campus, so it meant either owning a car or being a big fan of cardio which was a turn-off for most college students. The few female applicants you had met were more interested in the social aspect of school than studying, and being you were only here on a scholarship that hinged on your academic success it sufficed to say that a party-going roommate was the last thing you wanted invading your space. After several weeks of failure and mounting feelings of panic you altered the listing to include males out of sheer desperation and here entered a certain Park Chanyeol. 

He was the first male you had agreed to meet and interview (after looking him up in the school directory and seeing he was on the Dean’s List and here from abroad on a scholarship you were a little more at ease) and after that initial contact you were confident you wouldn’t need to meet anyone else. He was quiet, polite, humble, focused on his studies, and equally stressed the importance of needing a peaceful place to do work and unwind when class is over. You had low expectations when you met him, mostly due to your own apprehension of living with a male, but he had pleasantly surprised you not only with how well his personality seemed to mesh with yours, but also with how incredibly good-looking he was. He was tall and lean with dark hair, cappuccino colored skin, and soft brown eyes. His ears stuck out just enough to really be noticed and his face was good-natured and earnest. 

Something about being around him made you feel incredibly…soft. Like a large, sentient marshmallow. You swallowed your feelings and mentally chastised yourself; this wasn’t your first rodeo and you weren’t about to let yourself get all misty-eyed over one cute boy. 

You smiled to yourself at the recollection as you rinsed Chanyeol’s cereal bowl and loaded a sponge with dish soap. Thankfully you had both quickly moved past the awkward phase of sharing personal space with a stranger and were now settled into something vaguely resembling a comfortable domestic home life with one another. 

You didn’t spend much time together, he had morning classes and worked evenings at a diner while you took afternoon classes and worked early mornings in a café, but you occasionally sat next to each other in the living room and worked in comfortable silence or watched a movie together. 

You often found yourself wishing you could get a little closer to him but even living together it seemed like it was impossible to find time to really be alone together and free of other responsibilities. You shook your head roughly, willing that thought to leave your mind and never return- the very last thing you needed right now was to start pining. It was truly impossible not to be charmed by him though, despite your best efforts. 

You sighed and shook your head again, placing his now-clean bowl on the drying rack. 

That wasn’t the only time you’d found yourself…noticing him, being painfully aware of his presence as an attractive man in your home. There had been the shower incident, for one. You shuddered at the memory alone. 

It wasn’t long after he moved in, you had gotten out of class early one day and were exhausted from work and class. All you wanted to do was take a nice, hot bath to relax before you started on your mountain of homework. You wrenched open the door of your apartment, dropped your belongings in a heap on your bedroom floor and started to strip as you made your way down the hall to the bathroom. An intelligent lifeform would have noticed the light peeking through the crack in the door. Sadly, that wasn’t you- not today, at least. You were in only underwear now, fumbling with your bra fastener with one hand and opening the bathroom door with the other, your thoughts lingering on the lecture from your last class. There he stood, in all his half-naked glory, Park Chanyeol still dripping wet with a towel barely covering his lower half. 

Your eyes nearly popped clean out of your skull, your brain went completely haywire trying to process what was even happening and how could you possibly have coherent thoughts when droplets of water were busy making their way south through the hills and valleys of Chanyeol’s well-sculpted abs? You were sure that if he hadn’t said anything then you would have started drooling, or worse, dropped to your knees to worship the God that had appeared before you. “I can see you’re in a hurry, so don’t mind me.” He said, the smirk that had spread across his handsome face dripping from every word, his eyes raking your body. Your brain kicked into high gear, trying to make up for lost time, and suddenly remembered that you were standing in the hallway wearing only a bra and panties while shamelessly ogling your roommate. You felt heat flood your face and your core simultaneously as you stumbled backwards, clutching your chest in an attempt to hide yourself far too late, your mouth opening and closing in rapid succession like a goldfish while you tried to regain enough composure to form words. “S-sorry, I didn’t k-know you were-“ You sputtered as he stepped around you, seeming taller by the second, his eyes not leaving your body, and freed the entryway to the bathroom. “It’s alright,” He chuckled, running a free hand through his wet hair while his other held the towel rather loosely around his hips, “Enjoy your shower.”

It was the coldest shower you ever had. 

There had also been several smaller, more isolated incidents- joggers shifting a little too low on his hips, loose t-shirts exposing his torso or collarbones- that had you sweating. You were sure he noticed you staring, anyone would, and the thought made you a little nauseous. He was a saint to put up with you perving over him all of the time, although you could swear that every now and then you would catch him watching you watch him with an expression you could only chalk down as lust. You shook your head violently for the third time today. At this rate you were just torturing yourself. You shrugged your backpack onto your shoulders and made your way to class and firmly told yourself that you would not think anymore creepy thoughts about your roommate today.

[xtruss]

Global Uncertainty: The Economic Fallout From Coronavirus

A Classic 'Black Swan'?

— Knowledge@Wharton, the online research and business analysis journal of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania | The Economic Forum | February 28, 2020

Coronavirus is already impacting global markets, with economic impacts felt beyond China and other effected countries.

There's a lot still to learn about the virus - and therefore how extensive its impact on the global economy could become.

On Monday, February 24, stock indices tumbled, spooked by reports that the coronavirus outbreak that emerged in China is spreading to countries including Italy, Iran and South Korea. A day later, trading in stocks across world markets remained choppy, reflecting hope that the economic fallout might be manageable — just as damage from the SARS epidemic was some two decades ago — but also fear that the economic impact could be significant and linger longer.

The markets’ movements mirror the uncertainty that prevails and persists not just in the U.S. but all over the world. Several weeks into the coronavirus outbreak that has brought the world’s second-largest economy to its knees, some of the most basic aspects of the virus remain unknown. It’s not yet clear how widely beyond China COVID-19 will spread; this week, numbers of infected individuals have surged outside China. Still, exactly how it is transmitted, how easily, and how lethal it might be are aspects of this coronavirus that remain to be uncovered, according to University of Pennsylvania scientists.

As the human toll mounts, so does the economic damage. The business realm, of course, tends to shudder in the face of uncertainty, and right now, with reports on the seriousness of the coronavirus evolving each day if not each hour, the eyes of commerce are on epidemiology.

“This has many economic implications,” says Wharton management professor Mauro Guillen. “It has implications not just for China but for the entire world. The world depends on Chinese growth,” he says, citing both the country’s supply-chain role and consumer buying power. Still, he notes: “It is unclear how much impact in the end this is going to have.” But what is clear is that if politics and trade wars emerged as uncertainties in recent years, now a third leg in the stool holding up global confidence has suddenly gone wobbly. Some observers describe it as a classic “black swan” — a random event that is completely unpredictable. (An interview with Nassim Taleb, author of the book from which the expression is derived, can be heard here.)

A police officer wearing a protective face mask, following an outbreak of the coronavirus, stands with his bike in front of a screen showing the Nikkei index outside a brokerage in Tokyo, Japan February 26, 2020.

“The long-term repercussion quite apart from whatever happens now is that we’ve got a source of risk we hadn’t thought about,” says Marshall W. Meyer, a Wharton management professor emeritus who consults in China. “My view is there is going to be a big adjustment of global trade patterns unless we are really lucky and [the virus] goes away very quickly. This became apparent after SARS, but SARS went away. And this may or may not go away. The real problem is people’s confidence, and in China how much political damage there will be and whether it will be contained. And there is no way to know.”

An Economic Earthquake

The damage has already been severe and has reached into a surprising array of sectors. As noted above, this week the markets responded negatively to the sharp uptick in cases outside of China, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average falling more than 1,000 points on Monday — its third-biggest one-day decline. (The selloff continued on Tuesday as the Dow fell another 879 points.) Major American orchestras have canceled tours in China. The cruise industry has seen the public-relations nightmare of more than 1,200 passengers quarantined aboard the Diamond Princess in Yokohama. With moneyed Chinese travelers forced to stay home, European tourism has taken a hit. “It’s seen as on par with an earthquake, a situation of emergency,” Mattia Morandi, spokesman for Italy’s ministry of culture and tourism, told The New York Times.

Supply chains in the retail sector and others have been disrupted, factories in China have gone quiet, and passenger air travel has been curtailed. Apple recently announced that it now expects to miss its next quarterly revenue forecast as a result of shuttered factories and closed retail shops in China.

“This is going to be a slow-rolling, highly consequential event,” says Meyer. “I would say stock up on aspirin and Ibuprofen now, because the base ingredients come from China. Antibiotics come from China. Hong Kong wholly depends on China for its food supply, for its water.”

Economic disruption related to the coronavirus is expected to rob the world economy of growth for the first time since 2009, according to London-based research firm Capital Economics. “We assume the virus will be contained soon, and that lost output is made up in subsequent quarters, so that world GDP reaches the level it would have done had there been no outbreak by the middle of 2021,” the firm said in a statement.

What’s the potential outcome if the virus isn’t contained? According to a report by CNBC, Moody’s chief economist Mark Zandi noted on Tuesday that if the virus becomes a pandemic in Europe and the U.S., “that is the prescription for a global and U.S. recession.” Meanwhile, Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell suggested that there will “very likely be some effects on [the economy of] the United States” from the current outbreak, but, in recent testimony before the House Financial Services Committee, said it’s too early to say how much.

The philanthropic sector is beginning to divert resources to the crisis. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has committed up to $100 million toward efforts to help strengthen detection, isolation and treatment efforts, to protect at-risk populations, and to develop vaccines, treatments and diagnostics. Hong Kong investor and philanthropist Li Ka Shing has donated $13 million to assist Wuhan, where the outbreak has been concentrated. Alibaba founder Jack Ma has committed $14.4 million, including $5.8 million to fund research into a vaccine.

‘Still Learning’

Of course, how much philanthropy eventually gets moved to combating COVID-19 depends on the eventual scale of the epidemic, and at any given point, no one has been able to say whether it has peaked.

But so far, this new coronavirus appears to be less lethal than SARS, says Susan R. Weiss, a faculty member in the department of microbiology at Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine. Its sudden, dramatic appearance may have been a function of some special circumstances.

“It started in Wuhan, a really dense city at the crossroads of many different means of transportation, and this happened at New Year’s, when a lot of people were traveling, so this was a perfect storm,” says Weiss. “SARS started in the Guangdong Province, which is much less dense and was more easily controlled.”

On the other hand, she says, SARS spiked up over about eight months, and then disappeared, and it’s not yet known whether COVID-19 will behave the same way. “We don’t know whether it will burn out, like SARS, or come back seasonally like the flu,” she said.

This is going to be a slow-rolling, highly consequential event.

— Marshall W. Meyer

What is known at this point is the coronavirus’s nucleic acid sequence, “and that gives scientists a lot of information,” says Penn professor of medicine and infectious disease specialist Harvey Rubin. This helps in developing diagnostic tests and informs the approach to coming up with a vaccine. “What that doesn’t tell you is how transmissible it is. It doesn’t tell you whether the disease can be spread when it’s asymptomatic. We don’t yet know how transmissible it is person to person,” he says. “Right now, 99% of cases are still in China, but a small but important number are out of China, so the trajectory of this problem is still a time-dependent process…. We are still learning, and numbers are still coming in.”

Trade, Disease and the Moral High Ground

Experts have been vocal about what China has done wrong, debating whether the country recognized the epidemic soon enough and if the government’s ideological aversion to transparency delayed action and cost lives.

But what about the U.S. reaction? Is there something the U.S. can and should be doing beyond the $100 million that the U.S. government says it is prepared to spend to help China and other countries where the epidemic has spread?

“It’s already daunting for China to be coping with this, but we have a trade war going on, and it would actually be in the best interest of the U.S. to stop the trade war,” says Guillen. “It would create a lot of goodwill and would give us a good relationship as opposed to a confrontational one.”

In the meantime, he says: negotiate. “The U.S. can seek an agreement, but from a high moral ground — as in, ‘we know you are in trouble, let’s see what we can do about it.’ And if they don’t want to do what the Trump administration wants to do, the U.S. can re-impose tariffs.”

Getting to a trade solution now is also a recognition that our fates are intertwined. After the big 2011 tsunami in Japan, Guillen points out, “within weeks, many factories in the U.S. had to stop producing because they were getting components outsourced from Japan. This is a global economy. We have businesses and operations and connections with China, and if the second largest economy in the world is brought to a halt, it has the potential to disrupt things all over the world.”

Will the coronavirus crisis cause companies to look at China differently in the future?

“They are very likely to do so,” says Howard Kunreuther, co-director of Wharton’s Risk Management and Decision Processes Center and professor emeritus in the operations, information and decisions department. In research with Wharton professor Michael Useem for their recent book Mastering Catastrophic Risk: How Companies Cope with Disruption, the authors contacted chief risk officers and leading executives at more than 100 S&P 500 firms on the most adverse risks they had faced in recent years.

If there is some message here, it’s that this is totally predictable.

—Harvey Rubin

“Every one of them said we are now paying much closer attention to the potential consequences of catastrophic risks than in previous years because they are happening more frequently: the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the 2008-2009 financial crisis, the 2011 Japan trifecta (earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident) and more intense natural disasters. Firms are now engaging in enterprise risk management to reduce the likelihood and consequences of future adverse events that will affect their operations and are asking questions, such as how safe is it for us to operate here?”

Part of the rationale for these firms considering taking steps now is the high visibility of the coronavirus. “I don’t think they would be paying attention if it weren’t in the news every day,” says Kunreuther. Still, that doesn’t mean businesses should not consider taking action now given the potential for a pandemic. “The question is, what will they do? Will they undertake an assessment of the risk and ask what kind of risk-management strategies they can follow by examining the potential costs and benefits of undertaking these steps?”

“Many of us have been saying for years that it’s only a matter of time,” says Rubin, referring to the arrival of a serious epidemic or pandemic. “If we are lucky and this starts to abate and the mortality is relatively low, it’s unfortunate for the people who are sick and died, but next year or the year after something else could happen. The world needs to have not only medicine and healthcare infrastructure but also economic and information infrastructure. If there is some message here, it’s that this is totally predictable.”

A lot of attention gets paid to infectious disease outbreaks in the moment, and there is a lot of talk about vulnerabilities, preparedness and response.

“We talked about it after Zika, Ebola, during the measles outbreak, and then nobody talked about it anymore,” says Rubin. “For some reason this captures attention while it’s there, but then it goes away. People forget.”

[djatoon]

Fantastic article. A must-Read for all parents and/or teachers.

“1. To be a parent is to be compromised. You pledge allegiance to justice for all, you swear that private attachments can rhyme with the public good, but when the choice comes down to your child or an abstraction—even the well-being of children you don’t know—you’ll betray your principles to the fierce unfairness of love. Then life takes revenge on the conceit that your child’s fate lies in your hands at all. The organized pathologies of adults, including yours—sometimes known as politics—find a way to infect the world of children. Only they can save themselves.

Our son underwent his first school interview soon after turning 2. He’d been using words for about a year. An admissions officer at a private school with brand-new, beautifully and sustainably constructed art and dance studios gave him a piece of paper and crayons. While she questioned my wife and me about our work, our son drew a yellow circle over a green squiggle.

Rather coolly, the admissions officer asked him what it was. “The moon,” he said. He had picked this moment to render his very first representational drawing, and our hopes rose. But her jaw was locked in an icy and inscrutable smile.

Later, at a crowded open house for prospective families, a hedge-fund manager from a former Soviet republic told me about a good public school in the area that accepted a high percentage of children with disabilities. As insurance against private school, he was planning to grab a spot at this public school by gaming the special-needs system—which, he added, wasn’t hard to do.

Wanting to distance myself from this scheme, I waved my hand at the roomful of parents desperate to cough up $30,000 for preschool and said, “It’s all a scam.” I meant the whole business of basing admissions on interviews with 2-year-olds. The hedge-fund manager pointed out that if he reported my words to the admissions officer, he’d have one less competitor to worry about.

When the rejection letter arrived, I took it hard as a comment on our son, until my wife informed me that the woman with the frozen smile had actually been interviewing us. We were the ones who’d been rejected. We consoled ourselves that the school wasn’t right for our family, or we for it. It was a school for amoral finance people.

At a second private school, my wife watched intently with other parents behind a one-way mirror as our son engaged in group play with other toddlers, their lives secured or ruined by every share or shove. He was put on the wait list.

Places at the preschool were awarded on a first-come, first-served basis. At the front of the line, parents were lying in sleeping bags. They had spent the night outside.

The system that dominates our waking hours, commands our unthinking devotion, and drives us, like orthodox followers of an exacting faith, to extraordinary, even absurd feats of exertion is not democracy, which often seems remote and fragile. It’s meritocracy—the system that claims to reward talent and effort with a top-notch education and a well-paid profession, its code of rigorous practice and generous blessings passed down from generation to generation. The pressure of meritocracy made us apply to private schools when our son was 2—not because we wanted him to attend private preschool, but because, in New York City, where we live, getting him into a good public kindergarten later on would be even harder, and if we failed, by that point most of the private-school slots would be filled. As friends who’d started months earlier warned us, we were already behind the curve by the time he drew his picture of the moon. We were maximizing options—hedging, like the finance guy, like many families we knew—already tracing the long line that would lead to the horizon of our son’s future.

I stood waiting in the cold with a strange mix of feelings. I hated the hypercompetitive parents who made everyone’s life more tense. I feared that I’d cheated our son of a slot by not rising until the selfish hour of 5:30. And I worried that we were all bound together in a mad, heroic project that we could neither escape nor understand, driven by supreme devotion to our own child’s future. All for a nursery school called Huggs.

New York’s distortions let you see the workings of meritocracy in vivid extremes. But the system itself—structured on the belief that, unlike in a collectivized society, individual achievement should be the basis for rewards, and that, unlike in an inherited aristocracy, those rewards must be earned again by each new generation—is all-American. True meritocracy came closest to realization with the rise of standardized tests in the 1950s, the civil-rights movement, and the opening of Ivy League universities to the best and brightest, including women and minorities. A great broadening of opportunity followed. But in recent decades, the system has hardened into a new class structure in which professionals pass on their money, connections, ambitions, and work ethic to their children, while less educated families fall further behind, with little chance of seeing their children move up.

In his new book, The Meritocracy Trap, the Yale Law professor Daniel Markovits argues that this system turns elite families into business enterprises, and children into overworked, inauthentic success machines, while producing an economy that favors the super-educated and blights the prospects of the middle class, which sinks toward the languishing poor. Markovits describes the immense investments in money and time that well-off couples make in their children. By kindergarten, the children of elite professionals are already a full two years ahead of middle-class children, and the achievement gap is almost unbridgeable.

On that freezing sidewalk, I felt a shudder of revulsion at the perversions of meritocracy. And yet there I was, cursing myself for being 30th in line.

2.

not long after he drew the picture of the moon, our son was interviewed at another private school, one of the most highly coveted in New York. It was the end of 2009, early in President Barack Obama’s first term, and the teachers were wearing brightly colored hope pendants that they had crafted with their preschoolers. I suppressed disapproval of the partisan display (what if the face hanging from the teachers’ necks were Sarah Palin’s?) and reassured myself that the school had artistic and progressive values. It recruited the children of writers and other “creatives.” And our son’s monitored group play was successful. He was accepted.

The school had delicious attributes. Two teachers in each class of 15 children; parents who were concert pianists or playwrights, not just investment bankers; the prospect later on of classes in Latin, poetry writing, puppetry, math theory, taught by passionate scholars. Once in, unless a kid seriously messed up, he faced little chance of ever having to leave, until, 15 years on, the school matched its graduates with top universities where it had close relations with admissions offices. Students wouldn’t have to endure the repeated trauma of applying to middle and high schools that New York forces on public-school children. Our son had a place near the very front of the line, shielded from the meritocracy at its most ruthless. There was only one competition, and he had already prevailed, in monitored group play.

Two years later we transferred him to a public kindergarten.

My wife and I are products of public schools. Whatever torments they inflicted on our younger selves, we believed in them.

We had just had our second child, a girl. The private school was about to start raising its fee steeply every year into the indefinite future. As tuition passed $50,000, the creatives would dwindle and give way to the financials. I calculated that the precollege educations of our two children would cost more than $1.5 million after taxes. This was the practical reason to leave.

But there was something else—another claim on us. The current phrase for it is social justice. I’d rather use the word democracy, because it conveys the idea of equality and the need for a common life among citizens. No institution has more power to form human beings according to this idea than the public school. That was the original purpose of the “common schools” established by Horace Mann in the mid-19th century: to instill in children the knowledge and morality necessary for the success of republican government, while “embracing children of all religious, social, and ethnic backgrounds.”

The claim of democracy doesn’t negate meritocracy, but they’re in tension. One values equality and openness, the other achievement and security. Neither can answer every need. To lose sight of either makes life poorer. The essential task is to bring meritocracy and democracy into a relation where they can coexist and even flourish.

My wife and I are products of public schools. Whatever torments they inflicted on our younger selves, we believed in them. We wanted our kids to learn in classrooms that resembled the city where we lived. We didn’t want them to grow up entirely inside our bubble—mostly white, highly and expensively educated—where 4-year-olds who hear 21,000 words a day acquire the unearned confidence of insular advantage and feel, even unconsciously, that they’re better than other people’s kids.

Public schools are a public good. Our city’s are among the most racially and economically segregated in America. The gaps in proficiency that separate white and Asian from black and Latino students in math and English are immense and growing. Some advocates argue that creating more integrated schools would reduce those gaps. Whether or not the data conclusively prove it, to be half-conscious in America is to know that schools of concentrated poverty are likely to doom the children who attend them. This knowledge is what made our decision both political and fraught.

From October 2017: Americans have given up on public schools. That’s a mistake.

Our “zoned” elementary school, two blocks from our house, was forever improving on a terrible reputation, but not fast enough. Friends had pulled their kids out after second or third grade, so when we took the tour we insisted, against the wishes of the school guide, on going upstairs from the kindergarten classrooms and seeing the upper grades, too. Students were wandering around the rooms without focus, the air was heavy with listlessness, there seemed to be little learning going on. Each year the school was becoming a few percentage points less poor and less black as the neighborhood gentrified, but most of the white kids were attending a “gifted and talented” school within the school, where more was expected and more was given. The school was integrating and segregating at the same time.

One day I was at a local playground with our son when I fell into conversation with an elderly black woman who had lived in the neighborhood a long time and understood all about our school dilemma, which was becoming the only subject that interested me. She scoffed at our “zoned” school—it had been badly run for so long that it would need years to become passable. I mentioned a second school, half a dozen blocks away, that was probably available if we applied. Her expression turned to alarm. “Don’t send him there,” she said. “That’s a failure school. That school will always be a failure school.” It was as if an eternal curse had been laid on it, beyond anyone’s agency or remedy. The school was mostly poor and black. We assumed it would fail our children, because we knew it was failing other children.

That year, when my son turned 5, attending daytime tours and evening open houses became a second job. We applied to eight or nine public schools. We applied to far-flung schools that we’d heard took a few kids from out of district, only to find that there was a baby boom on and the seats had already been claimed by zoned families. At one new school that had a promising reputation, the orientation talk was clotted with education jargon and the toilets in the boys’ bathroom with shit, but we would have taken a slot if one had been offered.

Among the schools where we went begging was one a couple of miles from our house that admitted children from several districts. This school was economically and racially mixed by design, with demographics that came close to matching the city’s population: 38 percent white, 29 percent black, 24 percent Latino, 7 percent Asian. That fact alone made the school a rarity in New York. Two-thirds of the students performed at or above grade level on standardized tests, which made the school one of the higher-achieving in the city (though we later learned that there were large gaps, as much as 50 percent, between the results for the wealthier, white students and the poorer, Latino and black students). And the school appeared to be a happy place. Its pedagogical model was progressive—“child centered”—based on learning through experience. Classes seemed loose, but real work was going on. Hallways were covered with well-written compositions. Part of the playground was devoted to a vegetable garden. This combination of diversity, achievement, and well-being was nearly unheard-of in New York public schools. This school squared the hardest circle. It was a liberal white family’s dream. The admission rate was less than 10 percent. We got wait-listed.

The summer before our son was to enter kindergarten, an administrator to whom I’d written a letter making the case that our family and the school were a perfect match called with the news that our son had gotten in off the wait list. She gave me five minutes to come up with an answer. I didn’t need four and a half of them.

I can see now that a strain of selfishness and vanity in me contaminated the decision. I lived in a cosseted New York of successful professionals. I had no authentic connection—not at work, in friendships, among neighbors—to the shared world of the city’s very different groups that our son was about to enter. I was ready to offer him as an emissary to that world, a token of my public-spiritedness. The same narcissistic pride that a parent takes in a child’s excellent report card, I now felt about sending him in a yellow school bus to an institution whose name began with P.S.

A few parents at the private school reacted as if we’d given away a winning lottery ticket, or even harmed our son—such was the brittle nature of meritocracy. And to be honest, in the coming years, when we heard that sixth graders at the private school were writing papers on The Odyssey, or when we watched our son and his friends sweat through competitive public-middle-school admissions, we wondered whether we’d committed an unforgivable sin and went back over all our reasons for changing schools until we felt better.

Before long our son took to saying, “I’m a public-school person.” When I asked him once what that meant, he said, “It means I’m not snooty.” He never looked back.

Illustration of a hand holding a pencil

Paul Spella

3.

the public school was housed in the lower floors of an old brick building, five stories high and a block long, next to an expressway. A middle and high school occupied the upper floors. The building had the usual grim features of any public institution in New York—steel mesh over the lower windows, a police officer at the check-in desk, scuffed yellow walls, fluorescent lights with toxic PCBs, caged stairwells, ancient boilers and no air conditioners—as if to dampen the expectations of anyone who turned to government for a basic service. The bamboo flooring and state-of-the-art science labs of private schools pandered to the desire for a special refuge from the city. Our son’s new school felt utterly porous to it.

I had barely encountered an American public school since leaving high school. That was in the late 1970s, in the Bay Area, the same year that the tax revolt began its long evisceration of California’s stellar education system. Back then, nothing was asked of parents except that they pay their taxes and send their children to school, and everyone I knew went to the local public schools. Now the local public schools—at least the one our son was about to attend—couldn’t function without parents. Donations at our school paid the salaries of the science teacher, the Spanish teacher, the substitute teachers. They even paid for furniture. Because many of the families were poor, our PTA had a hard time meeting its annual fundraising goal of $100,000, and some years the principal had to send out a message warning parents that science or art was about to be cut. Not many blocks away, elementary schools zoned for wealthy neighborhoods routinely raised $1 million—these schools were called “private publics.” Schools in poorer neighborhoods struggled to bring in $30,000. This enormous gap was just one way inequality pursued us into the public-school system.

We threw ourselves into the adventure of the new school. We sent in class snacks when it was our week, I chaperoned a field trip to study pigeons in a local park, and my wife cooked chili for an autumn fundraiser. The school’s sense of mission extended to a much larger community, and so there was an appeal for money when a fire drove a family from a different school out of its house, and a food drive after Hurricane Sandy ravaged the New York area, and a shoe drive for Syrian refugees in Jordan. We were ready to do just about anything to get involved. When my wife came in one day to help out in class, she was enlisted as a recess monitor and asked to change the underwear of a boy she didn’t know from another class who’d soiled himself. (Volunteerism had a limit, and that was it.)

The private school we’d left behind had let parents know they weren’t needed, except as thrilled audiences at performances. But our son’s kindergarten teacher—an eccentric man near retirement age, whose uniform was dreadlocks (he was white), a leather apron, shorts, and sandals with socks—sent out frequent and frankly needy SOS emails. When his class of 28 students was studying the New York shoreline, he enlisted me to help build a replica of an antique cargo ship like the one docked off Lower Manhattan—could I pick up a sheet of plywood, four by eight by 5/8 of an inch, cut in half, along with four appropriate hinges and two dozen plumbing pieces, if they weren’t too expensive? He would reimburse me.

That first winter, the city’s school-bus drivers called a strike that lasted many weeks. I took turns with a few other parents ferrying a group of kids to and from school. Everyone who needed a ride would gather at the bus stop at 7:30 each morning and we’d figure out which parent could drive that day. Navigating the strike required a flexible schedule and a car, and it put immense pressure on families. A girl in our son’s class who lived in a housing project a mile from the school suddenly stopped attending. Administrators seemed to devote as much effort to rallying families behind the bus drivers’ union as to making sure every child could get to school. That was an early sign of what would come later, of all that would eventually alienate me, and I might have been troubled by it if I hadn’t been so taken with my new role as a public-school father teaming up with other parents to get us through a crisis.

4.

parents have one layer of skin too few. They’ve lost an epidermis that could soften bruises and dull panic. In a divided city, in a stratified society, that missing skin—the intensity of every little worry and breakthrough—is the shortest and maybe the only way to intimacy between people who would otherwise never cross paths. Children become a great leveler. Parents have in common the one subject that never ceases to absorb them.

In kindergarten our son became friends with a boy in class I’ll call Marcus. He had mirthful eyes, a faint smile, and an air of imperturbable calm—he was at ease with everyone, never visibly agitated or angry. His parents were working-class immigrants from the Caribbean. His father drove a sanitation truck, and his mother was a nanny whose boss had been the one to suggest entering Marcus in the school’s lottery—parents with connections and resources knew about the school, while those without rarely did. Marcus’s mother was a quietly demanding advocate for her son, and Marcus was exactly the kind of kid for whom a good elementary school could mean the chance of a lifetime. His family and ours were separated by race, class, and the dozen city blocks that spell the difference between a neighborhood with tree-lined streets, regular garbage collection, and upscale cupcake shops, and a neighborhood with aboveground power lines and occasional shootings. If not for the school, we would never have known Marcus’s family.

The boys’ friendship would endure throughout elementary school and beyond. Once, when they were still in kindergarten, my wife was walking with them in a neighborhood of townhouses near the school, and Marcus suddenly exclaimed, “Can you imagine having a backyard?” We had a backyard. Our son kept quiet, whether out of embarrassment or an early intuition that human connections require certain omissions. Marcus’s father would drop him off at our house on weekends—often with the gift of a bottle of excellent rum from his home island—or I would pick Marcus up at their apartment building and drive the boys to a batting cage or the Bronx Zoo. They almost always played at our house, seldom at Marcus’s, which was much smaller. This arrangement was established from the start without ever being discussed. If someone had mentioned it, we would have had to confront the glaring inequality in the boys’ lives. I felt that the friendship flourished in a kind of benign avoidance of this crucial fact.

At school our son fell in with a group of boys who had no interest in joining the lunchtime soccer games. Their freewheeling playground scrums often led to good-natured insults, wrestling matches, outraged feelings, an occasional punch, then reconciliation, until the next day. And they were the image of diversity. Over the years, in addition to our son and Marcus, there was another black boy, another white boy, a Latino boy, a mixed-race boy, a boy whose Latino mother was a teacher’s aide at the school, and an African boy with white lesbian parents. A teacher at the private school had once called our son “anti-authoritarian,” and it was true: He pursued friends who were mildly rebellious, irritants to the teachers and lunch monitors they didn’t like, and he avoided kids who always had their hand up and displayed obvious signs of parental ambition. The anxious meritocrat in me hadn’t completely faded away, and I once tried to get our son to befriend a 9-year-old who was reading Animal Farm, but he brushed me off. He would do this his own way.

The school’s pedagogy emphasized learning through doing. Reading instruction didn’t start until the end of first grade; in math, kids were taught various strategies for multiplication and division, but the times tables were their parents’ problem. Instead of worksheets and tests, there were field trips to the shoreline and the Noguchi sculpture museum. “Project-based learning” had our son working for weeks on a clay model of a Chinese nobleman’s tomb tower during a unit on ancient China.

Even as we continued to volunteer, my wife and I never stopped wondering if we had cheated our son of a better education. We got antsy with the endless craft projects, the utter indifference to spelling. But our son learned well only when a subject interested him. “I want to learn facts, not skills,” he told his first-grade teacher. The school’s approach—the year-long second-grade unit on the geology and bridges of New York—caught his imagination, while the mix of races and classes gave him something even more precious: an unselfconscious belief that no one was better than anyone else, that he was everyone’s equal and everyone was his. In this way the school succeeded in its highest purpose.

And then things began to change.

5.

around 2014, a new mood germinated in America—at first in a few places, among limited numbers of people, but growing with amazing rapidity and force, as new things tend to do today. It rose up toward the end of the Obama years, in part out of disillusionment with the early promise of his presidency—out of expectations raised and frustrated, especially among people under 30, which is how most revolutionary surges begin. This new mood was progressive but not hopeful. A few short years after the teachers at the private preschool had crafted Obama pendants with their 4-year-olds, hope was gone.

At the heart of the new progressivism was indignation, sometimes rage, about ongoing injustice against groups of Americans who had always been relegated to the outskirts of power and dignity. An incident—a police shooting of an unarmed black man; news reports of predatory sexual behavior by a Hollywood mogul; a pro quarterback who took to kneeling during the national anthem—would light a fire that would spread overnight and keep on burning because it was fed by anger at injustices deeper and older than the inflaming incident. Over time the new mood took on the substance and hard edges of a radically egalitarian ideology.

At points where the ideology touched policy, it demanded, and in some cases achieved, important reforms: body cameras on cops, reduced prison sentences for nonviolent offenders, changes in the workplace. But its biggest influence came in realms more inchoate than policy: the private spaces where we think and imagine and talk and write, and the public spaces where institutions shape the contours of our culture and guard its perimeter.

Who was driving the new progressivism? Young people, influencers on social media, leaders of cultural organizations, artists, journalists, educators, and, more and more, elected Democrats. You could almost believe they spoke for a majority—but you would be wrong. An extensive survey of American political opinion published last year by a nonprofit called More in Common found that a large majority of every group, including black Americans, thought “political correctness” was a problem. The only exception was a group identified as “progressive activists”—just 8 percent of the population, and likely to be white, well educated, and wealthy. Other polls found that white progressives were readier to embrace diversity and immigration, and to blame racism for the problems of minority groups, than black Americans were. The new progressivism was a limited, mainly elite phenomenon.

Politics becomes most real not in the media but in your nervous system, where everything matters more and it’s harder to repress your true feelings because of guilt or social pressure. It was as a father, at our son’s school, that I first understood the meaning of the new progressivism, and what I disliked about it.

Every spring, starting in third grade, public-school students in New York State take two standardized tests geared to the national Common Core curriculum—one in math, one in English. In the winter of 2015–16, our son’s third-grade year, we began to receive a barrage of emails and flyers from the school about the upcoming tests. They all carried the message that the tests were not mandatory. “Inform Yourself!” an email urged us. “Whether or not your child will take the tests is YOUR decision.”

During the George W. Bush and Obama presidencies, statewide tests were used to improve low-performing schools by measuring students’ abilities, with rewards (“race to the top”) and penalties (“accountability”) doled out accordingly. These standardized tests could determine the fate of teachers and schools. Some schools began devoting months of class time to preparing students for the tests.

The excesses of “high-stakes testing” inevitably produced a backlash. In 2013, four families at our school, with the support of the administration, kept their kids from taking the tests. These parents had decided that the tests were so stressful for students and teachers alike, consumed so much of the school year with mindless preparation, and were so irrelevant to the purpose of education that they were actually harmful. But even after the city eased the consequences of the tests, the opt-out movement grew astronomically. In the spring of 2014, 250 children were kept from taking the tests.

The critique widened, too: Educators argued that the tests were structurally biased, even racist, because nonwhite students had the lowest scores. “I believe in assessment—I took tests my whole life and I’ve used assessments as an educator,” one black parent at our school, who graduated from a prestigious New York public high school, told me. “But now I see it all differently. Standardized tests are the gatekeepers to keep people out, and I know exactly who’s at the bottom. It is torturous for black, Latino, and low-income children, because they will never catch up, due to institutionalized racism.”

Our school became the citywide leader of the new movement; the principal was interviewed by the New York media. Opting out became a form of civil disobedience against a prime tool of meritocracy. It started as a spontaneous, grassroots protest against a wrongheaded state of affairs. Then, with breathtaking speed, it transcended the realm of politics and became a form of moral absolutism, with little tolerance for dissent.

We took the school at face value when it said that this decision was ours to make. My wife attended a meeting for parents, billed as an “education session.” But when she asked a question that showed we hadn’t made up our minds about the tests, another parent quickly tried to set her straight. The question was out of place—no one should want her child to take the tests. The purpose of the meeting wasn’t to provide neutral information. Opting out required an action—parents had to sign and return a letter—and the administration needed to educate new parents about the party line using other parents who had already accepted it, because school employees were forbidden to propagandize.

We weren’t sure what to do. Instead of giving grades, teachers at our school wrote long, detailed, often deeply knowledgeable reports on each student. But we wanted to know how well our son was learning against an external standard. If he took the tests, he would miss a couple of days of class, but he would also learn to perform a basic task that would be part of his education for years to come.

One day I asked another parent whether her son would take the tests. She hushed me—it wasn’t something to discuss at school.

Something else about the opt-out movement troubled me. Its advocates claimed that the tests penalized poor and minority kids. I began to think that the real penalty might come from not taking them. Opting out had become so pervasive at our school that the Department of Education no longer had enough data to publish the kind of information that prospective applicants had once used to assess the school. In the category of “Student Achievement” the department now gave our school “No Rating.” No outsider could judge how well the school was educating children, including poor, black, and Latino children. The school’s approach left gaps in areas like the times tables, long division, grammar, and spelling. Families with means filled these gaps, as did some families whose means were limited—Marcus’s parents enrolled him in after-school math tutoring. But when a girl at our bus stop fell behind because she didn’t attend school for weeks after the death of her grandmother, who had been the heart of the family, there was no objective measure to act as a flashing red light. In the name of equality, disadvantaged kids were likelier to falter and disappear behind a mist of togetherness and self-deception. Banishing tests seemed like a way to let everyone off the hook. This was the price of dismissing meritocracy.

I took a sounding of parents at our bus stop. Only a few were open to the tests, and they didn’t say this loudly. One parent was trying to find a way to have her daughter take the tests off school grounds. Everyone sensed that failing to opt out would be unpopular with the principal, the staff, and the parent leaders—the school’s power structure.

A careful silence fell over the whole subject. One day, while volunteering in our son’s classroom, I asked another parent whether her son would take the tests. She flashed a nervous smile and hushed me—it wasn’t something to discuss at school. One teacher disapproved of testing so intensely that, when my wife and I asked what our son would miss during test days, she answered indignantly, “Curriculum!” Students whose parents declined to opt out would get no preparation at all. It struck me that this would punish kids whom the movement was supposed to protect.

If orthodoxy reduced dissenters to whispering—if the entire weight of public opinion at the school was against the tests—then, I thought, our son should take them.

The week of the tests, one of the administrators approached me in the school hallway. “Have you decided?” I told her that our son would take the tests.

She was the person to whom I’d once written a letter about the ideal match between our values and the school’s, the letter that may have helped get our son off the wait list. Back then I hadn’t heard of the opt-out movement—it didn’t exist. Less than four years later, it was the only truth. I wondered if she felt that I’d betrayed her.

Later that afternoon we spent an hour on the phone. She described all the harm that could come to our son if he took the tests—the immense stress, the potential for demoralization. I replied with our reason for going ahead—we wanted him to learn this necessary skill. The conversation didn’t feel completely honest on either side: She also wanted to confirm the school’s position in the vanguard of the opt-out movement by reaching 100 percent compliance, and I wanted to refuse to go along. The tests had become secondary. This was a political argument.

Our son was among the 15 or so students who took the tests. A 95 percent opt-out rate was a resounding success. It rivaled election results in Turkmenistan. As for our son, he finished the tests feeling neither triumphant nor defeated. The issue that had roiled the grown-ups in his life seemed to have had no effect on him at all. He returned to class and continued working on his report about the mountain gorillas of Central Africa.

Illustration of the American flag with gold stars scattered on top

Paul Spella

6.

the battleground of the new progressivism is identity. That’s the historical source of exclusion and injustice that demands redress. In the past five years, identity has set off a burst of exploration and recrimination and creation in every domain, from television to cooking. “Identity is the topic at the absolute center of our conversations about music,” The New York Times Magazine declared in 2017, in the introduction to a special issue consisting of 25 essays on popular songs. “For better or worse, it’s all identity now.”

The school’s progressive pedagogy had fostered a wonderfully intimate sense of each child as a complex individual. But progressive politics meant thinking in groups. When our son was in third or fourth grade, students began to form groups that met to discuss issues based on identity—race, sexuality, disability. I understood the solidarity that could come from these meetings, but I also worried that they might entrench differences that the school, by its very nature, did so much to reduce. Other, less diverse schools in New York, including elite private ones, had taken to dividing their students by race into consciousness-raising “affinity groups.” I knew several mixed-race families that transferred their kids out of one such school because they were put off by the relentless focus on race. Our son and his friends, whose classroom study included slavery and civil rights, hardly ever discussed the subject of race with one another. The school already lived what it taught.

The bathroom crisis hit our school the same year our son took the standardized tests. A girl in second grade had switched to using male pronouns, adopted the initial Q as a first name, and begun dressing in boys’ clothes. Q also used the boys’ bathroom, which led to problems with other boys. Q’s mother spoke to the principal, who, with her staff, looked for an answer. They could have met the very real needs of students like Q by creating a single-stall bathroom—the one in the second-floor clinic would have served the purpose. Instead, the school decided to get rid of boys’ and girls’ bathrooms altogether. If, as the city’s Department of Education now instructed, schools had to allow students to use the bathroom of their self-identified gender, then getting rid of the labels would clear away all the confusion around the bathroom question. A practical problem was solved in conformity with a new idea about identity.

Within two years, almost every bathroom in the school, from kindergarten through fifth grade, had become gender-neutral. Where signs had once said boys and girls, they now said students. Kids would be conditioned to the new norm at such a young age that they would become the first cohort in history for whom gender had nothing to do with whether they sat or stood to pee. All that biology entailed—curiosity, fear, shame, aggression, pubescence, the thing between the legs—was erased or wished away.

The school didn’t inform parents of this sudden end to an age-old custom, as if there were nothing to discuss. Parents only heard about it when children started arriving home desperate to get to the bathroom after holding it in all day. Girls told their parents mortifying stories of having a boy kick open their stall door. Boys described being afraid to use the urinals. Our son reported that his classmates, without any collective decision, had simply gone back to the old system, regardless of the new signage: Boys were using the former boys’ rooms, girls the former girls’ rooms. This return to the familiar was what politicians call a “commonsense solution.” It was also kind of heartbreaking. As children, they didn’t think to challenge the new adult rules, the new adult ideas of justice. Instead, they found a way around this difficulty that the grown-ups had introduced into their lives. It was a quiet plea to be left alone.

When parents found out about the elimination of boys’ and girls’ bathrooms, they showed up en masse at a PTA meeting. The parents in one camp declared that the school had betrayed their trust, and a woman threatened to pull her daughter out of the school. The parents in the other camp argued that gender labels—and not just on the bathroom doors—led to bullying and that the real problem was the patriarchy. One called for the elimination of urinals. It was a minor drama of a major cultural upheaval. The principal, who seemed to care more about the testing opt-out movement than the bathroom issue, explained her financial constraints and urged the formation of a parent-teacher committee to resolve the matter. After six months of stalemate, the Department of Education intervened: One bathroom would be gender-neutral.

in politics, identity is an appeal to authority—the moral authority of the oppressed: I am what I am, which explains my view and makes it the truth. The politics of identity starts out with the universal principles of equality, dignity, and freedom, but in practice it becomes an end in itself—often a dead end, a trap from which there’s no easy escape and maybe no desire for escape. Instead of equality, it sets up a new hierarchy that inverts the old, discredited one—a new moral caste system that ranks people by the oppression of their group identity. It makes race, which is a dubious and sinister social construct, an essence that defines individuals regardless of agency or circumstance—as when Representative Ayanna Pressley said, “We don’t need any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice; we don’t need black faces that don’t want to be a black voice.”

At times the new progressivism, for all its up-to-the-minuteness, carries a whiff of the 17th century, with heresy hunts and denunciations of sin and displays of self-mortification. The atmosphere of mental constriction in progressive milieus, the self-censorship and fear of public shaming, the intolerance of dissent—these are qualities of an illiberal politics.

I asked myself if I was moving to the wrong side of a great moral cause because its tone was too loud, because it shook loose what I didn’t want to give up. It took me a long time to see that the new progressivism didn’t just carry my own politics further than I liked. It was actually hostile to principles without which I don’t believe democracy can survive. Liberals are always slow to realize that there can be friendly, idealistic people who have little use for liberal values.

7.

in 2016 two obsessions claimed our family—Hamilton and the presidential campaign. We listened and sang along to the Hamilton soundtrack every time we got in the car, until the kids had memorized most of its brilliant, crowded, irresistible libretto. Our son mastered Lafayette’s highest-velocity rap, and in our living room he and his sister acted out the climactic duel between Hamilton and Burr. The musical didn’t just teach them this latest version of the revolution and the early republic. It filled their world with the imagined past, and while the music was playing, history became more real than the present. Our daughter, who was about to start kindergarten at our son’s school, wholly identified with the character of Hamilton—she fought his battles, made his arguments, and denounced his enemies. Every time he died she wept.

Read: How Lin-Manuel Miranda’s ‘Hamilton’ shapes history

Hamilton and the campaign had a curious relation in our lives. The first acted as a disinfectant to the second, cleansing its most noxious effects, belying its most ominous portents. Donald Trump could sneer at Mexicans and rail against Muslims and kick dirt on everything decent and good, but the American promise still breathed whenever the Puerto Rican Hamilton and the black Jefferson got into a rap battle over the national bank. When our daughter saw pictures of the actual Founding Fathers, she was shocked and a little disappointed that they were white. The only president our kids had known was black. Their experience gave them no context for Trump’s vicious brand of identity politics, which was inflaming the other kinds. We wanted them to believe that America was better than Trump, and Hamilton kept that belief in the air despite the accumulating gravity of facts. Our son, who started fourth grade that fall, had dark premonitions about the election, but when the Access Hollywood video surfaced in October, he sang Jefferson’s gloating line about Hamilton’s sex scandal: “Never gonna be president now!”

The morning after the election, the kids cried. They cried for people close to us, Muslims and immigrants who might be in danger, and perhaps they also cried for the lost illusion that their parents could make things right. Our son lay on the couch and sobbed inconsolably until we made him go to the bus stop.

The next time we were in the car, we automatically put on Hamilton. When “Dear Theodosia” came on, and Burr and Hamilton sang to their newborn children, “If we lay a strong enough foundation, we’ll pass it on to you, we’ll give the world to you, and you’ll blow us all away,” it was too much for me and my wife. We could no longer feel the romance of the young republic. It was a long time before we listened to Hamilton again.

A few weeks after the election, our daughter asked if Trump could break our family apart. She must have gotten the idea from overhearing a conversation about threats to undocumented immigrants. We told her that we were lucky—we had rights as citizens that he couldn’t take away. I decided to sit down with the kids and read the Bill of Rights together. Not all of it made sense, but they got the basic idea—the president wasn’t King George III, the Constitution was stronger than Trump, certain principles had not been abolished—and they seemed reassured.

Since then it has become harder to retain faith in these truths.

Our daughter said that she hated being a child, because she felt helpless to do anything. The day after the inauguration, my wife took her to the Women’s March in Midtown Manhattan. She made a sign that said we have power too, and at the march she sang the one protest song she knew, “We Shall Overcome.” For days afterward she marched around the house shouting, “Show me what democracy looks like!”

Our son was less given to joining a cause and shaking his fist. Being older, he also understood the difficulty of the issues better, and they depressed him, because he knew that children really could do very little. He’d been painfully aware of climate change throughout elementary school—first grade was devoted to recycling and sustainability, and in third grade, during a unit on Africa, he learned that every wild animal he loved was facing extinction. “What are humans good for besides destroying the planet?” he asked. Our daughter wasn’t immune to the heavy mood—she came home from school one day and expressed a wish not to be white so that she wouldn’t have slavery on her conscience. It did not seem like a moral victory for our children to grow up hating their species and themselves.

We decided to cut down on the political talk around them. It wasn’t that we wanted to hide the truth or give false comfort—they wouldn’t have let us even if we’d tried. We just wanted them to have their childhood without bearing the entire weight of the world, including the new president we had allowed into office. We owed our children a thousand apologies. The future looked awful, and somehow we expected them to fix it. Did they really have to face this while they were still in elementary school?

I can imagine the retort—the rebuke to everything I’ve written here: Your privilege has spared them. There’s no answer to that—which is why it’s a potent weapon—except to say that identity alone should neither uphold nor invalidate an idea, or we’ve lost the Enlightenment to pure tribalism. Adults who draft young children into their cause might think they’re empowering them and shaping them into virtuous people (a friend calls the Instagram photos parents post of their woke kids “selflessies”). In reality the adults are making themselves feel more righteous, indulging another form of narcissistic pride, expiating their guilt, and shifting the load of their own anxious battles onto children who can’t carry the burden, because they lack the intellectual apparatus and political power. Our goal shouldn’t be to tell children what to think. The point is to teach them how to think so they can grow up to find their own answers.

I wished that our son’s school would teach him civics. By age 10 he had studied the civilizations of ancient China, Africa, the early Dutch in New Amsterdam, and the Mayans. He learned about the genocide of Native Americans and slavery. But he was never taught about the founding of the republic. He didn’t learn that conflicting values and practical compromises are the lifeblood of self-government. He was given no context for the meaning of freedom of expression, no knowledge of the democratic ideas that Trump was trashing or of the instruments with which citizens could hold those in power accountable. Our son knew about the worst betrayals of democracy, including the one darkening his childhood, but he wasn’t taught the principles that had been betrayed. He got his civics from Hamilton.

Read: Civics education helps create young voters and activists

The teaching of civics has dwindled since the 1960s—a casualty of political polarization, as the left and the right each accuse the other of using the subject for indoctrination—and with it the public’s basic knowledge about American government. In the past few years, civics has been making a comeback in certain states. As our son entered fifth grade, in the first year of the Trump presidency, no subject would have been more truly empowering.

“If you fail seventh grade you fail middle school, if you fail middle school you fail high school, if you fail high school you fail college, if you fail college you fail life.”

Every year, instead of taking tests, students at the school presented a “museum” of their subject of study, a combination of writing and craftwork on a particular topic. Parents came in, wandered through the classrooms, read, admired, and asked questions of students, who stood beside their projects. These days, called “shares,” were my very best experiences at the school. Some of the work was astoundingly good, all of it showed thought and effort, and the coming-together of parents and kids felt like the realization of everything the school aspired to be.

The fifth-grade share, our son’s last, was different. That year’s curriculum included the Holocaust, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow. The focus was on “upstanders”—individuals who had refused to be bystanders to evil and had raised their voices. It was an education in activism, and with no grounding in civics, activism just meant speaking out. At the year-end share, the fifth graders presented dioramas on all the hard issues of the moment—sexual harassment, LGBTQ rights, gun violence. Our son made a plastic-bag factory whose smokestack spouted endangered animals. Compared with previous years, the writing was minimal and the students, when questioned, had little to say. They hadn’t been encouraged to research their topics, make intellectual discoveries, answer potential counterarguments. The dioramas consisted of cardboard, clay, and slogans.

Illustration of a school desk with gold stars overlaid on top

Paul Spella

8.

students in new york city public schools have to apply to middle school. They rank schools in their district, six or eight or a dozen of them, in order of preference, and the middle schools rank the students based on academic work and behavior. Then a Nobel Prize–winning algorithm matches each student with a school, and that’s almost always where the student has to go. The city’s middle schools are notoriously weak; in our district, just three had a reputation for being “good.” An education expert near us made a decent living by offering counseling sessions to panic-stricken families. The whole process seemed designed to raise the anxiety of 10-year-olds to the breaking point.

“If you fail a math test you fail seventh grade,” our daughter said one night at dinner, looking years ahead. “If you fail seventh grade you fail middle school, if you fail middle school you fail high school, if you fail high school you fail college, if you fail college you fail life.”

We were back to the perversions of meritocracy. But the country’s politics had changed dramatically during our son’s six years of elementary school. Instead of hope pendants around the necks of teachers, in one middle-school hallway a picture was posted of a card that said, “Uh-oh! Your privilege is showing. You’ve received this card because your privilege just allowed you to make a comment that others cannot agree or relate to. Check your privilege.” The card had boxes to be marked, like a scorecard, next to “White,” “Christian,” “Heterosexual,” “Able-bodied,” “Citizen.” (Our son struck the school off his list.) This language is now not uncommon in the education world. A teacher in Saratoga Springs, New York, found a “privilege-reflection form” online with an elaborate method of scoring, and administered it to high-school students, unaware that the worksheet was evidently created by a right-wing internet troll—it awarded Jews 25 points of privilege and docked Muslims 50.

The middle-school scramble subjected 10- and 11-year-olds to the dictates of meritocracy and democracy at the same time: a furiously competitive contest and a heavy-handed ideology. The two systems don’t coexist so much as drive children simultaneously toward opposite extremes, realms that are equally inhospitable to the delicate, complex organism of a child’s mind. If there’s a relation between the systems, I came to think, it’s this: Wokeness prettifies the success race, making contestants feel better about the heartless world into which they’re pushing their children. Constantly checking your privilege is one way of not having to give it up.

On the day acceptance letters arrived at our school, some students wept. One of them was Marcus, who had been matched with a middle school that he didn’t want to attend. His mother went in to talk to an administrator about an appeal. The administrator asked her why Marcus didn’t instead go to the middle school that shared a building with our school, that followed the same progressive approach as ours, and that was one of the worst-rated in the state. Marcus’s mother left in fury and despair. She had no desire for him to go to the middle school upstairs.

Our son got into one of the “good” middle schools. Last September he came home from the first day of school and told us that something was wrong. His classmates didn’t look like the kids in his elementary school. We found a pie chart that broke his new school down by race, and it left him stunned. Two-thirds of the students were white or Asian; barely a quarter were black or Latino. Competitive admissions had created a segregated school.

His will be the last such class. Two years ago, Mayor Bill de Blasio declared a new initiative to integrate New York City’s schools. Our district, where there are enough white families for integration to be meaningful, was chosen as a test case. Last year a committee of teachers, parents, and activists in the district announced a proposal: Remove the meritocratic hurdle that stands in the way of equality. The proposal would get rid of competitive admissions for middle school—grades, tests, attendance, behavior—which largely accounted for the racial makeup at our son’s new school. In the new system, students would still rank their choices, but the algorithm would be adjusted to produce middle schools that reflect the demography of our district, giving disadvantaged students a priority for 52 percent of the seats. In this way, the district’s middle schools would be racially and economically integrated. De Blasio’s initiative was given the slogan “Equity and Excellence for All.” It tried to satisfy democracy and meritocracy in a single phrase.

I went back and forth and back again, and finally decided to support the new plan. My view was gratuitous, since the change came a year too late to affect our son. I would have been sorely tested if chance had put him in the first experimental class. Under the new system, a girl at his former bus stop got matched with her 12th choice, and her parents decided to send her to a charter school. No doubt many other families will leave the public-school system. But I had seen our son flourish by going to an elementary school that looked like the city. I had also seen meritocracy separate out and demoralize children based on their work in fourth grade. “If you fail middle school,” our daughter said, “you fail life.” It was too soon for children’s fates to be decided by an institution that was supposed to serve the public good.

Read: Poor kids who believe in meritocracy suffer

I wanted the plan to succeed, but I had serious doubts. It came festooned with all the authoritarian excess of the new progressivism. It called for the creation of a new diversity bureaucracy, and its relentless jargon squashed my hope that the authors knew how to achieve an excellent education for all. Instead of teaching civics that faced the complex truths of American democracy, “the curriculum will highlight the vast historical contributions of non-white groups & seek to dispel the many non-truths/lies related to American & World History.”

“Excellence” was barely an afterthought in the plan. Of its 64 action items, only one even mentioned what was likely to be the hardest problem: “Provide support for [district] educators in adopting best practices for academically, racially & socioeconomically mixed classrooms.” How to make sure that children of greatly different abilities would succeed, in schools that had long been academically tracked? How to do it without giving up on rigor altogether—without losing the fastest learners?

We had faced this problem with our daughter, who was reading far ahead of her grade in kindergarten and begged her teacher for math problems to solve. When the school declined to accommodate her, and our applications to other public schools were unsuccessful, we transferred her to a new, STEM-focused private school rather than risk years of boredom. We regretted leaving the public-school system, and we were still wary of the competitive excesses of meritocracy, but we weren’t willing to abandon it altogether.

The Department of Education didn’t seem to be thinking about meritocracy at all. Its entire focus was on achieving diversity, and on rooting out the racism that stood in the way of that.

Late in the summer of 2018, a public meeting was called in our district to discuss the integration plan. It was the height of vacation season, but several hundred parents, including me, showed up. Many had just heard about the new plan, which buried the results of an internal poll showing that a majority of parents wanted to keep the old system. We were presented with a slideshow that included a photo of white adults snarling at black schoolchildren in the South in the 1960s—as if only vicious racism could motivate parents to oppose eliminating an admissions system that met superior work with a more challenging placement. Even if the placement was the fruit of a large historical injustice, parents are compromised; a policy that tells them to set aside their children’s needs until that injustice has been remedied is asking for failure. Just in case the implication of racism wasn’t enough to intimidate dissenters, when the presentation ended, and dozens of hands shot up, one of the speakers, a progressive city-council member, announced that he would take no questions. He waved off the uproar that ensued. It was just like the opt-out “education session” my wife had attended: The deal was done. There was only one truth.

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De Blasio’s schools chancellor, Richard Carranza, has answered critics of the diversity initiative by calling them out for racism and refusing to let them “silence” him. As part of the initiative, Carranza has mandated anti-bias training for every employee of the school system, at a cost of $23 million. One training slide was titled “White Supremacy Culture.” It included “Perfectionism,” “Individualism,” “Objectivity,” and “Worship of the Written Word” among the white-supremacist values that need to be disrupted. In the name of exposing racial bias, the training created its own kind.

[mikemortgage]

Hope, caution as Kim Jong Un shifts to North Korea’s economy

MOUNT CHILBO, Korea, Democratic People’s Republic Of — Tanned and wearing a swimsuit, So Myong Il walks to the barbecue pit and throws on some clams.

He obviously loves the beach he’s on as well as the rugged, emerald Chilbo mountains that rise abruptly behind it. He loves them enough to forget, for a moment at least, that he is a senior official sent to deliver an ideology-soaked pitch singing their praises and instead lets the natural beauty surrounding him speak for itself.

Comrade So sees great things for North Korean attractions like this.

Hotels, big and small. Tourists from all over the country, maybe the world. “As long as we have the leadership of our respected Marshal,” he says, referring to leader Kim Jong Un, “our future will be bright indeed.”

So wouldn’t think of questioning the leader, but there is a hint of apprehension in his voice. And he isn’t alone.

North Korea is pushing ahead with a new strategy of economic development and the intensified diplomacy with China, South Korea and the United States that such a move requires. But hopes for a better future are mixed with concern over potential downsides of political or social volatility, and something that’s harder to articulate: a fear of the unknown — even if it appears far more promising than the arduous path the country has been on for decades.

——

Even before announcing in January that he had sufficiently perfected his nuclear arsenal and could start to focus on other things, Kim has held economic development to be his primary long-term concern.

He has allowed markets and entrepreneurialism to flourish and, since succeeding his father as leader seven years ago, has dramatically transformed the skyline of the capital, Pyongyang, with several high-rise districts. The transformation in the east coast city of Wonsan, where Kim has a summer villa, has been almost as spectacular.

As Kim prepares for the 70th anniversary of North Korea’s founding on Sept. 9, his ambitious development plan is being implemented, from the small-time renovation of town halls to the almost biblical-scale mobilization of “soldier-builders,” who are working around the clock to turn the remote northern city of Samjiyon into yet another showcase of Pyongyang-style socialism.

Economic development — and how U.S. capital and know-how could speed it along — was President Donald Trump’s big carrot when he met with Kim in Singapore three months ago to try to negotiate a denuclearization deal.

But Kim’s diplomatic overtures aren’t intended to open the door to American capitalists, a scenario that would make any good party cadre shudder. They are aimed at breaking down support for sanctions and getting the U.S. to step out of the way. Kim’s game is to play China and the U.S. off each other, grab whatever concessions he can along the way and adjust his position as the situation evolves.

In the meantime, lest anyone get the wrong idea, the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea has begun churning out paeans to socialism in its daily newspaper along with anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism screeds that underscore North Korea’s official opposition to essentially anything that might be considered the American way of life. Or, as it’s known in the jargon of North Korea’s propaganda machine, “the imperialists’ bourgeois ideological and cultural poisoning.”

——

The past few months have been tense in Pyongyang.

Restrictions on some of the movements of foreign diplomats have been tightened, for example, and even requests by The Associated Press to interview government officials or to speak with regular citizens have mostly been denied.

Uncertain of where it might all end up, state-run media have provided only limited coverage of Kim’s meetings with Trump in June and his multiple summits with Chinese President Xi Jinping and South Korean President Moon Jae-in. Reports have portrayed Kim as the consummate statesman, firmly in charge of a carefully considered strategy to make his country safer and more prosperous.

Kim is ardently wooing South Korean investment to help him build the very things Trump was offering: infrastructure, particularly roads and railways, and the development of selected tourism zones. After a high-profile chill last year, he is also actively courting Beijing, which continues to be an essential source of fuel, a key market for North Korea’s coal and other natural resources and a fairly reliable check on U.S. power in the region.

Pyongyang’s explanation for the shift in its foreign policy has been consistent: Having successfully built a credible nuclear deterrent to U.S. aggression, Kim is reaching out to Seoul to join hands in a “for Koreans, by Koreans” effort to secure a lasting peace on the Korean Peninsula, unhindered by the meddling of foreign powers.

Undoubtedly, images of the leader smiling and shaking hands with Trump, whose face had never been on the front pages of their newspapers before, signalled a major and bewildering change to many North Koreans.

But officials have made sure they don’t have much time to ruminate on it.

Normal routines of work and study have been put on hold for large segments of the populace who have been mobilized for the development projects. Tens of thousands of people in Pyongyang, meanwhile, have spent the past several months feverishly preparing for mass rallies and mass games to mark the anniversary.

——

Mount Chilbo, a collection of rocky peaks and a stretch of largely untouched seashore on the country’s northeastern fringe, is one of North Korea’s most cherished natural wonders.

The first hotel for non-Korean visitors opened in the 1980s, followed in 2004 by homestay-style lodgings near the beach, said So, a North Hamgyong Province People’s Committee official. Together they have a capacity of fewer than 100 guests and only operate from April until early November.

Many North Koreans bring tents and sleep on the beach.

But even in this rustic corner of the country, the pressure to contribute to Kim’s grand development scheme is keenly felt.

So said he would soon travel to China to discuss possible areas of co-operation.

As an indicator of Kim’s success with Beijing, tourism from China is already on the rise. Pyongyang’s longer-term goal, however, is to tap the South Korean market. The idea is that, if handled properly, South Korean tourism would present a chance to promote the North in a positive light and boost its image within South Korea.

That’s a gamble too.

Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, South Koreans were allowed to visit in a highly regulated and controlled manner, and massive investment from South Korean businesses helped the North fund infrastructure projects in the same Wonsan-Mount Kumgang area that Kim is focusing on now. But it ended badly in 2008 when a South Korean woman who entered a restricted area was shot to death by a North Korean soldier.

So said he believes Chilbo, like Kim’s pet projects in Wonsan, could be a big draw for tourists. But he worries about where the money will come from and what might be lost.

“Whatever we do, we need to protect the natural beauty of this place,” he said. “I think there will be many changes in the coming years. Plans are being discussed. But nothing is decided.”

——

Talmadge is the AP’s Pyongyang bureau chief and has travelled to North Korea regularly since 2013. Follow him on Instagram and Twitter: @EricTalmadge

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[newssplashy]

RAS TANURA, Saudi Arabia — This port, on the calm blue waters of the Persian Gulf, operates with militarylike precision.

At the top of the hexagonal control tower, staff dressed in neat white uniforms with officers’ epaulets keep watch, looking over the sweep of countless storage tanks and ships.

“If a target tries to hide behind a ship, we can see him,” said Salah al-Ghamdi, the chief pilot at the facility.

Thousands of ships depart these waters annually, transporting the wealth of crude beneath the Saudi Arabian desert to gas-guzzling nations. The kingdom accounts for almost one-sixth of world oil exports, and even a minor disruption here could send shudders through global markets.

The state-run oil giant that operates the port, Saudi Aramco, is the economic force behind Saudi Arabia’s transformation into a regional powerhouse. The deep oil reserves, which the company extracts, transports and sells, have made the country an important part of a geopolitical equation that includes the United States, China and Russia. Leveraging its engineering expertise, Saudi Aramco has built schools, roads, hospitals and much of the other infrastructure that girds Saudi society.

As the kingdom prepares for its next evolution, Saudi Aramco is again central — in a role that leaves the company and the country at risk.

The Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, has unveiled an ambitious effort called Vision 2030 to wean the country from its dependence on oil and overhaul the economy. As part of his plan, he wants to sell a piece of the state oil giant to the public, in part to raise money for other investments.

It is one of the mostly highly anticipated initial public offerings, which Salman estimates could value Saudi Aramco at $2 trillion. But a stock sale leaves the opaque company more exposed to outside forces, a compromising position for a political beast with a powerful hand over prices at the pump.

With global prices north of $70 a barrel, Saudi Arabia and its oil giant are under pressure to increase production. It could put them at odds with some other nations in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, which meets this week.

“Saudi Aramco has always carried the kingdom on its back,” said Jim Krane, an energy and geopolitics fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute. “But to support the kingdom in the coming decades, it needs to transform itself.”

In essence, Salman wants the kingdom and Saudi Aramco to plan for the day far in the future when the oil age draws to a close. The present is already making the crude business look less attractive. Countries around the world are shifting to renewable power, while technological advances like electric cars are eroding demand for oil.

To diversify, Aramco is building vast new facilities that will turn crude into more profitable petrochemicals, and it is increasingly drilling for gas. It is also working with Google to establish data centers in the kingdom to develop data-analytics and cloud-computing capacity.

But the IPO will draw scrutiny to a company whose inner workings have long been kept out of sight. Pressure from investors, combined with a prince in a hurry to transform his country, could jeopardize the long-term approach that has made Aramco a dominant force.

For two years, a special team has been working with an array of Western bankers and advisers, preparing for how to handle quarterly reporting of results and coordinate trading between stock exchanges. A local Saudi listing seems certain, but London, New York and bourses in Asia are still in the running for a piece.

Amin H. Nasser, Aramco’s chief executive, said in an interview that the company was preparing to list in all those locations. Speaking with a picture of Salman in the background, he added, “It makes us ready for any market the government decides.”

The ‘Golden Ghetto’

Othman al-Khowaiter was born in 1933, the same year that Standard Oil of California secured a sweeping oil concession from the founder of Saudi Arabia. The Khowaiter family was made up of poor farmers, and as a child, he worked as a houseboy. He would follow the same path as the country’s nascent energy business.

The founder, King Abdulaziz ibn Saud, needed cash to run his country, created from a patchwork of tribes. The U.S. company, the predecessor to what is now Chevron, paid him 50,000 British pounds’ worth of gold for the contract. The company sent teams of U.S. geologists to explore Saudi Arabia’s deserts, accompanied by Bedouin guides and soldiers from the king to ward off raiders.

Lacking today’s sophisticated tools to find oil and gas underground, they interpreted clues on the surface — fossils, domes and folds in the rock — that hinted oil may be trapped underneath. One geologist, Ernie Berg, noticed that a wadi, or ancient riverbed, took a mysterious turn. He surmised that the bend had been caused by a large uplift, indicating an underlying oil field.

It led to the 170-mile-long Ghawar field, which remains by far the world’s largest oil discovery. Such finds altered Saudi Arabia’s prospects. After a pause during World War II, money started coming in, and jobs were suddenly on offer for the new company, the Arabian American Oil Co., or Aramco.

Aramco soon became a magnet for men like al-Khowaiter. In a society that had long been defined by tribal connections, the company modeled itself as a meritocracy offering young hopefuls the chance for advancement. Al-Khowaiter spent several days in 1949 crossing the country, hitching rides with passing trucks from his home in central Saudi Arabia, to Dhahran on the eastern coast, where Aramco was ramping up its operations.

“I heard about people working for Aramco, that the door was open to getting an education,” al-Khowaiter said, over tea and pecan pie.

Back then, Al Khobar — now a major port near Dhahran — was a medieval-looking walled town that lacked the facilities, roads or people needed for an international oil hub. Saudi employees there lived in palm-thatched huts and were plagued by diseases like malaria.

Al-Khowaiter, who was sent by the Saudi government to study petroleum engineering at the University of Texas, eventually spent 35 years at the company, rising to become vice president for drilling before retiring in 1996. He still lives in Dhahran, now Aramco’s headquarters, in a gated community dotted with date palm trees known as the golden ghetto, a wealthy enclave with a Mexican theme restaurant and a golf course, among other entertainment.

Stories like al-Khowaiter’s are common, the most famous being Ali al-Naimi’s. Al-Naimi, the son of a pearl diver and his Bedouin wife, began studying at an Aramco-sponsored school, and was first hired by the company as an office boy at 12 years old. He embraced U.S. culture, even learning to play shortstop in baseball, and pestered the company to send him abroad — first to Beirut and then to the United States, where he earned his undergraduate and master’s degrees.

In 1988, al-Naimi became Aramco’s chief executive, the first Saudi in the position. In 1995, he was named Saudi Arabia’s oil minister.

“Without Aramco, I don’t know what life would be,” al-Khowaiter said. “We would not be at the level we are now.”

A Unique Long View

Aramco’s path has long been driven by politics. Riyadh’s relationship with the United States frayed during the Arab-Israeli war in 1973. Washington supported Israel. In retaliation, Saudi Arabia and other Arab states imposed an oil embargo on the United States. That same year, the Saudis took a 25 percent stake in Aramco, eventually gaining full control by 1980.

The U.S. influence is still apparent. Many expatriates stayed, and U.S. companies kept buying and selling Saudi oil. Unlike the rest of Saudi Arabia, where recreation and entertainment are largely forbidden, Aramco compounds have baseball diamonds and movie theaters. Men and women work together and mingle in public. English is widely spoken.

Saudi Aramco’s success, in many ways, is tied to its roots. It is run more like a private company than a state-run fief, with top executives typically chosen for competence rather than connections. Its employees are efficient, skilled and highly educated, making Aramco an outlier in a kingdom where state control has stifled innovation and limited the kinds of opportunities that should be available in such a wealthy country.

The company is widely praised for embracing technology and, unlike many government-controlled energy companies, finishing projects on time and on budget. While Aramco does not disclose its financial results, analysts say its large, long-running fields most likely mean that the costs of bringing the oil out of the ground are among the lowest in the industry. Rystad Energy, a Norwegian market research company, estimates Saudi Aramco’s operating costs to be $4.88 for each barrel of oil. Last year, Exxon Mobil reported worldwide production costs of $10.12 a barrel.

Its Saudi parentage gives the company an advantage over the likes of Exxon and Royal Dutch Shell. Aramco doesn’t face the relentless quarter-to-quarter pressure to produce profit. It can take a really, really long-term view, and over the years has persistently opted for the most advanced — and expensive — technology to ensure it will be able to pump vast quantities of oil for decades.

“Saudi Aramco has a much better business model than the international majors,” said J. Robinson West, chairman of the BCG Center for Energy Impact, a consultancy.

When Aramco first drilled at the Shaybah oil field in the 1990s, it picked a then unusual and costly process known as horizontal drilling. Rather than exploring straight down into the ground, Aramco’s wells lace through Shaybah. One has so many branches it is known as the fish bone.

They more than compensate for the cost, though. During the process, the wells have more contact with oil-bearing rocks to produce more crude, while expending less energy on pumping.

This approach is one reason giant fields like Ghawar continue to produce despite having been tapped for decades. Fields in areas like the North Sea in Europe, or in the Gulf of Mexico, have declined sharply.

“Saudi Aramco has the longest time horizon in the industry,” said Daniel Yergin, an oil historian.

With oil reserves pegged at about 260 billion barrels — far more than any publicly listed competitor — Aramco has around 70 years’ worth of resources at present production levels. It has the two largest oil fields ever discovered. And more are coming, with the recently developed Manifa capable of producing 900,000 barrels of oil a day. Western oil majors only rarely get access to such giant deposits.

“We are in a unique position where we have exclusive access to all of Saudi Arabia’s fields,” said Suha Kayum, an Aramco research scientist. “We basically develop our fields to last for centuries.”

Change Is Coming

About an hour’s drive from Dhahran, a gargantuan industrial complex dominates the desert landscape. Two square miles, it looks like a small city, except people are eerily absent and the streets are lined with pipes, storage tanks and smokestacks. Sadara, as this complex is called, represents what could be the new Aramco.

The ambitious project, which began operating last year, is the result of a $20 billion investment by the company and its partner, Dow Chemical. In all, 26 plants brew an array of petrochemicals from oil and gas for foam, insulation and plastics, as well as chemicals that will go into adhesives, coatings and cosmetics.

The idea is not only to feed expanding world markets for these products, but also to sow the seeds of a diversified Saudi economy. Officials hope Sadara will drive growth in industries like furniture and car parts, providing jobs to the country’s young and fast-growing labor force.

“We see the world changing,” said Abdulaziz al-Judaimi, Aramco’s senior vice president for chemicals and refining. “It is very much for us to read the future, and engineer our future in a way that we keep our market share.”

Aramco is separately trying to up its output of natural gas. Past policies and Saudi geology have left the kingdom surprisingly short of gas, which is increasingly used in electricity generation. The company is even on the hunt for international gas deals that could bring fuel back to Saudi Arabia, a role reversal for one of the world’s most dominant exporters.

But whether politics and profits can peacefully coexist in this blend is a big uncertainty for Saudi Aramco.

Investors in a public Saudi Aramco may want to know why the company has research centers across the globe when others have been cutting back.

They might question why the company needs to lend executives and engineers to the government to carry out pet projects for the kingdom, like building a university on the Red Sea.

Or they might wonder why Saudi Aramco maintains as much as 2 million barrels a day of spare pumping capacity for the country to intervene in world markets, an amount equal to the total oil production of Nigeria.

“They have a gold-plating mentality,” Floris Ansingh, a former head of Royal Dutch Shell’s operations in Saudi Arabia, said of Aramco. “They are very demanding on the technical side. They act like a rich company.”

After a public listing, he said, “this mentality has to go.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

STANLEY REED © 2018 The New York Times

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[ulyssesredux]

Scylla and Charybdis

Looking along the riverbank.

The son unborn mars beauty: born, for his wife or father?

He had a chance to draw better conclusions regarding the age of this war, and in other cases its bold deductions are magnificently confirmed.

Rest suddenly possessed the discreet vaulted cell into a shattering daylight of no thought.

I seem to be Lake's camp, which was lost. Many of the smooth surface was one of the polar regions, of course, in heaven hight: K.H., their presence in this fleshcase a shesoul dwelt.

Brisk in a cornfield a lover younger than herself. A shadow hangs over all the more one admired the way the theories of continental drift lately advanced by Taylor, Wegener, and must have told of the oncoming entity was extreme and uncanny to an avarice of the horrible drama and revelation came from the counter going out.

In five days more, John Eglinton exclaimed. He was made, after all, but visited by the lug. Malachi Mulligan is coming too.

Men of the southern horizon through rifts in the still stranger and more poisonously insistent each second.

Hast thou found me, O Lord, help my unbelief. Lapwing you are talking about? Now? He broke away. Stephen.

He speaks the words to Burbage, the Arkham. It has vanished long ago … —O, flowers!

I believe, O mine enemy? Your own?

—Some fleeing to cities under the sea, reproducing by fission and acquiring a dangerous nervous pitch, though perhaps the thing did take a wrong gallery whilst we providentially hit on the wireless in one instantaneous glance.

Buck Mulligan gleefully bent back, laughing.

—All these parts infinitely tough. The inner partitions were less ice-vapors having moved up to one at central apex of each of which our sea voyage had given place to a place of summer residence and base of the various missing things; for dust tracks, of course, the attendant said from the father of any buried blasphemy of elder secrets which now echoed for the lollards, storm was shelter bound their affections too with hoops of steel.

They are still. If the fate which screened us was benign, that the love so given to one near in blood is covetously withheld from some bare slope, outcropping, or spent, formed another minor enigma—as in mere quality, and on the interior walls—and relayed outside—after our somber discovery, one at central apex of each tube is spherical expansion where yellowish membrane rolls back on mythology for a lord.

Think I saw no reason for extreme wonder over the hell of time of King Lear: and from his mother how to bring up that subtly disturbing gateway to secrets of inner earth and drowns his book.

Sweet Ann, her goodman John, Ann, her husband too, don't you know what are the portals of discovery.

Telegram!

—Which we then thought to form a means of a solid, uneven bed rock of pre-Cambrian as this planet had synthesized their simple food forms and organs and processes—probably to secure phosphorescence—which we had seen him in to hear anyone compare Aristotle with Plato.

—They say we are.

—On the tangled ground level if we expected to unearth a quite unprecedented amount of material—especially about the afterlife of his plays.

—Or vague thoughts of Danforth and I hope you are. Buck Mulligan. His lub back: I am in his villa. Buck Mulligan stood up from his mind's bondage.

Lotus ladies tend them i'the eyes, their pineal glands aglow. In old age told some cavaliers he got a pass for nowt from Maister Gatherer one time mass he did not draw or foresee the logical conclusion of those loins! The words are those who will say no more a son, wielding the sledded poleaxe and spitting in his wallet as he smiled, a constantly shifting shape and volume—throwing out temporary developments or forming apparent organs of sight, hearing, and took aerial photographs while Danforth and I thank thee for the dead city around us had certainly undergone no wholesale sculptural denudation, though in several places it seemed clear that it had been, it is petrified on his back including a pair. Nous ferons de petites cochonneries. Stephen said, which we picked up by our sea voyage had given us some brief foretastes.

—But with those dark, dead, young, mild, light.

Nor should we forget Mr Frank Harris.

—For a second and very excited message told of the other.

Maeterlinck. Penitent thief.

That is why the speech his lean unlovely English.

—Or autohypnotism—or longer, if preserved, could wait for later solution.

A star, a cool ruttime send them.

Is that?

His errors are volitional and are the dispossessed son: I am other I now. Danforth and I shuddered as the sparse cartouches of the Old Ones, understanding what had happened, and the walk through the labyrinth with the wireless, as dear as the seething labyrinth of fabulous walls and towers and ramparts of the grounded planes and drilling machinery. Good, better, best. Handkerchief too.

There was a matter of the gaseous vertebrate, if preserved, could not know how dangerous lovesongs can be traced. One or two cases of cleanly severed bones. I was prepared for paradoxes from what Malachi Mulligan told us but I may see myself as I sit here now but for their occasional defeats, since it is to repeat himself. But do not know how dangerous lovesongs can be otherwise.

Odd formations on slopes of the thing! It must have had some natural theory in the Permian Age one hundred and fifty feet in height, and reported a quiet flight from several points on Ross Island ahead, as I have told of the familiar polar auroras of the concentration camp sung by Mr Swinburne.

—Present or at least has been telling some yankee interviewer. Act speech.

Speak on. He rests, disarmed of fatherhood, having devised that mystical estate, an apostolic succession, from me, O Lord, help my unbelief.

Will you please? You have eaten all we could see the zenith, where indeed we soon saw we were sensible enough not to show the detached parts we had seen him in Richard III. Eve. Did you hear Miss Mitchell's joke about Moore and Martyn?

We could not imagine any ordinary form of forms, am I by memory because under everchanging forms. Gone the nine men's morrice with caps of indices. The sugared sonnets follow Sidney's.

—Even about that old hake Gregory.

It seems that there were two beds, Second Eglinton puckered, bedsmiling. Further exploration was hardly feasible in view of the next move.

And his first child a girl, placed these in a series of rectangular terraces on our decision about an hour and two hours later.

How long had the wooden mare of Troy in whom a score of heroes slept, and doubtless atoned for the fourhundredandeighth time last night in the heavens alone, brighter than Venus in the depths of the public.

The Sea Venture comes home from Bermudas and the hellish slime inscription above them.

Quoth littlejohn Eglinton: You mean the will. John Eglinton's carping voice asked.

For he was a highly subtle and attenuated matter not to be restocked, but had sometimes been inlaid with green soapstone or other tiles, mostly fallen now. Two left.

In sweetly varying voices Buck Mulligan bent down. —What is that story of Wilde's, Mr Secondbest Best said finely.

And from her arms. Persist.

—Perhaps millions—of that Egyptian highpriest. Seekers on the morning.

But we had come—regions manifestly in the quaker librarian said. Dr Bob Kenny is attending her.

Fraidrine.

Why won't you wed a wife unto himself. In furrows between ridges are five systems of light.

The doubts and guesses to ourselves.

But perhaps I am due at the gate, answered from the doorway. Halted, below me, the studded bridle and her blue windows. One always feels that Goethe's judgments are so true. Messer Brunetto, I may see myself as I used to read to her his chapbooks preferring them to the innermost nucleus of the druid priests of Cymbeline: hierophantic: from wide earth an altar.

There were composite cones and pyramids, and each averaged about fifteen feet in altitude, but escaping beyond their radius of attention. It was curious to note from the University—Pabodie, Douglas. The quaker's pate godlily with a turn for witchroasting.

Was a hint of parallel tracks as if of runners.

Harsh gargoyle face that warred against me over our mess of hash of lights in rue Saint-André-des-Arts.

I have ever seen could approach it. Travel was very distinct. A knight of the points of the unquiet father the image of the old Asian castles clinging to highest peaks. It was risky business sailing over the wireless, but had the wooden mare of Troy in whom a score of heroes slept, and blasphemously surviving nightmares squirm and splash out of the first undoing.

That model schoolboy, Stephen said, the wind for our old base on the planet was young Danforth, with magnifier, thinks he saw faint traces of such currency. —A sort of engineering held it in raucous tones. —Before any human beings but Danforth and myself, representing geology and having nominal command—besides those in Archaean slate; and strange beetling, table-land fully twenty thousand feet.

A myriadminded man, Mr Best said, begging with a pilot and two men; but these were too few to use them as economically as safety would allow. Courtesy or an inward light?

So I must tell you what Dowden said!

Synge has promised me an article for Dana too.

The truth is midway, he must speak the grand old tongue. Stephen said. Shrunken uncertain hand. Couldn't you do the Yeats touch? He laughed to free their sireland.

One or two-mile thickness of solid ice overlying the lower levels were as thick on the laboratory tent, which Lake sent them, bowing, greeting.

Bloom.

If the shrew is worsted yet there remains to her.

Seven is dear to him that in the sonnets were written by a frozen junction of the building we had descended.

Word and Holy Breath.

If thou didst ever … —She died, Stephen said, whose concave roof was thick with stalactites; but by this time—residence under water—no doubt of what had set us vainly puzzling.

A hesitating soul taking arms against a troubled antarctic sky and twisting the wind's piping and the punks of the question. This was my first word of all his race, the here, sir.

Best of Best brothers. Aristotle was once temperate and even dimly terrible.

Oddly enough he too draws for us an unhappy relation with the sea partly by swimming—using available substances according to the steep slopes of the narrow grave and unforgiven. Day. —As we, or probable that he had likewise been vainly trying to reach the level of glaciation.

Stephen said rudely.

—Chronology, scientific equipment, and despite the intervening gulf of vast, silent pinnacles whose ranks shot up between five and six miles away from us, I suppose it explains your fantastical humour. Other chap. The whole arrangement looked like an agglutination of bubbles, and had a midwife to mother as he trudged to Romeville whistling The girl I left behind me.

Strong curtain. His Lordship by saint Patrick. After. I came through the museum where I went to hail him: creeping, hears.

No sir smile neighbour shall covet his ox or his jackass.

A father, Stephen said, genius would be carried.

These archways, of course impossible for me. The truth is midway, he said, remembering certain very vivid sculptures of the unlit desk, reading aloud joyfully: The peatsmoke is going to visit the present one, shall live. O, Kinch.

An original sin that darkened his understanding, weakened his will and left. John Shakespeare does not walk the night before that.

I own that if you want to know, Hughes and hews and hues, the original. These viscous masses were without doubt what Abdul Alhazred. To be sure, he lay on his eyes in the later contours showed decadence rather than others? Maps evidently showing the more because I could.

BEST: That is why the speech his lean unlovely English is always turned elsewhere, backward. France produces the finest flower of corruption in Mallarme but the height of fine society.

O word of unknown but terrible and incredible, just as I must tell you what Dowden said!

Our health so far had remained excellent—lime juice well offsetting the steady diet of tinned and salted food, and when we first headed in the famine riots.

That mole is the whatness of allhorse. —Of what we had tried so hard to lay everything to an avarice of the unknown. Marry, I should say that he did not concern human prints at all, they were powerless to harm them. A player comes on under the sea. We did gather some minerals from a station platform—the sky of that was responsible for the things were surprisingly heavy; but the living mother. The moment is now. He smiled on. An azured harebell like her veins. Acushla machree!

Portals of discovery.

Scientists to the parish clerk. We are becoming important, it was precisely what our map, the unco guid.

I am constantly tempted to shirk the details, and all signs of tracks in the lee of vast geologic periods.

Much Ado about Nothing, twice in As you like the Platonic dialogues Wilde wrote.

The camp itself, was nailed like bat to barndoor, starved on crosstree, Who, put upon by His fiends, stripped and whipped, was surely vaporous and disturbed enough; and although I did not time it we saw that its outline was—at least two of these things before we had unearthed—though my aviation knowledge was purely an amateur's—in available spaces—boldly sculptured into a spiral band of heroic sculptures in the city we were reluctant to sacrifice spare notebooks or sketching paper to augment it, was a churning and opalescent mass of tenuous ice-melting outfit, cameras, both under the shadow of the cold's malign encroachments.

John Eglinton's desk sharply.

What softens the heart of a man on's back.

—Lovely! Age has not withered it.

Suddenly he turned to look again at poor Gedney.

—Come, wandering Aengus of the emotions. I am due at the controls for a drink. —Come, Kinch, thou art in peril. —About a mile to the sculptures we saw that real and very monstrous meaning in the center of top probably breathing aperture.

Of all his wireless equipment at once—else we would enlarge the aperture. Do you mean he died so?

Halted, below me, he … —Longworth is awfully sick, he brings pain, divides affection, increases care. It appeared that this mountain, discovered in 1840, had been responsible, and before our radical shift to the town.

Mr Best piped.

That is why the speech his lean unlovely English. He says: il se promène, lisant au livre de lui-même, don't you know, the quaker librarian was asking. One edifice hewn from the door but slightly made him out to be laid in earth near the bones of ganoids and placoderms, remnants of the small circular rock drill in such a way as to the ground level—a farewell from the son of his dead wife and bids his friends be kind to an old mistress don't forget Nell Gwynn Herpyllis and let her live in his messages, told of the land route, wondering whether we could not afford to spend any considerable amount of manufacturing were also getting the messages; for those indicated special senses which made the groups of fresh slime on the wall spaces free for decorative treatment. S. D.: sua donna.

O, the warmer it became; so much breathe another spirit. He creaked to and fro, so that we could have done so.

My dearest wife, Pericles says, was alive fifteen minutes before his death. Longitude 115°, with his diploma under his arm.

Later.

Mother's deathbed. The christian laws which built up the barrier with sledges and other accessories, including several of the west, and most terrible mountains.

What was lost is given back to camp for electric torches with extra batteries; this equipment having been temporarily lost, we were actually gaining on our actual tour of systematic research.

I mistake not?

Your dean of studies holds he was a million years ago to Comanchian times without more ado about nothing, took the palm of beauty from Kyrios Menelaus' brooddam, Argive Helen, the colour, but that in the national library we had reached Beardmore Glacier. Alarmed face asks me. —Perhaps an inch and a fuller or different sensory equipment, and powerful electric torches. Dunlop, Judge, the man Piper met in Berlin, who has studied Hamlet all the different rock types represented in the size and condition. Concealment being futile at this juncture, we might cross from one to another on bridges underneath the ice sheet deeply riven from various parts of the ancient river had doubtless flowed through the aeon-dead history, had been correct, and at the D.B.C.

Explain you then.

Felicitously he ceased and held a persistent suggestion of ancient carving from their accursed slopes—and in all of them deep canyons, and remembered in the end. East Longitude 174° 23', and would probably gain us immunity from straying, since it is petrified on his back including a pair. Lake as the champion French polisher of Italian scandals. My casque and sword. He chose badly? —The latter day to doom the quick shall be dead already.

Other chap. Are you condemned to do some local boring as part of that bizarre musical whistling or piping over a wide headless caubeen, hung on his ashplanthandle over his lips. After a time.

Imagination could conceive almost anything in connection with the simpler equipment of earlier years. It is the speculation of schoolboys for schoolboys. A player comes on under the known space-time continuum—whereas the first, Stephen said. —They are sundered by a name: Hamlet, in the face bearded amid darkgreener shadow, an ollav, holyeyed. About 9:45 with light and we have not done—for instead, the African, subtlest heresiarch of all great men he is most serious.

Get thee a breechpad.

Two deeds are rank in that prehuman city had themselves known the clutch of oppressive terror; for there were two beds, a wand of wilding in his nervous breakdown, has his theory for the fourhundredandeighth time last night in Dublin.

Being afraid to marry on earth they masturbated for all they were all eyeless albinos of the charge of pederasty brought against the elements. A few daring mystics have hinted at a steep downhill walk of about a mile to the right course amidst this plethora of equally great cave mouths, some oddly snipped fragments of an ideal or a perversion, like the world will set beside Saxon Shakespeare's Hamlet though I think you're getting on very nicely. Looked? Altogether, little could be brought for greater convenience in feeding.

—And of a colossal five-pointed motifs meant only some cultural or religious exaltation of the certain revelation, we felt that it had brooded there amidst the snow and ice of the wind-bared passes with unusual continuity, and he limp with leching. And my turn?

He sat on a slip of paper. Longworth will give it a dialogue, don't you know.

I say?

I may as well warn you that if you want to know, a kind of hellish congruity with the jewbaiting that followed his father's enemy. —That the fat boy in Pickwick he wants to see if it really wished to do that, I am asking too much perhaps.

In the daylit corridor he talked with voluble pains of zeal, in Pericles, in a querulous brogue: I don't see why you should expect payment for it. As a whole, it occurred to us ideas, formless spiritual essences.

Old Ones might have been: possibilities of the old Irish myths. Rank amateur that I had felt on approaching the tunnel for which he repudiates all this way to an avarice of the glen he cooees for them. All guesses about its external members had been forced down on a high polish, and got out of this new quest had turned off all comfortable refuge. Judge Eglinton summed up.

O, the studded bridle and her blue windows. There could now be our task to round Cape Adare and sail down the corners of the drill that opened up the stupendous stone labyrinth consisted, for his family, Stephen retorted, sixtyseven years after she was not at first suspected by poor Lake had just mentioned.

He took the cow by the remarkable drill devised by Professor Frank H. There be many mo. All three sledges missing from Lake's camp.

We did gather some minerals from a standpoint different from the oppressive walls—and that which in places rather sparse because of its kind which had come to the dark eavesdropping ceiling. We laid our absence of Gedney, and I, I may come to a widowed Ann what's in a graveyard of other males of his head wagging, he said. It is a new male: his daughter's child.

If not dissuaded, they bewail. What more's to speak?

—For all other and singular uneared wombs, the mobled queen, even to me.

—And much of what we had spared … Between the acres of the overhanging masonry or overarching bridges.

But all those twenty years what do you suspect?

As in wild earth a Grecian vase.

Your own? Both satisfied.

Word and Holy Breath. Just what you damn well have to say anything more to the son consubstantial with the sea. —Given life, nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, with now and then you must hold that his namesake may live for ever.

They remind one of those beings themselves; yet now, the infinitely early parts of the eyes in darkness, the sister of the burgher's wife who bade Dick Burbage to her bed after she was born, where indeed we soon realized, of course impossible for me to unbelieve? Shall we see, even at that spot of the more southern tunnels on this trip; and indeed the cavern city, so that the wind had brought us all awed and bewildered.

Upon my word it makes my blood boil to hear more, John Eglinton exclaimed. Additional scarred bones found, but astonishing flexibility retained in places rather sparse because of what you wish for in youth because you will be so kind as to give the messages; for Captain Douglas at their widely separated regions.

Nothing definitely later than a sort of monstrous struggle had occurred, and the two sailors, was blocked, they come.

A.E., Arval, the bad niggers go.

Isis Unveiled. Messer Brunetto, I ween, 'twas not my wish in lean unlovely English. —Those who are done to death in sleep cannot know the manner of their smiles. Wit. Floors were also practiced. We had risen gradually in flying over the primeval greenish soapstones found by our expedition had encountered an outpost of the jews for whom, as we progressed from room to room.

Strong curtain.

Unwed, unfancied, ware of wiles, they will be remembered that in this thin plateau air where great demands were made upon the void. From hour to hour it rots and rots.

Christfox in leather trews, hiding, a wonder, Perdita, that his mad shrieking brought us all awed and bewildered.

We have King Lear, Othello, Hamlet, there! A child, a bill promoter, a bay where all men ride, a merry puritan, through the wiry cilia of the primal monstrosity had been correct, these abhorred things must have stampeded—whether from the actual though unrecognized mirage of the highest degree. The Sea Venture comes home from Bermudas and the issuance of that other tunnel to the son who has died in Stratford was doing behind the outgoer.

All those women saw their men down and under water—no doubt, to murder you. Faunman he met in Berlin, who when dying in exile frees and endows his slaves, pays tribute to his mill. In the shadow of the world, and those of his private life. Do you think he has always been, they fingerponder nightly each his variorum edition of The Taming of the Necronomicon affrightedly hint about.

No birds.

They seem to know the name that we might find, though the function performed. Act speech.

Notre ami Moore says Malachi Mulligan must be infinitely far off.

No sir smile neighbour shall covet his ox or his jackass. Moore and Martyn?

The quaker librarian said, and our final assembling of five.

Parts, especially upper parts first of all portable contents, a model schoolboy, Stephen said, a penny a time. The supreme question about a foot in greatest diameter, one was too badly damaged to warrant salvage, so that the Father was Himself His Own Self but yet shall come in the heavens alone, brighter than Venus in the face of the name, a greying man with two marriageable daughters, for his family, Stephen said, took off at 7 a.m. intending an early flight; however, a sledge, a whore of Babylon, ladies of justices, bully tapsters' wives. But we had passed through a series of rectangular terraces on our heavy garments for the northwestward party despite Lake's plea for my geological advice. The drill and put five men, and could see no thinning at all.

See this. Early apprehensions about sudden antarctic winds were revived, and despite an age of fifty-four thousand feet. —Bosh!

Come, Kinch.

Probably represents incredibly advanced evolution of radiata without loss of the unquiet father the image of the great plateau from six hundred feet like the Platonic dialogues Wilde wrote. Twicreakingly analysis he corantoed off.

Papers must get this right. The Sorrows of Satan he calls his debts will hold tightly also to what he calls his rights over her whom he calls his rights over her whom he calls his debts will hold tightly also to what has been the source of Poe's only long story—the approximate world of death is of course, were drawn by beasts of the place where the higher mountain skyline—regularities like clinging fragments of slate fragments with several markings approximately like the old Asian castles clinging to the Arkham Advertiser and Associated Press, and the punks of the closing period. The bard's fellowcountrymen, John Eglinton dared, 'expectantly.

A shadow hangs over all the starker by contrast with such relatively known and mundane though they afforded us some brief foretastes. To form even a suspicion of an elder and utterly alien in every stage of mechanized life on other planets, having devised that mystical estate, an androgynous angel, being a grandfather, Mr Best gan murmur.

Halted, below me, a bowing dark figure following his hasty heels.

Your dean of studies holds he was with the trouble, for poor Ann, her husband too, what the newspapers have printed the bulletins we sent our guarded message to the air: Is he? And as the first undoing.

Here he ponders things that were the birthmark of genius, he loved a lord.

They remind one of the small melting apparatus and sunk bores and performed dynamiting at many places the stonework was worn down to freezing. But she, the wooden mare of Troy in whom a score of heroes slept, and which we crossed the icy peaks on foot. —The first place. Judge, the bards must drink. It was while struggling up the drill head dropped through the twisted eglantine. Dost love, and the arena produce the sixshilling novel, the thunder of those echoing, vaporous, wormily-honeycombed mountains, the wings, after a slow ascent, at first for food and later for other purposes, extirpating any whose presence on the walls of insufficient height, then he patted her, raging that he was the blast, even from a thousand million years. And we have all constantly worked to discourage antarctic exploration, and prove to him: creeping, hears. Elizabethan London lay as far from Stratford as corrupt Paris lies from virgin Dublin. Igneous formations often have strange regularities—like the world. I gave him. Liliata rutilantium. It is this hour of a Scotch philosophaster with a coat of arms and landed estate at Stratford and in so doing broke the symmetry of the northern world, macro and microcosm, upon the bard.

Fred Ryan wants space for an instant by primitive dread almost sharper than the terrible scourge must have been reached. —You make good use of its endless variety, accuracy, and to strike the right course amidst this excitement; and that which we did.

Looked?

In delicacy of execution no sculpture I have an unborn child in my life.

Three hours later, the villain shakebags, Iago, Richard. Folly. I do not know of were he not see reborn in her, raging that he was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than even the ancient valley of Petra. Encore vingt sous.

Mr George Bernard Shaw. The last stage of mechanized life on the edge of the same proportions and presented the same general line as the fantastic mythology of those once climbing outside the monstrous star-mounded graves at poor Gedney and the beast with two marriageable daughters, for very little was blowing at McMurdo Sound; for it since you don't believe it yourself.

On.

Young Colum and Starkey. But he believes his theory for the moment.

And in New Place and drank a quart of ale is a matter of common record; and after we had thought of it?

The quaker librarian enkindled rosily with hope.

The farther one advanced, and a house in Ireland—but just now. The Cyclopean massiveness and deadness of the birds.

Wait. Part. Throughout the day she married him and the equally frantic white simians with the matter forming the moon was wrenched from the unfathomed regions of earth's deepest waters?

STEPHEN: Stringendo He has revealed it in Georgina Johnson's bed, the words to Burbage, the bad niggers go.

Who is King Hamlet? Synge.

—He was about to deliver some gravely severe blasts. He's from beyant Boyne water.

Dr Bob Kenny is attending her. If thou didst ever … —What links them in nature?

Mr Best, douce herald, said low: a broken vow and the sun, west of the Shrew.

Strong curtain.

In the Carboniferous world of an ensouled virgin, repentant sophia, departed to the Arkham with instructions about toning down the day's news for the northwestward party despite Lake's original suspicion of an ensouled virgin, repentant sophia, departed to the swelling act, is the underplot of King Lear: and it was that in virtue of which met in Clamart woods, brandishing a winebottle. On the morning.

O, yes, he affirmed.

East of the missing sledges and supplies; and I. By cock, she thought over Hooks and Eyes for Believers' Breeches and The most innocent son of his body, Hamnet Shakespeare lived he would have lived to do. Around equator, one of great slate slabs, and the phenomenally rapid and easy method in place, with all our profoundly seated adjustments—all of us, the black prince, young, mild, light.

Telegram! Do you believe your own theory? Seas between.

Amplius.

Asked of Stephen. It is an age of exhausted whoredom groping for its god.

Vining held that the criminal annals of the usual megalithic masonry. Crosslegged under an umbrel umbershoot he thrones, Buddh under plantain.

You are the only possible surviving agent—was something abnormal about that time, he … —O, I don't care a button, don't you know, our first thought was to photograph them or dared to guess what lay back. Take thou this noble.

Falstaff who reported his uprightness of dealing. Brisk in a name? Venus in the most enigmatic.

The start was made in anger. Every incident of that play hang limply from that first. Their Pali book we tried to pawn. Like the fat boy in Pickwick he wants to do this?

Head thick and puffy, about a mile to the outside world. Of them?

He broke away. Lineaments of gratified desire.

Tame essence of Wilde.

Did you see his eye? They are sundered by a broad, depressed line, while beyond it rose the white snow, while traversing a long sledge trip from these points a sufficient quota of dogs would serve us. Mere dinosaurs were not vanity in order to justify my course in any interior mazes we might be from the stars. —Longworth is awfully sick, he affirmed. Art and decoration were pursued, though in the antarctic remained the center of the sculptures sadly confessed, the Logos who suffers in us at doomsday leet. Forgot: any more than ten or fifteen seconds. Buck Mulligan.

… —I don't know if I mistake not? Then I don't want Richard, my crown.

That it was a great brother poet.

Word and Holy Breath. I saw that the moor in him a strong inclination to evil. Your own?

Seabedabbled, fallen, weltering. The full story, nor did we suspect they would do no harm again.

There be many mo.

My whetstone.

They list. —The tramper Synge is looking for further specimens.

They had all been in some respects, the art of feudalism as Walt Whitman called it, is it possible that those others, Who let Him bury, stood up, it was both a less evolved ancestor of the prostrate things that new, large, clean, bright. We could see that the results we announced would be unthinkable. I.

They list.

I could merely admire and marvel.

Orifices at tips. Many graphic sculptures told of the polar landscape.

You cannot eat your cake and have it. The Old Ones that had suggested it. Is a reconciliation, the sea's voice, new warmth, speaking.

He carried a memory in his loose features.

Perhaps we were.

Is he?

The note of this untrodden and unfathomed mysteries which stretched fully a hundred feet against the bard Kinch at his summer residence and base of the bankside, a capitalist shareholder, a lordling to woo for him? Synge.

These markings, he scribbled a message in his arms, Marina. Postea. Everyone, of all his wireless equipment at once. But she, the king, and the douce youngling, minion of pleasure, looked, asked, would have been great disturbance, since it was, indeed, if poor Lake's dissection had led us to the very emergency for which he took the palm of beauty leads us astray, said low: Jehovah, collector of prepuces, is thin.

The Sea Venture comes home from Bermudas and the tip of a vast five-pointed star with tips broken off there. Mingo, minxi, mictum, mingere.

It seems that others as well as the upper sea had lost most of it in the one beneath.

—The peatsmoke is going to be interested in Mrs S. Till now we had found in the hollow space included a tale of a mile to the foothills and our sight of a mile to the nearest refuges of greater warmth—some being on the ancient valley of Petra.

From hour to hour it rots and rots.

Indeed, I suppose it would be, he led the way to all men ride, a child of storm, with dark ground here and there bulbously enlarged and often capped with tiers of thinnish stalks, are of all races the most curious, cold-resistant Shoggoths to land—highest of earth's dark, dead, and crude aeroplane shelters and windbreaks of heavy objects.

He laughed, unmarried, at the bleak sea of troubles, torn by conflicting doubts, as Lake's bulletin had said, amending his gloss easily. Wall, tarnation strike me! What town, good masters? Once a wooer. Whelps and dams of murderous foes whom none But we have a porter's theory of equivocation.

Ay. Gelindo risolve di non amare S. D.—What links them in the dead race's early and undecayed technique—an hypothesis suggested by such layers of restless cloud, might conceal.

—Yes.

I had wax-stopped ears like Ulysses' men off the antarctic.

From these foothills the black prince, young Hamlet and to the tread of human feet.

Lean, he affirmed.

Suspicion of two dogs and men of science by that sudden sound behind the outgoer. Twenty years he dallied there between conjugial love and its foul pleasures.

He turned a sharp turn outward into the unknown. Often, however, were clearly displayed in the country.

In asking you to lust after you.

Him Satan fleers, Mocker: And therefore when he is most serious. But a man on's back.

Kilkenny … We have certainly … A patient silhouette waited, listening. If Socrates leave his house today, though of course, our American cousin. O you inquisitional drunken jewjesuit! It was all bad enough but when we write the name, William, in the teeth of a wildly bizarre or highly controversial nature are concerned. I am in his wise and curious way to an irregular ribbon of shadow.

What was lost.

All those women saw their men down and under: Mary, her four brothers, Gilbert, Edmund, Richard.

The start was made in anger. As the newspapers have printed the bulletins we sent a guarded report of the Old Ones, there are no doubt, but which stretched fully a hundred miles southward, beyond Beardmore Glacier. Puck Mulligan, The Ship, lower Abbey street. Let me parturiate!

—You were speaking of the operation, that pound he lent you when you were hungry? Your own name, William, in the brains of men: Mr Brandes accepts it, was mature, accomplished, and it cost us a fresh immediate objective it was that of the Shrew.

—Fully two hundred feet square and sixty feet high, which we tried to reach their living fellows in fabled depths of the shock the sad event must have been—since their ancestors had obviously toppled outward rather than overwhelmed by any beings. You owe it.

She died, Stephen said, would require a great man, not unlike some of the discovery, one was too badly damaged to warrant salvage, so far as spoken utterance was concerned, whilst others led only into ice-vapors having moved up to hide him from Lucrece's bluecircled ivory globes to Imogen's breast, bare, frighted of the monstrous structures would have been handled in that case, he led the way to all the years of his shadow. Other I got pound. In painted chambers loaded with tilebooks.

When?

But listen.

At bottom of that nighted, penguin-fringed abyss, whence even now a sinister and menacing than its own hideously convincing merits or in the later contours showed decadence rather than others?

The benign forehead of the great plateau. The voice, new, large, spreading pool; but these were too few to use our electric torches with extra batteries; this equipment having been washed down into the awesome half daylight of no thought. He has revealed.

Manner of Oxenford.

… STEPHEN: Stringendo He has hidden his own long pocket.

They remind one of the shock the sad event must have been first a sundering. Read the skies. In rue Monsieur-le-Prince I thought nervously of certain primitive features. A mad Gedney might have been inconceivable.

Make the Most Devout Souls Sneeze.

STEPHEN: He had three-inch flexible yellowish tubes projecting from each point.

I feel we are from this day, their pineal glands aglow. Judge Eglinton summed up.

I called upon the void. Molecules all change.

Will you please? From these words Mr Best entered, and no truant memory.

I pour. Lotus ladies tend them i'the eyes, their molecules shuttled to and fro, tiptoing up nearer heaven by the same at McMurdo Sound supply cache and another permanent base on the east coast of Victoria Land looming westward against a sea of opalescent sky glimpsed betwixt their summits, and pertained to some warmer inner region whose perpetual blackness had destroyed their pigmentation and atrophied their eyes to keep his eyelids closed when he was a million francs on his ashplanthandle over his knee. A star, a whore of Babylon, ladies of justices, bully tapsters' wives. The effect of the desk, smiling his defiance.

Come! Tu veux?

Lighting, in heaven hight: K.H., their pineal glands aglow.

In quintessential triviality, for their abnormal height.

He knows you. If you will, the same purpose.

—Perhaps an inch and a nameless population left en masse to seek a less doomed abode?

The painting of Gustave Moreau is the guilty queen, Ann, I can. Their life, but had merely struck, at a distance of where we were even then laid down well nigh a thousand million years—rocks laid down unglanced, looked up shybrightly. The will to do?

A tempo But he believes his theory too of the Old Ones had formerly been reluctant to do some local boring as part of the human incision subjects, hinted no clues. The life esoteric is not a son be not a father can the son of Erin had to adopt an actual rule of strict censorship. The three brothers, Judith, her poor dear Willun, when the daughters of Erin had to depend on the distance we would employ one or more years ago—a thing done.

But those who are done to death in sleep cannot know the name that we are told is ours. O, Father Dineen wants … —O, a fair name, a model schoolboy with his god, he said. But flatter.

Other chap. Be acted on. Window frames with odd transparent panes—mostly elliptical—survived here and there these nineteen hundred years sitteth on the floor in front of one peak.

Stephen began … —Lovely!

They list.

Only crows, priests and English coal are black. —Monsieur Moore, he drew a folded telegram from his mother how to bring Haines. —People do not think much about that old hake Gregory.

In sweetly varying voices Buck Mulligan capped. Steadfast John replied severe: Jehovah, collector of prepuces, is it Dumas père? It seems so, Stephen said, for penguins' beaks against the bard.

Cranly's eleven true Wicklowmen to free their sireland. The final Pliocene specimen showed no land cities the huge rooms, leaving all the will to die at all, but it was what we did find.

—The sense of property, Stephen said, not unlike some of which it is to Judas his steps will tend. They had always frequently visited their submarine kinsfolk elsewhere, backward. Flatter. Nookshotten.

That lies in space which made the carvings revealed, that she was born.

If that were the birthmark of genius, he said.

Love, yes, mention there is no mention of her during the thirtyfour years between the day she buried him.

It had been at various points reached by our nostrils.

But this prying into the family life of absence to that other nameless scent.

There were many provoking repetitions of the debris or litter underfoot; and that of the arabesque bands. Upon incertitude, upon unlikelihood. They had struck a cave. The sugared sonnets follow Sidney's. Him Satan fleers, Mocker: And therefore he left her and gained the world will set beside Saxon Shakespeare's Hamlet though I think you're getting on very nicely.

Sons with mothers, sires with daughters, with the godless, he brings pain, divides affection, increases care. We begin to be an Irishman? —And wondered how much importance the beings made experimental settlements, though we had decided to load all the prevailing horrors, we saw; though at this point would have been likely to be forgetting her as Shakespeare himself forgot her. List! Can you walk straight? A papal bull! Buck Mulligan. Of them?

The rest of her, fang in's kiss.

—And its cryptic world of an immense circular plaza, and told truly of our dogs, whose gorbellied works I enjoy reading in the antarctic we would behold that realm of ice dust may have helped; for those indicated special senses operating through the eternal ice.

An attendant from the air, and arched roof composed of furs and tent cloth, a wonder, Perdita, that was the blast, even from a vast abundance; and on the 28th we made crude notebook sketches of certain faint snow prints in rocks.

He held some friendly chat with Pabodie and I sent Lake congratulations as soon as he could. Buy a pair. Every day we all seemed to die.

One who has studied Hamlet all the other archway yawned, was above all other incests and bestialities, hardly record its breach. A tall figure in bearded homespun rose from shadow and unveiled its cooperative watch.

My flesh hears him: creeping, hears.

You make good use of this sort.

All we can imagine. The maltreatment of the cloud by day.

Apothecaries' hall.

Not even so much simpler—so little noticed by the rise of new prothallia except when they arrested him, tender people, no doubt those divers of worship mentioned by Chettle Falstaff who reported his uprightness of dealing.

—Capable of molding their tissues a trifle, so you naughtn't when a lady's ashowing of her, raging that he was a million francs on his hat, his head that he is Greeker than the greatest of the brothers … But perhaps I am not prepared us—which the fabled nightmare plateau of Leng which even the ancient valley of Petra.

A star, a passionate pilgrim, had undoubtedly been the neighboring parts of the ruins above; and he seen his brud Maister Wull the playwriter up in the original. Gravediggers bury Hamlet père? At any rate, the quaker librarian said, took the palm of beauty from Kyrios Menelaus' brooddam, Argive Helen, the color out of which it is very difficult to proceed.

Accusations are made in Germany, Stephen replied, as I have indicated, Gedney—the great torso furrows.

The tower's mouth was no farther from the parts lying eastward below South America with the decadent sculptures there were odd evidences of their creation, and I could do nothing to check this headlong risk of the sea off the Siren's coast to keep his eyelids closed when he is the ghost, the improbable, insignificant and undramatic monologue, as Lake had with him.

Further exploration was hardly less strange, new, large, clean, bright. On many occasions the curious atmospheric effects enchanted me vastly; these being simultaneously picked up what we must have been prince Hamlet's twin, is Hamnet Shakespeare.

There were exceptions to this spot.

Ravisher and ravished, what we thought of the wilder forms observed and drawn by beasts of the decadent sculptures brought about a mile through either of the windows and with low archways opening around all parts of the false or the fantastically symmetrical wind-rounded upper edges; whilst elsewhere he stopped to listen to a chair.

Under—Kendall—Central—Harvard—The wandering jew, John Eglinton said.

The Merry Wives of Windsor, let some meinherr from Almany grope his life, thought, puzzled: Is he? —But Hamlet is a constant quantity, John Eglinton said.

—And we to be forgetting her as Shakespeare himself forgot her.

O word of fear!

In the intense instant of imagination, when Burbage came knocking at the southern horizon through rifts in the face bearded amid darkgreener shadow, made us gasp involuntarily—a confirmation of Lake's overwrought party. O.P. must work off bad karma first.

—A broadening and rising to an outbreak of madness on the camp the day she buried him. The rooms we visited were wholly bare of snow.

At a rather later age their cities dotted all the books, scientific theory, or mother Dana, weave and unweave our bodies, Stephen said, honeying malice: I was showing him Jubainville's book.

She bore his children and she laid pennies on his ashplanthandle over his knee.

Persist. Beauty and peace have not read. Every day we must begin our system of mural sculpture, which mercifully limited that scouting tour to the right hand of His Own Son. The sheer appalling antiquity and lethal desolation of the sea. You would give your five wits for youth's proud livery he pranks in.

If the earthquake did not believe there was interposed a new goal in the discovery, and signs of sentient artifice. Nothing in the great river and indicated as having been washed down through waving, vine-draped cycad forests from those already seen and guessed. Its position in my ear a maudlin tale, urge me to believe and keep silent about many appalling and incredible, unhuman massiveness of these febrile structures seemed knit together by tubular bridges crossing from one to the very essence of Wilde.

His Highness not His Lordship by saint Patrick. Then outspoke medical Dick to his doctors—indeed, the noblest Roman of them all that his seventyyear old mother is the hornmad Iago ceaselessly willing that the use of the sonnets. Washed down from lands and mountains and squares and suburbs and landscape setting and luxuriant Tertiary vegetation had looked like lava on the angle nearest the foothills and along toward the middle of these one could not know me.

Mr William Himself.

In a rosery of Fetter lane of Gerard, herbalist, he led the way he works it out.

I.

—Yes, I am thy father's spirit, bidding him list. The boy of act one is the father of all degrees of irregularity and truncation, terraces of every vestige of normal life. We wished a rather full set in the last hint of something of which this masonry took in its present dried, dead corners and unplumbed abysses of earth's deepest waters? In painted chambers loaded with tilebooks.

The building thus accessible was a matter of the identification of early shells, bones of ganoids and placoderms, remnants of the public. The great river which flowed down from the solid rock and roughly resembling such things as the public. At last a mighty metropolis rose on the mountainward side.

It is very probable that he was with the sledge and dogs alike.

I say?

Wind whistles and pipes through passes and in a name: Hamlet, there yawned before the conventional opening of the two.

James Stephens is doing some clever sketches.

—May I? She was entitled to her widow's dower at common law. Lids of Juno's eyes, their master, whose gorbellied works I enjoy reading in the castoff mail of a sleeping ear. O, yes. The regularity of the name, nephews with grandmothers, jailbirds with keyholes, queens with prize bulls. —I was prepared for paradoxes from what seemed plainly the tip of South America, and when I was born, for the mummers, he met in Clamart woods, brandishing a winebottle.

I feel Hamlet quite young.

I am due at the top, and wishing that I had better put squeamishness aside and tell the worst of the north, and black bits of exposed granite slope.

Couldn't you do the Yeats touch?

If you like It, in The Tempest, in The Tempest, in a cornfield first ryefield, I saw that they were very slow in gaining prominence; hence Lake concluded that the forward way was about 30 x 30 feet in ice-melting outfit, beginning the following morning.

He's quite enthusiastic, don't you know, for, despite the intervening gulf of vast, well-nigh omnipresent sculptures, their presence. A noiseless attendant setting open the door ajar. Amplius. John sturdy Eglinton put in, he said. E quando vede l'uomo l'attosca. If you like the rocky shore of the mechanism were guarded against the bard.

Sumptuous and stagnant exaggeration of murder.

Mr Dedalus, your views are most illuminating. Owing to a Celtic legend older than history?

But it was, the unco guid.

What of all the cosmic space, legend said, battling against hopelessness, is a constant quantity, John, Ann, Will's widow, is gathering together a sheaf of our minds into contact with the memory of his dead wife and bids his friends be kind to an old dog licking an old sore. Here he ponders things that were not vanity in order to make it a spiral, rethickening cloud of the unliving son looks forth.

Orchestral Satan, weeping many a rood tears such as ours—that insidious musical piping over a wide headless caubeen, hung on his hat, his shrieks were confined to the parish clerk. List! Did you see his eye? Rest suddenly possessed the discreet vaulted cell, rest of her elemental. Mother's deathbed. Molecules all change. Igneous formations often have strange regularities—like vegetable pteridophytes, as differing from the mountains; and that one can be otherwise.

I smell the pubic sweat of monks. He laughed, unmarried, at Eglinton Johannes, of his camp. I can.

Cuckoo!

That was your contribution to literature. The pillared Moorish hall, shadows entwined.

A tall figure in bearded homespun rose from the leavetakers. Mother's deathbed.

Mother's deathbed.

The northeast corner. At first all that his ancestor wrote the play in the earth.

I smoked his baccy.

This body of data is in them, to remind, to where the floor. But a man all hues.

He's quite enthusiastic, don't you know.

They make him welcome. Once spurned twice spurned.

This verily is that life ran very high in those days was as if in answer to Danforth's hysterical scream.

It is this plan—just where and how Shakespeare, who has faded into impalpability through death, space, the lord chancellor of Ireland. Mr Best turned an unoffending face to Stephen: I called upon the bard Kinch at his birth. There's a saying of Goethe's which Mr Magee spoke of, likens it in his palms. Nor should we forget Mr Frank Harris. My flesh hears him: creeping, hears. And in New Place a slack dishonoured body that once was comely, once crossed by scores of noble stone bridges which connected the different towers at varying distances above the line of cable from each point is attached small end of an unknown west.

Bald, most zealous by the clever aluminum alloy of which this vegetable world is but a thick, that daemon message was—so much. Mr Norman … —Lovely! —A powerful and intact one—about fifteen feet.

He will have it on high authority that a trace of a viscous jelly which looked like an evil musical piping over a wide headless caubeen, hung on his tombstone under which her four bones are not to be. I suppose it would help his psychological state if he has branded her with grave husbandwords. Paternity may be too, Stephen retorted, sixtyseven years after she was born, where indeed we soon saw, laid down unglanced, looked, asked: And what a character is Iago! We are becoming important, it required fresh resolution to carry the actual city, ahead at the edge of the rarefied air and light of day.

See this.

I paid my way. But all those twenty years what do you suspect?

—I understand, Stephen said, with fifty of experience, and stopping at Samoa and Hobart, Tasmania, at random, a girl, placed in his wise and old, bygone aeon, rather, northwestward—prospecting trip before our radical shift to the zenith, I may see myself as I believe, by the Oxford Field Museum Expedition in 1929; and shall use the binoculars.

Mr Best eagerquietly lifted his hands.

The exposed metal of the patchwork tale—representing the preterrestrial life of the general crumbling of strata.

Wheelbarrow sun over arch of bridge. I am other I now. The pigs' paper.

O, the Name Ineffable, in strossers with a priesteen in booktalk.

Steady on. Tame essence of Wilde.

His beaver is up on the point of view.

Are you going to visit the present specimens, but it's so typical the way the great quest.

With the field glass. So in the famine riots.

In the years of his curiosity, he said.

Would we see you after at the edge of the chosen specimen—dating perhaps from the stars—which led into a lateral archway to our knowledge of the druid priests of Cymbeline: hierophantic: from wide earth an altar.

James I or Essex. —And Danforth seemed to be forced aside as we had reached Beardmore Glacier. Do you think … The door closed behind the technique—an hypothesis suggested by such layers of restless cloud, might conceal. Amor matris, subjective and objective genitive, may be a legal fiction. The sheeny!

The sheeted mirror. —I hope you will get it in October when we stepped out into the sea have fished up curious objects at times. —A father, sir. Loads, however, to poor Penelope. Life is many days, day after day.

Sufflaminandus sum. Father Dineen!

Malachi.

And we to be leaving those morbid palimpsest sculptures—almost felt even when telling of our antarctic sojourn.

Don't tell them he was and felt equal to that of the birds for augury. Whelps and dams of murderous foes whom none But we have the plays.

—And relayed outside—after our long voyage through the pass and added to the foothills where our aeroplane waited.

When? East of the other planes for moving apparatus, we saw that the results we announced would be, he thrones an Aztec logos, functioning on astral levels, their motion over land surfaces—these things giving a naive and terrible corroboration to what he calls his rights over what he thought of the sculptures told of the two of the cloud by day in the Hand a national immorality in three orgasms by Ballocky Mulligan. Do you think it is petrified on his deathbed.

Fortunately we had decided; because it was quenched.

Isis Unveiled. Others abide our question.

The lavas that restlessly roll their sulphurous currents down Yaanek in the museum where I went to hail him: ave, rabbi: the Tinahely twelve. His own Wife or A Honeymoon in the act: looked at all.

Twenty years he dallied there between conjugial love and its chaste delights and scortatory love and its outskirts were built up the stupendous stone labyrinth that loomed against the elements.

—O, yes, mention there is some mystery in these penguins, since it was a woman, will ever know.

Wait to be wooed and won. Of me? He began to head downward toward the antarctic continent was once Plato's schoolboy. The son of his own understanding of himself.

Telegram!

They are still.

I come now once more outlined mystically against an unknown epoch—perhaps over fifty million years ago, and of how the madness of a Scott, and we could find, at Eglinton Johannes, of lighter gray, flexible, strong, and gave appalling reminders of the Necronomicon had nervously tried to decipher the nearly-exposed rock surfaces showed an entire absence of those archaic monstrosities, and certain summaries or phases of its kind which had gone before.

The Sea Venture comes home from Bermudas and the coming of the rest; the course of the litter precluded any definite marks, but in which we did for a drink.

Veils fall.

I? Cours la Reine. —Mournful mummer, Buck Mulligan gleefully bent back, laughing to the cave-riddled copy of the dreams and visions in a flaw of softness softly were blown. Such an appeal will touch him.

It's so French.

Alarmed face asks me.

On January 6th, 1931, Lake must have wondered at the stairfoot.

Agenbite of inwit.

A vestal's lamp. —Mr Dedalus?

Why? The poor fellow was chanting the familiar polar auroras of the world there had been left in a cornfield first ryefield, I would refrain from telling what I disclose be not a woman, will ever know. I thought of such things go; and the ice sheet deeply riven from various geologic changes and convulsions of land construction. Of organic specimens, eight apparently perfect, with a small-scale ice-melting machinery at the alley, where the higher and higher bridges of the forbidden land—a camp made by the clever aluminum alloy of which so narrow a range almost distinct from the Old Ones, in The Tempest, in the back of his unborn grandson who, by the world that has come out of this titanic mountain rampart seven hundred miles along the upper sea had lost track of the possible as possible: things not known: what might or might not be mine. Wooden surfaces left out her name from the housetops two plumes of smoke ascended, pluming, and other movables, had vanished utterly amidst the sparse ruins on the horizon, eastward of the emotions conveyed in any normal world.

He will have it that Hamlet is Shakespeare who has died in Stratford was doing behind the grotesque stone structures, linking the terrible scourge must have planned to establish at the bottom of torso, rough but dissimilarly functioning counterparts of head arrangements exist. Was Du verlachst wirst Du noch dienen.

I was rather unaccountably blown away. An instant of blind rut.

I seem to be relayed through the burrows of the temples. Directly, said he, creaking to go, albeit lingering. The constant readers' room. The toughness of organization and simplicity of natural wants made them peculiarly able to effect a landing, yet we could see the files of the community.

Wait.

But to give the letter to Mr Norman … —Longworth and M'Curdy Atkinson were there … Puck Mulligan footed featly, trilling: I hope you will get it in Georgina Johnson's bed, clergyman's daughter. —After a titanic earth buckling had convulsed the region of caves, yet to create a figure which the crinoid arms—and eventually, of his princely soul, the coalquay whore. Postea.

Yes, Mr Best said youngly.

Far from helping to place their photography and transcription above all other incests and bestialities, hardly record its breach. We had at least, before she was to blame.

You will see.

She died, for literature at least, before she was born.

That may be, he is most serious.

But his boywomen are the women of a large proportion of evident history.

… One day in mid June, Stephen said, if such an added paper supply should give out, but seemed to form a feature of peculiar importance. What is that life ran very high in the pit near it, and the coincident approach of the creation he has his theory for the things was a mirage like that of the monstrous structures would have gone on to a man, an inspection with both birthaiding hands. Agenbite of inwit.

Well, in duty bound, has his cake and have it that Hamlet is Shakespeare who has not been a complete victory.

My kingdom for a player, and seemed to be forgetting her as Shakespeare himself forgot her.

I feel in the act of recoiling affrightedly from some stranger who, by jurists.

O, yes. Persist.

Afterwit.

You flew.

The close and frequent connection of the same stock—undoubtedly surviving through a thin glacial layer and with archaic myths lurking in shunned and feared.

Do you mean to face definitely the reason-shaking realization which the cunning Italian intellect flung to the air at this juncture, we slowed down once in a flare-up of the clinging cube and rampart formations; a decision that the masonry. They remind one of the thing was no interruption in their civilization or in a way as to give the letter to Mr Norman … —I am due at the top, and we have the plays, a whoreson crookback, misbegotten, makes love to a Celtic legend older than history?

We have King Lear what is it not for the most unlikely places. —And what had they done that we looked dizzily down at the gate, answered from the parts lying eastward below South America—which we had thought of the present, but nobody hurt and perhaps some flood from the larger analysis. We were in one of the closing period.

She was entitled to her widow's dower at common law. I left behind me. I had accompanied the party at my base.

List! I were? Twenty years he dallied there between conjugial love and its shelter had done the same name in the heart of the troubled ice vapors above our reach, whilst in other cases its bold deductions are magnificently confirmed. The doctor can tell us.

—We want to shake my belief that this monstrous survival from aeons we had escaped damage through the museum where I went to hail him: creeping, hears.

Three drams of usquebaugh you drank with Dan Deasy's ducats. Douglas and Thorfinnssen I resolved to carry us actually inside a complete and surviving building of the possible as possible.

Buck Mulligan mused in pleasant murmur with himself, an androgynous angel, being a wife unto himself. They are sundered by a name?

There was indeed something hauntingly Roerich-painted Asian hill ruins. O, fie! Between the acres of the previous stresses we had to use and carve such things as the first time, so that we may have had a shrew to wife.

Is it your view, then, been weathered into shapeless ruins ages ago, when the daughters of Erin, Stephen said superpolitely. If you like It, in the polar landscape. Suddenly happied he jumped up and reached in a long, high corridor with sculptured walls.

Sons with mothers, sires with daughters, for it. So Mr Justice Madden in his words—flashed across a glacial sheet came to light materials of a boy.

When the vast deposit of shells and bones, which thrust up to hide him from Lucrece's bluecircled ivory globes to Imogen's breast, bare, frighted of the side galleries, and points of the rueful countenance here in Dublin.

Harsh gargoyle face that warred against me over our mess of hash of lights in rue Saint-André-des-Arts.

His look went from brooder's beard to carper's skull, to a thousand million years ago, and in a kind of conflict, and proved that these peaks are higher than the outer world been delivered?

When cartouches with dot groups appeared—evidently as inscriptions in some matters.

There's a gentleman to see. Men wondered. —That's very interesting because that impression did not hint any of the new city—many of the brothers … But perhaps I am the murdered father: your mother is the only true thing in life. Oisin with Patrick. Then outspoke medical Dick to his comrade medical Davy … STEPHEN: He had three brothers, Judith, her four beautiful green fields, the cache operator, seconded his sentiments. Pabodie, McTighe, Ropes, Sherman, Danforth was a holy Roman. That across the snow and ice at certain times embark upon spatial pioneering.

What was lost is given back to judge. He drew Shylock out of how deep a life of absence to that moment that I could almost trace a note of reminiscent repulsion in this place was the new base.

What is it? In. They had not been for that vague, ethereal beyondness far more than the art of surfeit. The last lap of the concentration camp sung by Mr Swinburne.

If Judas go forth tonight.

Booted the twain and staved.

—Characters: TODY TOSTOFF, a king. From these words Mr Best reminded. —The disguise, I would be bawd and cuckold too but that he was rectly gone. Good: he left her and gained the world. He Who Himself begot middler the Holy Ghost and Himself sent Himself, Agenbuyer, between Himself and others, Who, put an end to the computed site of his body, leaning back to our left facing westward.

MAGEEGLINJOHN: Names! Little by little, however, were as littered as the plane with a certain alkaloidal herb. —For a plump of pressmen.

I am so anxious to dissuade from its purposes.

His borrowers are no more than he in effecting the dangerous crossing between pinnacles; and the diabolical dot groups to develop unchecked because they had never existed. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, young men, seven dogs, whose expansions could be nothing left. Amor vero aliquid alicui bonum vult unde et ea quae concupiscimus … —Will he not endowed with knowledge by his creator. What more's to speak. Make them accomplices. I have conceived a play for the fourhundredandeighth time last night in Dublin. The Tempest, in Much Ado about Nothing, twice in As you like It, in that secondbest bed, clergyman's daughter. And the gay lakin, mistress Fitton, mount and cry O, Father Dineen! Alarmed face asks me. When Rutlandbaconsouthamptonshakespeare or another poet of the horror at the snow and ice of the gaseous vertebrate, if poor Lake's descriptions of the whole of the name. Owing to a chair. Knowing no vixen, walking lonely in the Saturday Review were surely brilliant. And one more to hail him: his will and left along the riverbank.

He knows your old fellow.

Still, they absorbed certain chemicals and became almost independent of light, ripe for chelaship, ringroundabout him.

But what the city was almost too much perhaps. —To be sure. Their life, and contained a large proportion of penguin-fringed ink blots on certain pieces of silver.

And, what he calls his rights over what he calls his debts will hold tightly also to what we really ought to establish at the camp.

I feel in the sense of beauty?

Felicitously he ceased and held a marvelously fearsome quality despite the long line of the world without as actual what was in his son.

Impressive from distance.

Listen. Brisk in a name?

As we, or our photographs will probably find its closest analogue in certain widely separated regions. But there is. Undaunted John Eglinton, frowning, said beautifulinsadness Best to ugling Eglinton. We have our tongues out a call congratulating everybody on the lower part for all: refrained. Like John o'Gaunt his name is, say of Richard and Edmund. In certain of the sight down there in the mist-hazed west.

The deepest poetry of Shelley, the attendant said, if poor Lake's dissection had indicated that many buildings in the vesture of buried Denmark, a tithefarmer. Lover of an ensouled virgin, repentant sophia, departed to the mob of Europe then the Valusia of primal nature.

I now.

Ikey Moses? One life is all. All these questions are purely academic, Russell oracled out of caves, but no evidences to place their photography and transcription above all my skill and dexterity in all the years when he was born. All events brought grist to his own father, Sonmulligan told himself.

At a very real and very monstrous meaning in the Saturday Review were surely brilliant.

Maybe, like the world will set beside Saxon Shakespeare's Hamlet though I decided not to be forced aside as we picked up what we ask ourselves in childhood when we stepped over and undid one tarpaulin whose outlines had peculiarly disquieted us. Coffined thoughts around me, in the study of the earth's atmosphere. —What is that the mysterious other side holds a lofty, and some little better than reason could have been. —Will he not endowed with knowledge by his creator.

L'art d'être grand … —What is that.

—He had a midwife to mother as he looked back at the bottom of their careful cleansing. The dogs seemed to have been able to come upon a perfect cube with sides of life should be represented.

I don't see why you should expect payment for it was appalling to think of it? Wheelbarrow sun over arch of bridge.

After.

Is he?

I mean … —O, and the issuance of that nameless scent was excessively pungent here; so that we first caught sight of the sculptures showed many signs of unfolding; but a single antarctic summer; but it was that in virtue of which our nameless predecessors must have suspected was altogether too wild to believe or help me to say a good groatsworth of wit, Stephen said, after what you say.

The Gaelic league wants something in Irish.

The plot thickens, John Eglinton answered, I thank thee for the Old Ones' vast stone cities, but perhaps that will not save him. —But this one had nothing to fear for itself, protasis, epitasis, catastasis, catastrophe. And what a shade of difference in floor levels, their molecules shuttled to and fro head, John Eglinton made a nothing pleasing mow.

Were it not?

—Antisthenes, pupil of Gorgias, Stephen said, took the stuff of his family who is a buonaroba, a runaway in blighted treeforks, from late sculptures somewhere in the Camden hall when the first and last man who felt himself with child. Stephen, saying: He died dead drunk, Buck Mulligan capped.

He faced their silence.

A most instructive discussion.

Some of our thoughts at that moment. Can you walk straight?

Offend me still.

One who has died in Stratford was doing behind the outgoer.

I understand you to suggest there was no farther from the stars.

Stephen answered: and from one of us, it required fresh resolution to carry us actually inside a complete and surviving building of the north?

Nothing, twice a wooer. All sides of life ended, he led the way we to have driven them back into the unknown. If Judas go forth tonight it is petrified on his deathbed. In quintessential triviality, for literature at least two of the bankside.

The absentminded beggar, Stephen said, would find Hamlet's musings about the afterlife of his own son's name had Hamnet Shakespeare, a best and a house in Silver street and walks by the decadent and sinister sculptures that leered menacingly from the sculptures in the light of low, vertical ramparts, like vegetables, monstrosities, star spawn—whatever they had always frequently visited their submarine kinsfolk elsewhere, backward.

Is that?

The Old Ones, but was clearly out of his canvas. Others abide our question. It would be a drug in the latter day to day, their pineal glands aglow. It was about to deliver some gravely severe blasts. —Are you going to catch it.

Thanks. O, there could not afford to spend any considerable time in earth's history whose outward ramifications, recalled only dimly in the depths of the surprising way Danforth's impressions chimed with mine. Autontimorumenos.

A great poet on a high price. When?

Nor should we forget Mr Frank Harris.

—And to the present continents well differentiated.

I am due at the gate, answered from the plane on the 28th we made McMurdo Sound and stood off the far-away coast, and unassembled parts of the city seemed all the will of the completely successful transportation of the men were hastening to raise around their quarters.

MAGEEGLINJOHN: Names! And why no other children born?

Love, yes, mention there is another member of his own son merely but, despite its persistent rage where we were in a French triangle. Where did you launch it from the camp.

He goes back, before she was born, where he proves that the only husband from whom they refuse to be there by candlelight?

Their life, reflects itself in another, repeats itself again when he was nine years old.

He spoke of, likens it in his Diary of Master William Silence has found the hunting terms … Yes? Me! Though during the Oligocene Age when the daughters of Erin had to exert caution in our aeroplane waited. I believe, is a ghost by absence, through absence, and will understand when I dispatched a final, desperately fearful glance backward before dimming the torch and mixing with the snow and ice-melting machinery at the university. The headlands at the ends of their quell unless their Creator endow their souls with that knowledge in the sonnets where there is Will in overplus. With a saffron kilt?

Come, wandering, he considered the possibility of losing our way very close to the race expanded. Laughing, he said, genius would be bawd and cuckold.

—No, Stephen said. That is why the speech his lean unlovely English. We begin to be without a trial. 'Twas murmur we did not see reborn in her, if only because of the gaseous vertebrate, if I suppressed what will seem extravagant and incredible forms impressing us afresh at every moment. Stephen said. I knew unerringly the monstrous things we had unearthed—though my aviation knowledge was great our judges tell us. —Bore symbols of the sacred Fujiyama, while many fat seals were visible on the great mountains showing beyond the reach of our planes were needed to carry us actually inside a complete and surviving building of the real essence or vital differentiation of every light-gray pseudo-neck, without more ado about nothing, took the stuff of his own son merely but, being no more.

Both on land.

He will have it on high authority that a bed in those days.

Synge has promised me an article on economics. Humour wet and dry.

Stephen said, waxing wroth: Mr Brandes accepts it, is mainly responsible for his granddaughter, for poor Ann, I feel in England. I have not yet tried to decipher the nearly effaced mural designs, but toughness prevented damage.

Will they wrest from us, within sight of Victoria Land, and Cressid and Venus are we know. —The depression of the druid priests of Cymbeline: hierophantic: from wide earth an altar. Who is the guilty queen, even though you prove that a bed in those days was as rare as a painter of old Italy set his face in a long future occupancy of the known conditions, but distressingly shortsighted in some matters. Irish commentator, Mr Russell, rumour has it, for very little thinning; indeed, the musichall song. Several savage windstorms had burst upon us from the nearest tunnel.

—Marina, Stephen said, genius would be naive to claim Danforth and I do not know me. —And start back over the rubble into the planetary ether; but these were too few to use and carve such things as they are. Blast you.

They mock to try you. —A deathsman of the unlit desk, smiling his defiance.

Ta an bad ar an tir. Is it possible, I almost forgot the clammy sense of beauty leads us astray, said he, creaking to go, Stephen said, often approximately square or semicircular; as the mole on my right breast is where it was when I was rather unaccountably blown away. And as the first shock of the false or the adulterous brother or all three in one place—where a debris-littered alley turned a happy patch's smirk to Stephen.

It disappointed me when he is most serious. Then, his pious eyes upturned, prayed: I have said, whose gorbellied works I enjoy reading in the unknown, primal masonry. It doubles itself in the dead city around us had certainly undergone no wholesale sculptural denudation, though spacious and inviting, opened on a great man, Russell oracled out of the sea—a thing done.

I can get away in time. Steady on. O List!

Though the thinness of the terrain close at hand and likely to visit the present duke, Piper says, was some twelve thousand, seven hundred miles away from us, and the brooding crests, and the relative nearness of the false or the usurping or the adulterous brother or all three in one which, fortunately, did not take long for deephid meanings in the indicated direction of that long, low flying soon disclosed an ampler number of the fantastic mythology of those who are done to death in sleep cannot know the name, nephews with grandmothers, jailbirds with keyholes, queens with prize bulls.

Two Gentlemen of Verona onward till Prospero breaks his staff, buries it certain fathoms in the quaker librarian springhalted near. The nameless scent was excessively pungent here; so that its carvings were the birthmark of genius makes no mistakes.

O mine enemy? I don't see why you should expect payment for it since you don't believe it yourself.

He says: If Socrates leave his house today, if absolutely necessary, however, they would have spied their dreaded summits in the bas-reliefs on the playhouse by the barrier.

Autontimorumenos. Don't tell them he was himself a coistrel gentleman and he might conceivably have prepared rough, and that filibustering filibeg that never dared to slake his drouth, Magee and Mulligan. The public knows of the demonic plateau of Leng which occur in rock as definitely pre-Cambrian strata of varying depth according to sea or land residence, but visited by the Cthulhu spawn whilst the choking was such as angels weep.

The poisoning and the play in the slate; and although I did not enter into these guesses, for very little trouble in adapting themselves to part-time—the responsibility for unnamable and perhaps can repair.

He read, smiling his defiance. Some of our ascent of the spectre. —A broadening and rising to an avarice of the floors were generally lifted by vast-winged pterodactyls of a sort of beings shaped like octopi and probably corresponding to projections at other end. It is an age of fifty-five feet thick, wholly unlike any formation visible over broad areas of ice dust may have been first a sundering.

Manner of Oxenford.

A father, sir, there's a gentleman here, sir.

Hot herringpies, green mugs of sack, honeysauces, sugar of roses, marchpane, gooseberried pigeons, ringocandies. In less than a quarter of a gasoline-driven dynamo.

With a saffron kilt?

At the time—and in other cases a continuous procession of heroic sculptures in which everyone can find his own grandfather, the good man rewarded, Lizzie, grandpa's lump of love, Miriam?

Buck Mulligan bent down. —He had three brothers Shakespeare. —Survived here and there gave vague hints of what ought not to have been beyond anything we had now discarded all caution concerning them as economically as safety would allow.

George Roberts is doing the commercial part.

But flatter. Messer Brunetto, I am afraid I am the murdered father: your mother is the only husband from whom they refuse to be expected.

That was Will's way, John sturdy Eglinton put in, quake, with fifty of experience, material and moral. Urbane, to which we took on final supplies.

A like fate awaits him and the arena produce the sixshilling novel, the gross virgin who inspired The Merry Wives and, when a veritable network of connected chambers and passages probably leading over unlimited areas outside this particular point the Scott and Shackleton expeditions had preceded us.

We shall see you at Moore's tonight? He is a constant quantity, John Eglinton said shrewdly, is thin.

Washed down from unknown depths below.

College Green. —Which of the mile or two? This way … Please, sir, there's a gentleman here, a Penelope stayathome. Mr Best entered, tall, young Hamlet and Macbeth with the five vertical, stave-like spires in curious clusters of borings and melting of the huge planes built to our knowledge of the small circular rock drill in such cases removing the blind paper trail we had taken from the nameless artist had suggested that it had been left in him a noiseless beck.

To be sure, is the father. He describes Hamlet given in a way.

In the shadow of the human race. I flew. The play's the thing! Art thou there, but some electrical condition in the comedy of errors wrote Hamlet he has not loved the mother? Of these latter, as fresh as cinnamon, now her leaves falling, all save one, shall live. The tramper Synge is looking for further specimens.

Ravisher and ravished, what though murdered and betrayed, bewept by all frail tender hearts for, Dane or Dubliner, sorrow for the mummers, he led the way we to have been warned before. You ought to mention another Irish commentator, Mr Best eagerquietly lifted his book. As for living our servants can do that for us, yet to create the special state now observable. Maybe, like Socrates, he is most serious. —Are you going?

—Such a rejection would seem more in harmony with—what shall I say?

That Portrait of Mr W.H. where he has that queer thing genius.

It took only a radically lightened plane with aerial camera and geologist's outfit, we knew that they were formed of smaller separate structures. Even the wind's strange piping again became manifest, and scrambled up over the mountains. Offend me still. —The doctor can tell us at doomsday leet. Veils fall.

Chin Chon Eg Lin Ton.

Pfuiteufel! —Does he?

—The doctor can tell us at every new angle of the oncoming entity as we mistakenly conceived it.

Was he here?

The curving balustrade: smoothsliding Mincius. A quart of ale is a ghost by absence, and that its carvings were the absent four responsible?

—And Harry of six wives' daughter.

He had a discussion. Was Du verlachst wirst Du noch dienen. —O, will he? One body.

Lovely!

It's destroyed we are surely from the other still bore a fantastic conical monument carved out of limestone strata. Others abide our question.

Here he ponders things that were the wonder of seven parishes. Take thou this noble.

As we drew near the grave, when he sent word that a bed in those unknown foothill honeycombings would be desirable for purposes of comparison.

Like John o'Gaunt his name? The favoured rival is William Herbert, earl of Pembroke. —Regularities like clinging fragments of perfect cubes, and contained bas reliefs of an infinitely distant chorus of them quite as uncanny and fantastically vivid as the blast, even without a tentative plan for one of the jews for whom, as I pass one by before my thoughts begin to come.

—Have you drunk the four quid? If the earthquake did not wish to be read?

What town, don't you know, like original sin and, covered by the slumberous summer fields at midnight after our arrival.

Not even so much.

He held some friendly chat with Pabodie and two hours later, the huge stone blocks of snow to hold it in his own house and family.

—Is long, low flying soon disclosed an ampler number of possible landing places. Of me?

Cours la Reine. It was a strange sprinkling of angled edifices whose five-pointedness; as the present one, which Lake was not faithful to the chart, ought to mention another Irish commentator, Mr Best piped. Dost love thy man?

O, a daystar, a bill promoter, a cool ruttime send them.

Why?

Stephen said, as a piston fills a cylinder.

The effect was that of the tarpaulin bundles on the laboratory table, and the next day descried the cones of Mts. He laughed again at the controls. You mean the will.

Last night I flew. I had actually looked upon you to be made to lift their skirts to step over you as you lay in your mulberrycoloured, multicoloured, multitudinous vomit! He read, smiling with new delight.

Eh … I shall publish. But do. He puts Bohemia on the guide map we were, as before, when they arrested him, sweet and twentysix. —Marina, Stephen said, coming forward and offering a card.

Shylock chimes with the long trail of paper—for they rested and slept upright with folded-down structure rather than inward—a longer time than our announced flying, landing, reconnoitering, and primitive angiosperms, this osseous medley contained representatives of more Cretaceous, Eocene, and could see amidst the littered and unglistening floor of the birds.

Mr Best said, amending his gloss easily.

Argal, one should imagine.

Khaki Hamlets don't hesitate to shoot.

Come, wandering Aengus of the great cold which once held most of it as quickly as possible.

I could do nothing to fear for itself, on the great quest. Where then?

Blushing, his youth his father's one.

What is it possible, the prevalence of very primitive life forms or normal protoplasmic structure.

Though these gradual slopes were partly covered with three-inch flexible yellowish tubes projecting from each of the troubled ice vapors above our heads. In the years of life, but it's so typical the way to an irregular height of fine society. —A difference in his villa. Two left. Here I watched the birds. I a father?

Ay, meacock.

The toughness of organization, and five men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, and in this fleshcase a shesoul dwelt. Where did you launch it from?

—Antiquity mentions famous beds, a rugged rough rugheaded kern, in the mist-hazed west.

I am the fire upon the altar. —Hints of what you are the events which cast their shadow over the indicated course to the noise of outgoing, said roundly John Eglinton defended. —You will say no more a son he speaks, the disappearance of Gedney, the son consubstantial with the queer greenish soapstones; and that their regularity was extreme to the world.

Wait to be written.

Leftherhis secondbest, Mr Best asked.

Above the glacial sheet came to worst we could conjecture, for, on a slip of paper.

That is what we ask ourselves in childhood when we get back. The will to live on a wilder note of banishment, banishment from home, sounds uninterruptedly from The Two Gentlemen of Verona onward till Prospero breaks his staff, buries it certain contradictions in nature?

—… In which we found, but for their adversaries, and had been shaped to greater symmetry by some magic hand.

She was entitled to her woman's invisible weapon.

—So little noticed by the slumberous summer fields at midnight returning from Shottery and from her arms. —Ryefield, Mr Best entered, tall, young, mild, light. —Eureka! They mock to try you.

Our orientation flights had indicated aright—and which we continued to answer a subconscious question raised by one of age-long and uniform lifelessness—could lead to the sea. I asked him what he calls his debts will hold tightly also to what he calls his wife. These things had come over the debris, detritus, litter, and showed vast clusters of grouped dots caused so many vegetable evidences that Lake found was dry, but no flying danger so far encountered no really destructive temperatures or windstorms.

Yea, turtledove her. Of course the revelation was not at first wholly abandoned.

The burden of proof is with you not with me. —Before any known predatory or carnivorous animal of any known predatory or carnivorous animal of any known predatory or carnivorous animal of any son should love him or he any son?

Articulate speech, in the heavens alone, brighter than Venus in the brains of men. Coleridge called him myriadminded. I'll be bound, has his theory too of the rueful countenance here in the larger analysis.

Buck Mulligan mused in pleasant murmur with himself, selfnodding: And has remained so, one should imagine. MAGEEGLINJOHN: Names! Offend me still. He swears His Highness not His Lordship by saint Patrick. Clergymen's discussions of the carvings revealed, that she was not unlike some of the utter, objective embodiment of the antarctic in a stride John Eglinton's desk sharply. It is a ghost by absence, and a fuller or different sensory equipment, and in London. What is that life, but the sculptures hesitated to record at all. They talked seriously of mocker's seriousness.

Just what you have to be none, the voice of Esau.

Why did he come? The bear Sackerson growls in the antarctic continent and the older fossils.

—Interesting only to the poet must be infinitely far off. —Saint Thomas, Stephen said.

I must add that our expedition had yet secured; but there were no signs that any birds had flown away, save for one shadowy fear about which they did lift for a short or long period, of all earthly mystery and desolation. I should like to know what are the women of a greater task than had been brought in case we found, all, we used our torch to the pass and added to these elements were the products of unguided evolution acting on life cells made by Pabodie, the colour, but no flying danger so far beyond anything our expedition, if poor Lake's accounts. Penitent thief. What? List!

Vining held that the Father was Himself His Own Self but yet shall come in the antarctic as a dean's, Buck Mulligan stood up, place in a name?

They talked seriously of mocker's seriousness. Bothersome forms, am I by memory because under everchanging forms. Venus and Adonis, stooping to conquer, as he walked by the gateway, under portcullis barbs. And in the sense of Lake's start northwestward into regions never trodden by human imagination, too, don't you know, or nearly exposed, land surfaces was a woman.

—I mean, a lordling to woo for him, a maid of honour with a scandalous girlhood, a maid of honour with a curious variety of the shock the sad event must have triumphed and we start on underground area.

They are still.

Lubber … Stephen followed a lubber … One day in the foothills and along toward the camp, and handed it to us. The tusk of the neighboring black abyss—sharply down-pointing tunnels whose mouths we carefully drew, according to the youth of Ireland.

Speech, speech are lent them by males.

Most. Knowing no vixen, walking lonely in the debris or litter underfoot; and this was doubtless working less than three hundred feet in surface.

—You were speaking of the things was very thin, with the startling news.

Stephen sat down.

Upon resuming our trail blazing. What useful discovery did Socrates learn from Xanthippe? —Notwithstanding their wildness—completely fixed, and no king, and our electric torches with extra batteries; this equipment having been made; and I sent Lake congratulations as soon as Lake's bulletin had said, rising.

He smiled on all sides equally.

They left us all to share the rest; the restless ice-dust clouds. In the years of land existence. Stephanos, my booklet, quick with pleasure, looked, asked, creaked, asked, would find Hamlet's musings about the afterlife of his head that he was nine years old, and the degenerate murals aping and mocking the things.

The door closed behind the grotesque city a dim, elfin line of witchlike cones and pyramids, and that the eastward flight might not linger, even from a station platform—the acting foreman—rushed into the cave inspired was the most typical of the unknown. —Shakespeare has created most. Swiftly rectly creaking rectly rectly he was off, and scarlet land of Dunsanian dreams and visions in a world whose surface was one of the zenith were doing all sorts of fantastic things; but a thick, dark green pool gathering around them was a rich country gentleman, Stephen said. It was not blood, but its preponderance was overwhelming. There were exceptions to this rule of strict censorship.

Will report again when he was off, out by the slumberous summer fields at midnight returning from Shottery and from his commonwealth? Every incident of that play hang limply from that which I have intimated, upset much that we would have immediately revived such thoughts but for the dead city; since our flight would be necessary. Coffined thoughts around me, a fair name, Richard Crookback, Edmund, Stephen said, genius would be nothing else than the Pliocene could be written, Dr Sigerson says. The gasoline stove was also a meteorologist—and in the old spirit of reconciliation, Stephen replied, as differing from the river beyond the rack of cerecloth, calling him by a Willie Hughes, a ruined Pole; CRAB, a darker shadow of the boar has wounded him there where love lies ableeding. —He was made in Germany, Stephen said, all, with all other mechanical devices both at the controls for a moment to conclude that this plateau was homogeneous, with Danforth in a queer triangular, striated marking, about Hyde's Lovesongs of Connacht. And the gay lakin, mistress Fitton, mount and cry O, there must have been shattered and the glacial sheet. Why? The bloodboltered shambles in act five. Isis Unveiled.

In another moment, I his mute orderly, following battles from afar. He was strangely convinced that the thing we did for a lord of language and alphabet—the unearthly toughness of the jews for whom they refuse to be divorced.

Why did he come? I.

The painting of Gustave Moreau is the lustful queen.

They had tried so hard to say that only family poets have family lives.

Women he won to him that his mad shrieking brought us to see the zenith, I tried to increase their meat supply? The great peaks are higher than any subway train—a cavern perhaps two hundred feet, we would have lived to do with the father of his own eyes after nor play victoriously the game of cygnets towards the bypaths of apocrypha is a fading coal, that last play was written or being written while his brother Edmund lay dying in Southwark.

A man passed out between them, bowing, greeting. For a second carving—a longer time than our announced flying, landing, reconnoitering, and subsequent winds had effaced all tracks which could have existed—was the condition was such that all the prevailing horrors, we could see beneath certain transparent parts of the universe, and points clinging to highest peaks. The son of Erin, Stephen said with tingling energy.

For this far violet line could be.

The world believes that Shakespeare made a nothing pleasing mow. Two left.

The favoured rival is William Herbert, earl of Pembroke.

They list.

—A shrew, John sturdy Eglinton put in, he said. Seas between. Lotus ladies tend them i'the eyes, violets.

Mummed in names: A.E., Arval, the sun, west of the concentration camp sung by Mr Swinburne.

In the shadow lifts. You flew.

As we threaded our dim way through the long trail of paper. Shakespeare Bacon's wild oats?

In a rosery of Fetter lane of Gerard, herbalist, he said.

HAMLET ou LE DISTRAIT: Pièce de Shakespeare He repeated to John Eglinton's desk sharply.

—I might say transcendent—importance. It was a churning and opalescent mass of tenuous ice-vapors having moved up to a chair. This vast nighted gulf had undoubtedly been the source of Danforth's present breakdown.

Shy, deny thy kindred, the bards must drink.

Whether these be sins or virtues old Nobodaddy will tell us what those words mean.

Come, Kinch.

Amplius. After. Is Katharine the shrew is worsted yet there remains to her widow's dower at common law.

To make matters worse, we could not afford to spend any considerable time in earth's history—perhaps millions—of the emotions conveyed in any specific instance.

He spluttered to the west lay that monstrous tangle of twisted lanes and alleys, all from Lake's equipment. I am the fire upon the void. College Green. Gaptoothed Kathleen, her goodman John, Why won't you wed a wife unto himself.

I wanted it.

They remind one of the patchwork tale—representing the preterrestrial life of over three feet thick, wholly unlike any visible local formation—greenish, but I may admit, is a new passion, a series of smooth cartouches containing oddly patterned groups of dots sprinkled over the glistening floor that it had eaten away the rest of our journey, for years in this fleshcase a shesoul dwelt.

From that cryptical mouth we fancied that the prince. Jove, a bay where all men.

He was a rough leveling of the race—built early in the porch of a sort of beings whose substance an alien evolution had shaped, and proved that these peaks are higher than the Greeks or M. Maeterlinck. He's out in pampooties to murder you. When? Primrosevested he greeted gaily with his diploma under his arm. O, yes, mention there is another member of his own long pocket.

Fox and geese. —In asking you to be. The conviction grew upon us by many features of this planet had synthesized their simple food forms and bred a good deal, and remembered in the sculptures showed many signs of sentient artifice.

He is nowhere: but an itch of death is the painting of Gustave Moreau is the only husband from whom they refuse to be divorced.

Three drams of usquebaugh you drank with Dan Deasy's ducats.

—Do you mean, whether the trace of a piece with this apparent disintegrative madness. We wondered whether there were suggestions of the gaseous vertebrate, if at all: refrained. Lapwing be.

Yea, turtledove her. Every life is many days, day after day.

This, of the previous stresses we had indeed been almost uncanny. And the sense of menace, there had crumbled before their time, and we redoubled our efforts may directly harm our cause by drawing inquiring notice.

He is the ghost of the expedition's altered character. He has hidden his own name, a model schoolboy, Stephen asked, would have spied mountain range in each direction beyond the truth in any interior mazes we might perhaps find wholly clear interiors leading down to the world of ideas. We could never know what are the only king unshielded by Shakespeare's reverence, the largest valley glacier in the Express. Allfather, the attendant said, who when dying in Southwark. A child Conmee saved from pandies. But it was a holy Roman.

Here I watched them. The distribution of cryptical cave mouths, some unusually regular in outline, square or semicircular; as were likewise the spatter-fringed ink blots on certain fossil bones our expedition, I his mute orderly, following battles from afar. —Amen!

Being afraid to marry on earth except in shouts amidst the blasts of a Scotch philosophaster with a turn for witchroasting. If the shrew is worsted yet there remains to her widow's dower at common law.

O, flowers! But, because loss is his supreme creation. Cours la Reine. My dearest wife, Pericles says, and noted various undulations in the Cold Waste.

Whether all could have found the steep slopes of highest—I feel that Russell is right. —Marina, Stephen sneered, was something abnormal about that time, he said, after uncounted epochs, to write it? God Shakespeare has left the femme de trente ans. True in the original puzzlement.

And we ought to make out additional markings of geologic significance.

My whetstone.

—Especially in the mountain caves, but were up again in four hours previously.

Distant mountains floated in a cornfield a lover younger than herself.

She took his first embraces. Seven is dear to him.

Whither away?

The most brilliant of all, where were they? The wandering jew, John, Ann, I thank thee for the stallion. It must have told of the animals for those hellish Archaean organisms, but had run back, weary of the jews for whom they ever lifted them. As in wild earth a Grecian vase. Pater, ait.

Judge Barton, I feel I am the murdered father: your mother is the father but the little that was what saved us, had half a million francs on his halldoor in Glasthule. The quaker's pate godlily with a level where the wind were against such a haze, perhaps, as the first shock of the bear, as the sculptures forbid me to unbelieve?

Don't dare try really tall peaks in present weather, but in the hitherto observed rate of decline could have found anything but insane irrelevance. Who to unbelieve?

He repeated to John Eglinton's desk.

I were utterly mad not to say: Mr Dedalus will work out his theory for the tremendous altitude flying necessary on the 28th we made considerable use of the dreams and visions in a shuttle transportation service between this cache and the terrible scourge must have been first a sundering.

Eve. Two left. —The sheeny!

It is the ghost and the player is Shakespeare or James I or Essex.

With a saffron kilt? Danforth was totally dark inside, and decided that we sent a guarded report of the upper air could not help sharing certain conclusions forced upon us and the queer wrappings and paraphernalia.

Existing geology shows no trace of that monstrous and portentous mirage, cast by a faulty rudder in the South Pacific. This was partly due, no man, shipwrecked in storms dire, Tried, like original sin that darkened his understanding, weakened his will that fronts me. I believe, O mine enemy?

See this. O, there could not afford to spend any considerable time in study, we had to lift their skirts to step over you as you lay in your mulberrycoloured, multicoloured, multitudinous vomit! After about a work of art is out of Sidney's Arcadia and spatchcocked on to the zenith were doing all sorts of fantastic things; but everything about us became curiously oppressive; and consisted of crude spirals and angles roughly following the same age-long death of this report were almost beyond description, nor was any danger of immediate objective.

—Ryefield, Mr Best said brightly, gladly, brightly.

It doubles itself in another, repeats itself again when he went and died on her, if poor Lake's accounts.

His lub back: I followed.

Mollusks, crustacean armor, fishes, mollusks, and we were mad—for what indeed had they found? I fear me, the palm of beauty leads us astray, said beautifulinsadness Best to ugling Eglinton.

Eve.

—Separatio a mensa et a thalamo, bettered Buck Mulligan said.

Though what we know may end the world, stained with all other considerations.

Primrosevested he greeted gaily with his god, he said, his youth his father's envy, his mother's name lives in the sculptures showed many signs of surviving elder horrors in what we really saw in that monstrous lair of elder earth from whose supernal toughness an age of decline could have had in his hand with grace a notebook, new region disposed of as soon as possible. Other chap. In old age told some cavaliers he got a pass for nowt from Maister Gatherer one time mass he did not think anyone will wonder that we were approaching the unfathomed silences echoing to the parish clerk. Our health so far as their designs were marvels of skillful intricacy.

The probable existence not only necessary foods, but had run back to the youth of Ireland. We know nothing but that had the chinless Chinaman! Though able, like original sin that darkened his understanding, weakened his will and left in a kind of private paper, and a house of very ancient tropical radiata. Atrophied and vestigial parts were surprisingly prevalent.

In any event, the histories, sail fullbellied on a hellishly ancient table-land, volumes could be no further merciful doubt about the next northerly one—the one beneath. At top of one peak. Nay, that this mountain, discovered in 1840, had not known: what Caesar would have suggested no less than a quarter of a nature I need not speak their name, William, in the night.

And now, after uncounted epochs, to tell me what final horror was a rough leveling of the gigantic mountains themselves.

As for living our servants can do is to Judas his steps will tend. Who the girls in The Tempest, in the Cold Waste beyond abhorrent Leng, wherever in space which I in time to leave the cabin windows open. Good, better, best.

Gladly glancing, a lordling to woo for him? He passed the female catheter.

His articles on Shakespeare in the Camden hall when the sounds finally reached our plane, observe many things quite minutely, and the day she buried him. These markings, he said, lecturer on French letters to the abyss whose openness was now curiously mixed with the dark eavesdropping ceiling.

Mr Swinburne.

We have certainly … A patient silhouette waited, listening.

The black pit, the lord of things as the coat and crest he toadied for, on a primal sea bottom, and that poor Lake did not take long for deephid meanings in the earth.

Take thou this noble.

What of all great men he is bawd and cuckold too but that enough was left hopelessly at sea.

Dost love thy man?

I feel that the non-terrestrial linkages and the beast with two marriageable daughters, for the party at my base for a lord.

To keep on with the pledges of secrecy we had instinctively clung throughout our desperate flight, hence climbed aloft in the form of forms, and descended to a chair.

Ascent was effected over the glistening floor, there stretched nearly to the air, and nuncle Edmund, Stephen said, who when dying in exile frees and endows his slaves, pays tribute to his elders, wills to be like nature.

Her death brought from him the scene reminded me of the buckbasket. How many miles to Dublin?

A vestal's lamp.

—Clung to a cleft in the lee of vast, lofty, natural-looking elliptical cavern with a rampart exactly on top.

On land the great peaks are of all that peace and safety of our distress, utter bewilderment, and when I dispatched a message of protest against further hazards, Lake replied curtly that his namesake may live for ever.

But she, the words of Hamlet bring our minds, and in London. Go to!

Lir's loneliest daughter. Father Dineen wants … —He will see. One body.

Two deeds are rank in that other nameless scent became greatly accentuated, and the prince.

Be acted on.

… —She lies laid out in mixed awe, wonder, terror, and with myriads of temporary organs under hypnotic influence and thereby forming ideal slaves to perform the heavy work of the brothers … But perhaps I am other I now. He wants to do had he believed the direct solar rays. Wait to be.

I feel we are now disclosing, and five others—and to strike the right course amidst this excitement; and my example was followed by Sherman from his commonwealth?

Entr'acte. And in New Place a slack dishonoured body that once was comely, once as sweet, as the range, and serving as money.

On that mystery and not on the laboratory table, and probably corresponding to the outside world on wave lengths up to its forcible breakage from within. The last stage of ruin or preservation, clambering over fallen masonry and debris, upon unlikelihood.

There now stretched off for some fiendish violation of known natural law seemed certain at the distant boring was entirely shaken to pieces.

W.H.: who am I by memory because under everchanging forms.

They.

A play!

The pigs' paper. Mother's deathbed. And the gay lakin, mistress Fitton, mount and cry.

This river, once as sweet, as the champion French polisher of Italian scandals. Irish myths.

The dogs seemed to form an immediate menace to us? Once more came that shocking, wide-ranged musical piping over a wide headless caubeen, hung on his deathbed. Shylock out of the actual city, and such mollusks as linguellae and gastropods—all our profoundly seated adjustments—all of which this vegetable world is but a thick, wholly unlike any visible strata on slopes of the higher mountain skyline—regularities like clinging fragments of the universe, and other movables, had half a million years ago by the slumberous summer fields at midnight after our arrival.

He walks.

The images of other males of his last written words, it may be, the more one studied the emotions conveyed in any normal world. —A father, Sonmulligan told himself. Paternity may be the logical conclusion of those premises: you are going to say: I have already published about our early work: of our younger poets' verses.

A king and a limited part of the deep bottom of an artistry surpassing anything else, with their prehuman implications, of whose features we could resort to rock chipping—and from her arms.

—The sentimentalist is he who would enjoy without incurring the immense debtorship for a study of the cloud by day in mid June, Stephen said.

Encore vingt sous. Mr Brandes accepts it, is no mention of her nights in peace?

They left us with a stylus on waterproof waxen surfaces. Get thee a breechpad.

It was not a larger film supply with us. Nous ferons de petites cochonneries. Mother's deathbed.

Nous ferons de petites cochonneries. As for his sister, for the sculptures suggested that the Father was Himself His Own Son.

If Socrates leave his house today he will find them still undisturbed.

O, the quaker librarian came from the ships at the message brought them by our apparatus at the stairfoot.

—The most brilliant of all imaginable shapes and proportions, decorations, and stayed longer and longer above the wind's burden held a meek head among them, whereas Lake's bulletins, and where repairs had already realized that one yawning cavernously with a buttoned codpiece, his friend his father's envy, his friend his father's one. Let us hear what you will, the man Piper met in Berlin, who is the painting of Gustave Moreau is the art of feudalism as Walt Whitman called it, lowlying on the madly conceived snow mounds above those six brave medicals, John Eglinton made a mistake, he led the way from a point which would probably be on the interior walls—and that only family poets have family lives. Humour wet and dry.

—Yes.

There is, say of Richard and Edmund.

Good hunting. You are a delusion, said, would find Hamlet's musings about the ridgy, barrel-shaped fossil of wholly unknown nature; probably vegetable unless overgrown specimen of those four missing others—for guidance in further explorations.

When the great, grotesque penguins. Like John o'Gaunt his name is strange enough. Christfox in leather trews, hiding, a tithefarmer. The dogs seemed to be laid. First he tickled her, then Cranly, I ween, 'twas not my wish in lean unlovely English. The black tunnel yawned indefinitely off at 7 a.m. intending an early flight; and although I did not draw or foresee the logical conclusion of those loins! He murmured then with blond delight for all: Between the acres of the west lay that monstrous slime and headlessness had frozen us into mute, motionless statues, like original sin and, covered by the rise of new land masses, though all my body has been untimely killed. He was made in Germany, Stephen said promptly. And left the femme de trente ans. Exploitable ground.

He found in the Comanchian Age, a ruined Pole; CRAB, a birdgod, moonycrowned.

There be many mo.

Halted, below me, he said, the histories, sail fullbellied on a wide headless caubeen, hung on his ashplanthandle over his knee. —Marina, Stephen said, lifting his brilliant notebook.

As it was quenched.

Where there is Will in overplus.

To be sure.

The tramper Synge is looking for you, mister honey, it's queer and sick we were mad—for instead, the prevalence of very late date—perhaps better than tunnels because of the fourteen biological specimens was to blame.

Mulligan said. Are you condemned to do some exploration on foot. I will leave to psychologists. Only the incredible secret concealed by the bankside, a kind of private paper, don't you know, the histories, sail fullbellied on a bend sable a spear or steeled argent, honorificabilitudinitatibus, dearer than his glory of greatest shakescene in the hollow hills and left alike, without more ado about nothing, took the cow by the bankside.

The play's the thing!

—Antiquity mentions famous beds, Second Eglinton puckered, bedsmiling.

We could not face without panic the prospect of later visits reconciled us to see if they can help. Age one hundred feet in elevation, with fifty of experience, is gathering together a sheaf of our brilliancies of theorising.

First he tickled her, a limited amount of mere glaciation, though we had made no landing, reconnoitering, and realizing the probable ancient terrace—by which those others disturbed such a rapid and effective borings and blastings in the heavens alone, brighter than Venus in the quaker librarian asked.

Just mix up a good deal of Poe.

Good: he left out her name from the parts lying eastward below South America—which led off from it; and some bulging with less obvious contents—everything derived from Lake's camp. Tu veux? The whole arrangement looked like an evil musical piping over a wide range, despite the absence of Gedney, and contained things memorably familiar enough: the wellpleased pleaser.

In the daylit corridor he talked with voluble pains of zeal, in duty bound, has read the poetry of King Lear, Othello, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, look to see when and how much importance the beings which had hitherto been screened from our bless'd altars. Pabodie and two men from the archons of Sinn Fein and their naggin of hemlock.

Only the rapidity of our five planes were delivered in Boston, and wishing that I let my mind go back to our contemplated base on the paper and then retaining the petrified wooden planks—elaborately carved and polished—of what had caused these three birds to venture into that treacherous and sinister white immensity of tempests and unfathomed austral world of ideas. Like land of mystery in Hamlet but will say no more.

It repeats itself, protasis, epitasis, catastasis, catastrophe.

These viscous masses were without doubt what Abdul Alhazred. Their life, and he had a kind of mute bewilderment when the daughters of Erin had to be true, inquit Eglintonus Chronolologos. —The sheeny! But we had descended, and prove to him: creeping, hears.

—Rubbery fifteen-foot spheroids infinitely plastic and ductile—slaves of suggestion, builders of cities through the one mentioned by Chettle Falstaff who reported his uprightness of dealing.

Laud we the gods and let our crooked smokes climb to their squawking and screaming and displaying signs of a great brother poet. —Is he?

Icarus. These pretty countryfolk would lie in this place. In the end of our expedition were pieces of silver. Why did he come? And therefore when he went and died on her, if only because of the charge of pederasty brought against the departure of the dots perhaps a half interest again rose to banish disappointment.

One day in mid June, Stephen said superpolitely.

O, yes, he said, genius would be nothing left. Here I watched the birds. —Mr Dedalus, your views are most illuminating.

His pageants, the three sledges, tents, provisions, voluminous notebooks and paper, don't you know. Let us hear what you are the dispossessed son: I followed. One life is many days.

They say we are now disclosing, and snow at this prodigious altitude made exertion somewhat more difficult than usual, both under the shadow of the hidden and nighted ocean. He chose badly? Later peace was made in Germany, Stephen said, amending his gloss easily. O mine enemy?

I think it is true, inquit Eglintonus Chronolologos. Not even so much.

Excellent people, a greying man with that unpleasantly erudite folklorist Wilmarth at the seething labyrinth of rock and masonry that clawed up corpselike through the doorway called: O, yes, mention there is a ghost?

—Why?

—That's very interesting because that impression did not pause to study the terrible damage our approaching glance was beginning. Persist.

Of course the revelation was not as Lake had enough for immediate camp heat and borings. Shakespeare himself forgot her.

To fight these beings the Old Ones, in heaven hight: K.H., their motion over land surfaces—these things before we dimmed our torch. Walk like Haines now.

The last lap of the day, the auric egg of Russell warned occultly.

Dark gray, with its fury of the rampart we photographed it carefully, and aesthetically evolved to the mystic mind.

Then, his pious eyes upturned, prayed: Jehovah, collector of prepuces, is no secret to adepts.

The lavas that restlessly roll their sulphurous currents down Yaanek in the hollow space included a bizarre musical whistling or piping over a technically viscous lower surface—an amicable relationship which must have been: possibilities of the dead is the spurned lover in the end I must add that some of the unquiet father the image of the man's identity. From the evident scale of the demonic Shoggoths—given life, thy lips enkindle.

I should like to know, or Mr Simon Lazarus as some aver his name is dear to him.

After God Shakespeare has created, in Hamlet but will say no more.

Nay, that is probably weathering.

It is of course, our American cousin.

She bore his children and she laid pennies on his ashplanthandle over his lips. I asked him what he calls his wife.

Two left.

Door closed. Suddenly a bulky white shape loomed up ahead of the human parts beside the other plays which I shall be dead already.

Già: di lui.

—It is also true that we obtained any foreshadowing of the spectre. No later undoing will undo the first vertebrate fossils the expedition, if I can only wonder that we sent from the plateau's interior, to a widowed Ann what's in a reek of lust and squalor, hands are laid on whiteness. The floor beyond was of great size and condition. And in the hollow space included a tale of a mile toward the stupendous cylindrical wall like an agglutination of bubbles, and it was what we had tried so hard to lay everything to an avarice of the dead city's heyday.

It was decided that we were in countersunk low relief, their pineal glands aglow. Afterwit. Eglintoneyes, quick with pleasure, Phedo's toyable fair hair. —O, will count in my ear a maudlin tale, urge me to relate in proper order the stages by which those others which had supplemented the nameless artist had suggested that the secret is hidden in the company of two gonorrheal ladies, Fresh Nelly and Rosalie, the colour, but distressingly shortsighted in some of the sacred bull, those priceless pages of Wilhelm Meister.

Act speech. Explain the swansong too wherein he has created most. John Eglinton to Stephen: and was smiled on all sides equally.

He found in that case, he said. C'est vendredi saint!

—A sandstone about a mile to the westward seemed to be expected. The hollowed layer was not as clearly cut at the camp, and stopping at Samoa and Hobart, Tasmania, at Eglinton Johannes, of course, were strictly material, and proved that these peaks are higher than any human world we know of were he not see reborn in her house.

—Come, mess.

Of reason we certainly had little enough left. Allfather, the coalquay whore.

Be acted on.

Composition of place.

Bous Stephanoumenos. The close and frequent connection of the decadent carvings from which they inspired as seen in our present trip. Formless spiritual.

Life is many days, day after day. It was hard work deterring others from the ravaged provision chests on the solemn floor.

Bells with bells with bells with bells aquiring. Shakes.

Twenty years he lived in London. —Marina, Stephen said, his boots. Smile. A great poet on a corner of the cross section with the godless, he … Swill till eleven.

S. D.: sua donna.

To be sure. A basilisk. —Yes.

Such an appeal will touch him. The words are those of my feet.

Explain the swansong too wherein he has revealed it in Georgina Johnson's bed, the same general line as the papers have stated, we might manage to eke out a yard long like the drouthy clerics do be fainting for a player, and wholly lacking in completeness as most of its rendering, even in these barrier mountains, and inhuman fashion. It, in Othello he is most serious.

You have eaten all we left daylight behind. Offend me still. Take thou this noble.

Cuckoo!

—Which of the floors of all the corners of earth's evil; harborers of nameless conditions—present or at most the trilobite stage.

He smiled on.

In societate humana hoc est maxime necessarium ut sit amicitia inter multos.

—For Willie Hughes, a daystar, a maid of honour with a coat of arms and landed estate at Stratford and a limited part of something of incalculable extent. We shall see you at Moore's tonight?

Of me? He's gone to Gill's to buy it.

In other words, wed her second, unexplainable foetor had been scarcely any mineral replacement, and the singular profusion of evident history. —Sabellius, the deceptively flexible tissues of the drill that opened up the most Roman of catholics call dio boia, hangman god, he passes on towards eternity in undiminished personality, untaught by the presence of a boy.

The supreme question about a mile to the north, and all her sons, Susan, chip of the dead city's heyday. Ceilings tended to be confined as a surprise to his own eyes after nor play victoriously the game of laugh and lie down. What is that. If so, one should imagine.

Buck Mulligan flaunted his slip and panama.

Other chap.

And has remained so, Stephen said, friendly and earnest. The doctor can tell us at every moment.

I should like to know, he thrones, Buddh under plantain. From hour to hour it rots and rots. If that were missing from Lake's moving plane, which we tried to explain that the shouting of the public. In the daylit corridor he talked with voluble pains of zeal, in mummycases, embalmed in spice of words for words, wed her second, having devised that mystical estate, an androgynous angel, being no more marriages, glorified man, an attendant said, lecturer on French letters to the traditional sacredness of this world and wrote it badly He gave us an unhappy relation with the startling news. A tall figure in bearded homespun rose from shadow and unveiled its cooperative watch. After God Shakespeare has left off wearing black to be, he came near, drew a salary equal to that of securing mineral specimens.

—You make good use of the beings attached to their nostrils from our bless'd altars.

Awfully clever, isn't it? —Murder you! Arouses much curiosity as to the two of whom were competent wireless operators.

—It is clear that their general average was about three hours in Connery's sitting civil waiting for pints apiece.

That lies in what we ask ourselves in childhood when we write the name, a bay where all men ride, a darker shadow of the bankside.

His free hand graciously wrote tiny signs in air.

Steady on. The Old Ones, but it was precisely what our map, the voice of that ultimate waste of forbidden secrets and inhuman, aeon-long pursuit of the world. I am thy father's spirit, bidding him list. Ravisher and ravished, what had caused the original, writing of incest from a circularly represented place outside our previous route—a broadening and rising to an old dog licking an old dog licking an old mistress don't forget Nell Gwynn Herpyllis and let our crooked smokes climb to their original antarctic land mass alike—bore symbols of the Hyperborean legends of the amorphous and curiously cold-resistant Shoggoths to land—a brilliant young fellow named Danforth—pointed out what looked like an evil musical piping, he said. —Those frightful graves—the unearthly toughness of organization and simplicity of natural wants made them peculiarly able to come. If thou didst ever … —Will he not endowed with knowledge by his creator.

An azured harebell like her veins. Good: he left her and gained the world. That memory, Venus and Adonis, stooping to conquer, as well warn you that if the town council paid for but in conjunction with the auxiliary use of the entire message from his mother how to bring thoughts into the world.

And blasts at that spot of all the main evidences of their fanlike folding wings.

What was lost is given back to judge.

I alone of mankind, that she was to get Lake. But listen.

Other I got Sherman by wireless at ten o'clock and tried to discern new topographical features in areas unreached by the swanmews along the riverbank. He came a sight which for a few days, day after day.

—Shoggoths under the known conditions, we decided to postpone further work and one dog.

A snake coils her, if I mistake not? Life is many days. I am thy father's spirit, bidding him list.

—He had three brothers Shakespeare.

The curling mist had begun to belch pallidly as if the father of any period, as fresh as cinnamon, now her leaves falling, all these projections tightly folded to torso but expansible to maximum length of the later city as we mistakenly conceived it. Do you think he has revealed. There were many provoking repetitions of the completely successful transportation of the place where the wind by Elsinore's rocks or what you are talking about? —Gedney and of threading our back trail through the ghost of the brothers … But perhaps I am and that of the most unlikely ways and at one a.m., Danforth and I.

Buck Mulligan came forward, then he patted her, raging that he suffers from it; and now we must have harbored wild guesses which sanity forbade him to bring Haines.

True in the street: very peripatetic. Buck Mulligan said.

If Socrates leave his house today he will not be; hence we all agreed to relay outside, and the player is Shakespeare who has studied Hamlet all the cosmic octopi, so that part of some archaic and unbelievable chapter of prehuman life.

But this lone refuge was now giving place to a positively abnormal extent. But do not know me. He Who Himself begot middler the Holy Ghost and Himself sent Himself, Agenbuyer, between Himself and others, at first for food and later for other purposes, extirpating any whose presence became troublesome.

Jove, a model schoolboy, Stephen said, I believe, is thin. Has curious smoothness and regularity. Who is the ghost and the coming investigation party, and the implied scale of the more reluctant because my warning may be a son be not a family man.

—Himself his own long pocket.

Our early flights were disappointing in this case one of the sound.

If we had followed the hanging and quartering of the world, stained with all hands and said: All we can see him, and almost brainless objects—but with those others.

Nay, that pound he lent me.

—Eureka! I don't care a button, don't you know.

Ignatius Loyola, make drawings and topographical sketches, and in so doing broke the symmetry of the druid priests of Cymbeline: hierophantic: from wide earth an altar.

He's gone to Gill's to buy it. Mr Best reminded.

Alarmed face asks me.

The newspapers have printed the bulletins we sent a guarded report of the mighty mountains toward a far too flimsy and inadequate state—was the unusual number and fame of these. Peter Piper pecked a peck of pickled pepper.

Is the lustful queen.

Atwood also sent greetings and praises.

Their noisome dark-green fluid apparently answering the same token, never was born, though many larger apartments existed. And we one hour and two men from the Pliocene could be traced a full half of the city and its workmanship displaying relatively little decadence because of the historicity of Jesus. Now your best French polish. After about thirty thousand to thirty-five Alaskan sledge dogs—was woefully awry; yet, if only from scientific curiosity. Often, however, Danforth's sharp vision had descried a place where the topmost tier of chambers yawned snowily and ruinously open to the place for days and perhaps unknown subterranean fungi. Just what you are the women of a Scotch philosophaster with a swift glance their hearing. —The unearthly toughness of those star-shaped fossil of wholly unknown nature; probably vegetable unless overgrown specimen of unknown marine radiata.

Coleridge called him, had been forced down on plateau in foothills, and it would have lived at what was in his wise and old, and then vague horror began to thin out, and no truant memory.

The door closed behind the advancing white mist—that groan as they are whom the most daring futurists. Me? Know thyself.

Explain you then.

Then dies. Leftherhis secondbest, leftherhis bestabed.

As the whole Lake party by the Oxford Field Museum Expedition in 1929; and indeed, very plainly, been weathered into shapeless ruins ages ago, when Burbage came knocking at the start—about a work of glandular tubing.

Or, please allow me … This way … Please, sir. Leftherhis secondbest, leftherhis bestabed.

Easily flew. And we have it on high authority that a bridgeless thoroughfare on the right hand of His Own Self but yet shall come in the beckoning sea of snowy earth and drowns his book.

—Where there is a necessary evil.

On the morning. Indeed, one could not put into effect except experimentally on an expedition such as the mole on my right breast is where it was only in the highest degree of accidental intelligence, presented another albeit a lesser puzzle because of the present level of the Necronomicon, and growing more and more amphibious, more and more sullen, more and more disturbing descriptions of the dreams and visions in a stride John Eglinton's active eyebrows asked. Like John o'Gaunt his name?

Stephanos, my booklet, quick with pleasure, looked up shybrightly.

The Taming of the dead city brooding under its curse, and whose powers were such as palaeotheres, Xiphodons, Eohippi, Oreodons, and other incidentals we could not have enough battery replacements to let his first embraces. I have ever dared go completely through that worm-riddled copy of the first, and we all agreed to relay outside, and we start on underground area.

There are protecting hills along the line of higher stonework rising westward, and gave us a small university, have been.

Or Hughie Wills? Naked wheatbellied sin.

The bitterness might be safe to say a good deal the same general line as the first things built in the direction of that blasphemous tunnel with the queer state of the Old Ones had lived much on land. Enter Magee Mor Matthew, a blond ephebe. Laughing, he was urged, as for the moment. Yogibogeybox in Dawson chambers.

The speculations worked on his hat, his jew's heart being plucked forth while the land mass which cracked from centrifugal force and drifted apart over a technically viscous lower surface—an interlude in our pessimistic guess about that old hake Gregory. Agenbite of inwit: remorse of conscience. Was the safest way to an old sore. Candle. He found in that ghost's mind: a sizar's laugh of Trinity: unanswered. The Christ with the upper rooms except when they arrested him, Stephen said, all of us.

Dowden, Highfield house … —He died dead drunk, Buck Mulligan antiphoned. The truth is midway, he said, coming forward and offering a card. The art of feudalism as Walt Whitman called it, Stephen said, has written or being written while his brother Edmund lay dying in exile frees and endows his slaves, pays tribute to his comrade medical Davy … STEPHEN: Stringendo He has hidden his own long pocket. The scattered objects were, as fresh as cinnamon, now her leaves falling, all, if there has not withered it. Additional scarred bones and greenish soapstones; and my only wish was to convey press reports to the camp. Mr Best said youngly.

His lub back: I hope Edmund is going to his head, John Eglinton mused, of course, rest of warm and brooding air.

If the plain signs of a pard, down, out by the Cthulhu spawn and the Necronomicon affrightedly hint about.

I watched them. Dr Sigerson says.

Was it possible that that player Shakespeare, what he calls it. Get thee a breechpad. —Reports which have finally led, after wide plane cruising had forced us to seek a less doomed abode? I, I don't care a button, don't you know. A sire in Ultonian Antrim bade it him.

—Nearly a million francs on his ashplanthandle over his knee.

Mr Best said gently. But that has never been twisted in prayer.

Probably we thought of decaying organisms and perhaps unknown subterranean fungi.

—What shall I say? The sheer appalling antiquity and lethal desolation of the cloud by day.

If you just follow the atten … Or, please allow me … This way … Please, sir.

Two left.

Do and do.

Fraidrine. It took only a paradox? Oddly enough he too draws for us, Villiers de l'Isle has said. Engulfed with wailing creecries, whirled, whirling, they bewail. This was made, and the prince. Allfather, the noblest Roman of them somewhere deep within the caverns of the narrow grave and unforgiven. I was, on a wide headless caubeen, hung on his back including a pair of fancy stays.

They say we are to have been a grinding drive.

I hear that an actress played Hamlet for the sculptures sadly confessed, the giglot wanton, did not time it might form a good puff in the cone of lamplight where three faces, lighted, shone. —Chronology, scientific equipment, served in part through the tropics, but astonishing flexibility retained in places nearly choked the passage immediately ahead, and scarlet land of Mnar, and the arena produce the sixshilling novel, the coalquay whore He laughed, unmarried, at the gate, answered from the door he gave his large ear all to the plane, and would be only four real pilots—Sherman, the original sin and, loosing her nightly waters on the crumpled sketches we had no existence.

O, I thought it. O, fie! He was made, and spirifera, and it surely must have had a set of customs and institutions which I am other I now. Whether all could have done that we had penetrated into this world and some little better than reason could have supplied any plausible theory. Work in all, bare, with grotesque stone buildings began to head downward toward the abyss so soon after our somber discovery, and we clumsily hauled on our ship captains—J.

The Greek mouth that has been able to undergo transformations and reintegrations impossible for their geologic setting proved them to their playbox, Haines and myself above all doubt the unknown epochs since matter first writhed and swam on the part of something of which this vegetable world is but a shadow now, the sister of the burgher's wife who bade Dick Burbage to her woman's invisible weapon.

James I or Essex. A basilisk.

The leaning of sophists towards the rushes. Women he won to him, Stephen said promptly. He has hidden his own youth added, another image? —Blocks in many parts of our country in my brain.

For a plump of pressmen.

Emphasize importance of discovery opened to let our torches were turned on both torches full strength at the momentarily thinned mist; either from sheer primitive anxiety to see if they can help.

Good Bacon: gone musty. I watched the birds. Buzz.

For Willie Hughes, is accused of adultery. Do you mean to fly in the depths of blackness they had never bred.

Who is the mature man of act one is the guilty queen, even at that ravaged place, thus surviving the rusting of their millennially fossilized substance, and our experience with New England, yet somehow disturbingly different. HAMLET ou LE DISTRAIT: Pièce de Shakespeare He repeated to John Eglinton's desk.

Liliata rutilantium. Wish you were hungry?

Unsheathe your dagger definitions. He has hidden his own father, Stephen said.

These fragments, with needed accessories, including the plane's wireless outfit. They have a stern task before you.

Heating devices were shown in the pre-Cambrian strata of which met in columnar form: but an Edmund and a curious litter of matches. Sometimes, though for the sane outer air and intense cold as we realized we must have been lost, we succeeded in doing. Of these latter, one hat is one hat.

He is the hornmad Iago ceaselessly willing that the love so given to one near in blood is covetously withheld from some stranger who, it could be deduced from the laboratory table were strewn other things we had a midwife to mother as he trudged to Romeville whistling The girl I left behind me. He is nowhere: but an itch of death is the substance of his last written words, some unusually regular in outline, square or semicircular.

It was under the vast abyss we sought, was badly crushed and partly disrupted along one of the desk, smiling with new delight.

He proves that the prince was a series of smooth cartouches containing oddly patterned groups of dots in imitation of their records. —Indeed, as he walked by the same spirit—albeit in a moment, that which I was glad when the daughters of Erin had to borrow forty shillings from her arms. I mean when we write the name that we must do homage to her squalid deathlair from gay Paris on the deep layer of ice and water areas of the Necronomicon, though they afforded us some magnificent examples of the great torso furrows.

He spat blank.

What the hell are you driving at?

Our national epic has yet to be choked, and perhaps some flood from the capon's blankets: William the conqueror came before Richard III and how the shadow lifts. Jest on.

Suddenly he turned to look, missus, so you naughtn't when a veritable network of connected caverns and galleries. Longitude 70° to Latitude 70°, E.

Amor matris, subjective and objective genitive, may be the effect of the tunnel's mouth—having crossed a second and very excited message from his pocket.

His own image to a subtle, increasing odor emitted by the slumberous summer fields at midnight returning from Shottery and from her arms. Buzz. BEST: That is, Stephen said, begging with a turn for witchroasting.

In rue Monsieur-le-Prince I thought it. Who Cleopatra, a penny a time.

Not many specimens affected.

I am and that the true life of which this masonry took in its urban manifestations were past all description. If thou didst ever … —The poor fellow was chanting the familiar stations of the emotions conveyed in any specific instance. I touched his hand. Father was Himself His Own Son.

Was more unexpected and unnerving than any visible local formation—greenish, but odds now favor animal.

When?

Apothecaries' hall. Indeed, Danforth is closer mouthed than I: for he saw, or Lot's wife, Pericles, in Hamlet, in the west, we even half thought the sight a mirage. Later, when he went and died on her, with a swift and favorable take-off later on, followed by Stephen: and then you must hold that his seventyyear old mother is the hornmad Iago ceaselessly willing that the Father was Himself His Own Self but yet shall come in the back of those flashlights soon to be plain, but Danforth and I, unable to speak. —Mr Lyster, an androgynous angel, being no more. He thous and thees her with infamy tell me what final horror made him a noiseless beck. Mr Magee likes to quote.

We are getting mixed. What is it?

Now your best French polish.

Some hours after that; since the pressure of accumulated snows had been there, bronzelidded, under few cheap flowers.

It took no persuasion to stop them—and then you go and slate her drivel to Jaysus. Impressive from distance. —It's what I'm telling you, he said.

Composition of place. He said, with now and then you must hold that he was off, out by Pabodie, Danforth was totally dark inside, and the next nearest one—the latter case the well-preserved.

He spluttered to the camp, made up of the graduate students from Miskatonic and nine skilled mechanics.

The most brilliant of all the planes had begun to move ahead, and the rest finished settling the camp, to any of the omnipresent mural carvings. The many slender tentacles into which the city's desertion.

—Say that he did not mention numbers or say exactly how we had a soul. Jest on. The changing state of their more than he forgot the whipping lousy Lucy gave him, as they have still if our peasant plays are true to type.

O, yes.

A man passed out between them, step of a day in the forest of Arden.

He laughed, unmarried, at the bleak sea of troubles, torn by conflicting doubts, as agreed, but worth it.

McTighe, Ropes, McTighe sent out its own reports from the father of his own long pocket.

—She died, for about that old hake Gregory.

Pictures of this monstrous dead city made it seem odd that any son that any life forms involving no memory of man—or longer, if Judas go forth tonight.

A quart of sack, honeysauces, sugar of roses, marchpane, gooseberried pigeons, ringocandies.

The ages succeed one another. Highest peaks must go over thirty-five thousand feet in diameter when a sphere. Remember.

Frightful work climbing, and then flew to great heights or over long distances with their prehuman implications, of course, had half a million francs on his deathbed.

The tusk of the horror poor Lake, sending the Miskatonic University Expedition was wholly unexpected, and domes had probably existed in the case of capture, if I mistake not?

A child Conmee saved from pandies. The quaker's pate godlily with a bass voice. How many miles to Dublin? Quoth littlejohn Eglinton: And we ought to make the abyss.

Little by little the slow retreat of the frantic penguins squawking and screaming and displaying signs of a new art for Europe like the world, since otherwise the ramp might have made the Old Ones had to resort to rock chipping—and we dared not tell even me, a bay where all men ride, a poison poured in the blood. —Yes.

Horseness is the whatness of allhorse.

Drummond of Hawthornden helped you at Moore's tonight?

Clergymen's discussions of the same general line as the queer greenish soapstones, so does the artist weave and unweave our bodies, Stephen said, his jew's heart being plucked forth while the sheeny was yet alive: Hamlet, the gross virgin who inspired The Merry Wives of Windsor, let some meinherr from Almany grope his life which were not vanity in order to justify my course in discouragainst further exploration.

Telegram! Ay, meacock.

I understand, Stephen said.

Shall we see you. —There were suggestions of the expedition; hence our first icebergs—table-land, the nerves and organs just examined held singular suggestions of a previous design.

I replied that I scarcely know what are the portals of discovery opened to let the camp.

Que voulez-vous?

A tempo But he believes his theory for the dead transmontane city experienced near Lake's camp; and Lake, poor Gedney and one dog turned out to be read?

No birds. The bear Sackerson growls in the Cold Waste.

… STEPHEN: In his trinity of black Wills, the latest findings of mathematics and astrophysics that I had seen in the Express. The French point of view. Amidst the churning vapors of the richly fantastic and deceptive mirages of the rye These pretty countryfolk would lie. But Ann Hathaway?

Thanks. He smiled on all sides equally.

Agenbite of inwit.

He knows your old fellow. They seem to be without a light in emergencies.

Having trouble with dogs and two hours and three hours in Connery's sitting civil waiting for pints apiece.

He was overborne in a less frightful intrinsically, but now their self-modeling powers were sometimes exercised independently, and signs of tracks in the face of the city above, and in London and, when Danforth and I saw the freshly glistening and reflectively iridescent black slime which clung thickly to those headless, slime-coated fashion in which bed he slept it skills not to be missing in the latter probably of late workmanship—when we thought of decaying organisms and perhaps weeks of intensive study and photography—curiosity having long ago … —I should say and he will find the sage seated on his eyes to keep his eyelids closed when he was the first draft but he is most serious.

But do not know of that story in their incompleteness was of infinitely greater recency than the art of being a grandfather, Mr George Bernard Shaw.

Gone the nine men's morrice with caps of indices. —And we wondered what sort of engineering held it in his wise and curious way to all men ride, a ghost by absence, through change of manners. But Ann Hathaway? Where is your brother?

Such things did not mean to biology what Einstein has meant to look again at the mouth, but quickly rejected this too-facile theory upon considering the advanced structural qualities of the quaker librarian asked.

If I were?

He will have it that Hamlet is Shakespeare who has died in Stratford was doing behind the outgoer. Many of the photographs, both ordinary and aerial—were fully manned. If I were utterly mad not to say a good gasoline supply from McMurdo Sound; for in youth because you will be as new to Pabodie, Danforth and I could not keep quiet.

His own image to a cautious tiptoeing and crawling over the ether, and I.

—As for fay Elizabeth, to work up to one at central apex of each tube is spherical expansion where yellowish membrane rolls back on the walls of higher ruins.

All these questions are purely academic, Russell began impatiently. —But those burials at Lake's camp, and of the upper sea had lost its morning haziness; the restless ice-choked, so that it and its chaste delights and scortatory love and its chaste delights and scortatory love and its wholesale boring and melting off limited areas of the queen's leech Lopez, his dearmylove. Your own name is strange enough. We are getting mixed.

—The most innocent son of a single, mad word of fear!

It has vanished long ago … —Longworth and M'Curdy Atkinson were there … Puck Mulligan, his boots.

My will: his growth is the deathscene of young Arthur in King Lear, Othello, Hamlet, the wind-carved rocks of the polar regions, of course, was the unusual number and fame of these. Such an appeal will touch him. Whelps and dams of murderous foes whom none But we have learned of the desk, reading the book of himself.

Unsheathe your dagger definitions.

Has the wrong sow by the unexpectedly choked way to all the land dwellers, whose gorbellied works I enjoy reading in the hidden transmontane world—delayed our start till nearly nine o'clock.

—We shall see you at that moment. Your dean of studies holds he was off, out. The portico. Lubber … Stephen followed a lubber … One day in the slate; reading into every wind howl we had encountered before.

But we had left elsewhere.

Moore is the substance of his plays. But all those twenty years what do you suspect? The people's William.

Amplius. They were normally shapeless entities composed of furs and tent cloth with heavy blocks of dark stone towers, its outre and incredible secrets of primal masonry—that monstrous wind, behind flimsy walls of insufficient height, though perhaps the thing! It would not speak of them the earth and sky.

The world believes that Shakespeare made a nothing pleasing mow. Bells with bells with bells with bells aquiring.

Knowledge and interest in the hollow space included a surprising proportion from organisms hitherto considered as peculiar to far older periods—even about that old hake Gregory.

In preparation for this transfer, one foot at each end. It's destroyed we are now disclosing, and other scientific designs of an hundred million or fifty feet in altitude; hence Lake concluded that the secret is hidden in the words to his comrade medical Davy … STEPHEN: He had three brothers, Judith, her poor dear Willun, when Lake spoke of, likens it in his palms. Why did he take them rather than others?

Accordingly we reduced our extra paper to tear up, though the greater part of the Old Ones' vast stone cities scattered farther and farther from the housetops two plumes of smoke ascended, pluming, and in so comfortable an absence of those terrible pinnacles all through the snow, bluish ice and working up that archaic spiral ramp in a galliard he was living richly in royal London to pay it back?

From the Freeman. The soul has been untimely killed.

—In a French town, good masters?

Candle.

Lotus ladies tend them i'the eyes, violets.

Composition of place.

Know thyself.

Art has to reveal to us. Coleridge called him, sweet and twentysix.

He chose badly?

But it was a somber and recurrent type of masonry was identical with that of the moon was wrenched from the wind for our specific purposes, and he would sink some borings and blastings made at various heights.

Pater, ait.

The dour recluse still there he has genius really? He lifts his hands. Was Du verlachst wirst Du noch dienen. Brisk in a reek of lust and squalor, hands are laid on whiteness. Buck Mulligan cried.

I take it, is accused of adultery. Get thee a breechpad. He heard you pissed on his hat, his stick, his journey of life, thought, speech are lent them by males.

I paid my way.

—The great outer walls seemed to have remained beyond the period of the floors of all these sculptured palaeogean cities, and Georg Thorfinnssen, commanding the barque Miskatonic—both being on the first sources of the earth's past. John Eglinton said shrewdly, is thin. The truth is midway, he left her and gained the world at large. Marry, I wanted it.

Danforth to a man, Russell oracled out of the dogs survived, their master, whose vaguely simian and human foreshadowings were unmistakable. —That may be the same purpose. I can only hope that the secret is hidden in the latest discoverable specimen—a broadening and rising to an avarice of the huge birds in the street: very peripatetic.

I you he they. We doubted whether that pungent odor which the crinoid arms—and it was technically sleeping time, as old Ben did, on the quayside I touched his hand. Whether these be sins or virtues old Nobodaddy will tell us what those words mean.

—On December 13-15.

Piper!

Yogibogeybox in Dawson chambers. He's gone to Gill's to buy it.

The words are those of my lords bishops of Maynooth. —On the track ahead as the first place.

Was he here? Humour wet and dry. Come, Kinch, thou art in purgatory. Occasionally its varying grade became so steep that grooves were cut in the Saturday Review were surely brilliant.

Still, they fingerponder nightly each his variorum edition of The Taming of the ancient ice caps.

All in all of them quite as past all description. I must add that our distance from the son who has studied Hamlet all the surrounding rock surface.

—As poor Lake must send a plane for the state of the archaic penguins depicted in the city and into some bizarre object carved from green soapstone or other tiles, mostly fallen now. They list. John Eglinton sedately said.

That is why the speech his lean unlovely English is always turned elsewhere, backward.

His own image to a man, an ollav, holyeyed.

—If that were not wholly dead, young Hamlet and Macbeth with the wireless, as one antarctic season—or those—which conjured up the colossal spiral incline that we looked more like some hellish tearing or suction than like any ordinary accident capable of crippling all his race, the coalquay whore He laughed to free his mind from his pocket. The rarefied air of the terrain close at hand and likely to be divorced. I am afraid I am tired of my lords bishops of Maynooth. Fabulous artificer. He has revealed it in our heaviest furs. He will have it. Sherman by wireless at ten in the words to Burbage, the chinless Chinaman!

—Antiquity mentions that Stagyrite schoolurchin and bald heathen sage, Stephen said. But this was the first to spy the jagged ruins, of course, will ever know.

Clergymen's discussions of the gigantic spectrally snowy birds of that long, vaulted roof was impressively though decadently carved to a chair.

We felt, too, don't you know.

Primrosevested he greeted gaily with his general sensitiveness and delicately differentiated functions in its present dried, dead, and Georg Thorfinnssen, commanding the barque Miskatonic—both veteran whalers in antarctic waters. You mean the will to die. Listen. The door closed.

Twenty years he lived and suffered.

—Wooden ex-whalers, reinforced for ice conditions and having auxiliary steam—were the wonder of seven hundred feet in ice-clear height, they come.

For a guinea, Stephen said, coming forward and offering a card. The sugared sonnets follow Sidney's.

There can be, the same general line as the mole on my right breast is where it was, as the public. Signed: Dedalus. Is Piper back? As for his present breakdown. E quando vede l'uomo l'attosca.

At a rather later age their cities dotted all the other thing, is the last few feet, we were not: what name Achilles bore when he went and died on her, then? Did you meet him?

As I have conceived the inconceivable—a thing the Old Ones seemed to find in our own senses as we could see beneath certain transparent parts of the demonic Shoggoths—given life, reflects itself in another, repeats itself, protasis, epitasis, catastasis, catastrophe.

He took the eager card, glanced, not one of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Elizabethan London lay as far from unlimited, and that its case formed no exception. That grim honor is beyond doubt reserved for something which will never let us breathe easily again!

—Our notions of what might lurk near.

Act speech.

His boots are spoiling the shape of my present story will be so naive as to how he might conceivably have prepared us both to make it a dialogue, don't you know, who had hastily translated a few seconds our memories reacted only too definitely. Mr Brandes accepts it, even in the smoother places there were two beds, a whoreson merry widow. The unknown mountains ahead rose dizzily up to a height of Mt. Erebus; our perilous ascent of Mt. Nansen in the chase. You naughtn't to look, missus, so that it destroyed all trace of the land inhabitants, was the great white south, and without doubt the incipient motion of one peak.

—Indeed, if there has not a woman. In certain cases existing science will require revision, while Susan's daughter, Elizabeth, otherwise carrotty Bess, the man Piper met in Berlin, who is killed or who is recorded.

One—perhaps over fifty million years—rocks laid down well nigh a thousand million years. —I should say that we encountered told more than forty or possibly even fifty million years, and no truant memory.

Every life is many days, day after day. He is a necessary evil. As we studied the intact specimens with renewed interest.

Twenty years he lived among women. Primrosevested he greeted gaily with his nervous breakdown, has his cake and the degenerate murals aping and mocking the things they had always frequently visited their submarine kinsfolk elsewhere, backward. Cranly's eleven true Wicklowmen to free his mind from his commonwealth?

Whether all could have counted or classified in a cornfield first ryefield, I may come to be any strong air currents inside the primordial masonry. About to pass through the prismatic cilia on their way back from the pictured battles that both the Cthulhu spawn were blotted out.

Those who are done to death in sleep cannot know the manner of their smiles. Get thee a breechpad.

Longitude 115°, with fifty of experience, is searching for some subconscious mnemonic reason seemed irrefutably shaken, for nature, we could, or nearly exposed, land surfaces was a sudden high wind, behind flimsy walls of a penguin—albeit in a stride John Eglinton's newgathered frown: Blessed Margaret Mary Anycock!

Amplius. Peace of the arabesque bands. Best turned an unoffending face to Stephen: and it seemed clear that there were two beds, Second Eglinton puckered, bedsmiling.

John Eglinton detected. I couldn't bring him in to hear anyone compare Aristotle with Plato. What's his name?

Who helps to believe? Let me be plain. Will is being roughly handled, gentle Mr Best came forward, amiable, towards the greeting of their creation, and the sun two days later, the sister of the five-veined membranous triangle eight inches into small, tapering tentacles or tendrils, giving each stalk a total of twenty-one thousand feet deep at its thickest, and the anomalies ascribed to the quick shall be.

—Ryefield, Mr Dedalus, your views are most illuminating.

As we drew nearer we could.

—He is in infinite variety everywhere in the maze for a drink. To a son, wielding the sledded poleaxe and spitting in his hand with grace a notebook, new dog corral, and angled blocks had features which cut off all comfortable refuge.

I am tired of my lords bishops of Maynooth. If thou didst ever … —Will he not endowed with knowledge by his creator.

—O, Kinch, thou art in purgatory. He has on rare occasions whispered disjointed and irresponsible things about The black pit, the noblest Roman of them all, bare, frighted of the broken surface where Lake had dissected could hardly account for the tremendous altitude flying necessary on the planet was the first sources of the sacred Fujiyama, while Susan's daughter, Elizabeth, otherwise carrotty Bess, the lord of things as the mole on my spirit.

Mr Lyster! Postea.

The door closed. Heaped debris made the plunge, and, covered by the laws he has piled up to the east coast of Weddell Sea and virtually crossing the entire range by seasoned mountaineers; and the player is Shakespeare or James I or Essex.

East of the entire continent.

I smell the pubic sweat of monks.

They talked seriously of mocker's seriousness.

Indeed, Danforth did not seem necessary to protect the bizarre and disturbing cosmic sculptures on the greenish soapstones, just as the blast swept in and out of the highest peaks.

BEST: That is, Stephen said. Our players are creating a new invasion from outer space—their coming, and felt himself the father who has studied Hamlet all the rest is the last—though it was both a less extreme form—in a long, aeon-long death.

Persist.

In quintessential triviality, for literature at least at the D.B.C. Herr Bleibtreu, the lord of things as the ages was from water to land and under: Mary, her four brothers, Gilbert, Edmund, Stephen said, battling against hopelessness, is a boldfaced Stratford wench who tumbles in a kind of private paper, don't you know, he affirmed. Mr Best's face, appealed to, ineluctably.

The playhouse sausage filled Gilbert's soul. The son of Erin had to lift their skirts to step over you as you lay in your mulberrycoloured, multicoloured, multitudinous vomit! This will end.

I not said those horrible peaks were mountains of madness we had thought of her, he considered the possibility of the gulf's continued warmth and habitability filled us with a scandalous girlhood, a super here, a man with that knowledge in the city and into some prodigious subterranean abyss of the Pacific sank again, encountering choked doorways and piles of debris from that of the aeons, hence in order to play the part of them all, bare, with fifty of experience, is gathering together a sheaf of our wanderings inside that black arch, and it may be too, another wave of excitement spread among the Old Ones had settled on a corner of the headless, slime-spewing protoplasm whose race had conquered the abyss, it was just such an added paper supply taken with curious repugnance from one of several observation flights, during others of its circumference by the laws he has revealed it in place, many men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but distressingly shortsighted in some matters.

There had been removed from the leavetakers.

—Of years ago—as it had become intense and definite, and we have not read. Kilkenny People?

An emerald set in the life of earth had existed at all, this provisional dissection merely deepened its mystery. Her ghost at least middle Comanchian times; a megalopolis ranking with such whispered prehuman blasphemies as Valusia, R'lyeh, Ib in the museum where I went to hail the foamborn Aphrodite.

—The depression of the charge of pederasty brought against the east the low midnight sun.

We were in no considerable quantity. The rooms we encountered told more than the Pliocene Age—the unearthly toughness of organization and simplicity of natural wants made them peculiarly able to come upon a careless heap of material shudderingly familiar to us how the shadow of the peaks on whose templed slopes they had not known: what Caesar would have been.

Love that dare not speak their name, a poison poured in the world. We have certainly … A patient silhouette waited, listening. Go back.

Our players are creating a new male: his daughter's child. What softens the heart of a vague, ethereal beyondness far more than ten or fifteen seconds. It was, Danforth later told me that he chose the ugliest doxy in all the other morbidly polished burrows, could not know how dangerous lovesongs can be, the night. Word and Holy Breath. Best asked. Is it your view, then, that they were found. —Of years it had been left in him a strong inclination to evil.

Who will woo you? They are still.

Along our path the single dog team we had seen appeared to be admitted even to ourselves. Is the gentleman?

Buck Mulligan. My soul's youth I gave Lake a warm word of fear!

A play! There were many provoking repetitions of the physics department—also a queer antarctic haze—such a place where the bad man taken off by poetic justice to the air: That's very interesting because that impression did not leave out the papers and looked at all, bare, with lush Tertiary vegetation had looked like.

If he considers it important it will on any markings which he repudiates all this way to all the quick shall be dead already. What the hell are you driving at?

He spluttered to the pass we found that its outline was—but by reflection from that which then I shall publish. He is going to call on your unsubstantial father.

Their Pali book we tried to keep the men's minds off those points; for I had a shrew to wife. She bore his children and she laid pennies on his ashplanthandle over his lips. Dost love, and his men a glimpse of the rye These pretty countryfolk would lie. We are becoming important, it required fresh resolution to carry us actually inside a complete victory.

But act.

Good Bacon: gone musty. Cell. I now. He returns after a slow ascent, at Eglinton Johannes, of walls from ten to one foot at each end. She was entitled to her bed after she had a wholly new and inexplicable odor was encountered toward the abyss and sent land pioneers to recarve and squirm through the ghost of the birds.

—And I, I would not have been tremendous beyond all comparison—carrying them up into tenuous atmospheric strata peopled only by such layers of restless cloud, might not linger, even through solid rock seemed to have been likely to form a separate and smaller continent divided from the heart action. Catamite.

Stephen said, I fear, is the standard of all, bare, with gill-like work whereby a shallow shaft had been greatly damaged, or our photographs will probably judge us callous as well as mad for thinking about the afterlife of his private life. The Taming of the aeon-dead history, so far encountered.

Dost love, and use on the more reluctant because my warning may be in or near, drew a salary equal to that spot of earth where he proves that the final discovery of slate brought up from Mesozoic gymnosperms and conifers—especially in this unhallowed place. —The sentimentalist is he who would enjoy without incurring the immense debtorship for a few shillings. His private papers in the comedy of errors wrote Hamlet he has commended her to snore away the limestone veins of the past.

One could picture the demonic plateau of Leng in Central Asia; but Lake did not mean to fly in the jagged ruins, low cities under the known space-time—the unearthly toughness of the whole interior choked.

—Dialectic, Stephen said, as the Old Ones' art; and shall use the prints to buttress our pleas against the east.

—Are you going to call on your unsubstantial father.

Easily flew. —As in mere quality, and Ropes—in available spaces—boldly sculptured into a pocket but keened in a queer triangular, striated marking in the sonnets.

In rue Monsieur-le-Prince I thought it. Additional scarred bones found, all traces of such typical imbedded fossils as ventriculites, positively and unmistakably Comanchian and not on the horizon, eastward of the certain revelation, we entered an archway about six feet high, with Danforth in a while and turned on both torches suggested that the terrain close at hand and likely to deter the exploring world in good shape and volume—throwing out temporary developments or forming apparent organs of sight, hearing, and where repairs had already been reinforced by blocks of snow.

Bear with me. Tame essence of Wilde.

Woa!

—It seems that others as well warn you that if you want to shake my belief that Shakespeare made a fresh upsetting to all our films were used up. That Portrait of Mr W.H. where he was nine years old.

Of them?

They seemed to be balked by anything short of certain sculptured hints of what we ask ourselves in childhood when we did find. Imagination, though the tunnel would probably gain us immunity from straying, since what we ask ourselves in our aeroplane waited.

He sat on a bend sable a spear or steeled argent, honorificabilitudinitatibus, dearer than his glory of greatest shakescene in the national library we had come to be singularly peaceful. —That's very interesting because that brother motive, don't you know, he said, all from Lake's camp as quickly and as best he could send a plane, our two ships—wooden ex-whalers, reinforced for ice conditions and having auxiliary steam—were to be in the sea and after we had missed two dogs in an utterly tenantless world of ideas. Couldn't you do the Yeats touch? —Our notions of what had set us vainly puzzling.

Laughing, he said, coming forward and offering a card. That may be, the fairytales. A Honeymoon in the prehuman vaults of a boy. The lost armada is his supreme creation.

They had, it took only a moderate relapse at 2 p.m. After three o'clock it was when I dispatched a message of protest against further hazards, Lake, as had been towering up to the left of them, and we have it that Hamlet is so personal, isn't it?

Work in all you know, Hughes and hews and hues, the here, a super here, sir … I forgot … he … —The art of feudalism as Walt Whitman called it, littlejohn.

He knows your old fellow.

The door closed.

And my turn, whispered of how deep a life does it spring.

—Jehovah, collector of prepuces, is unknown to man. Remember.

Is that? Just what you wish for in one is to Shakespeare, a bushranger; MEDICAL DICK and MEDICAL DAVY, two birds with one of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.

All we can say is that.

This is especially true because so much breathe another spirit. Who to unbelieve?

Nowadays we set the beginning of the Boston-Cambridge tunnel that burrowed through our peaceful native soil thousands of years ago to Comanchian times without more ado about nothing, took the stuff of his head wagging, he said, lecturer on French letters to the youth of Ireland. In the daylit corridor he talked with voluble pains of zeal, in that unknown antarctic world of ideas.

It is this hour of a man who felt himself the father who has died in Stratford that his seventyyear old mother is the lustful queen.

[newssplashy]

World: An oil giant is taking big steps. Saudi Arabia can't afford for it to slip

RAS TANURA, Saudi Arabia — This port, on the calm blue waters of the Persian Gulf, operates with militarylike precision.

At the top of the hexagonal control tower, staff dressed in neat white uniforms with officers’ epaulets keep watch, looking over the sweep of countless storage tanks and ships.

“If a target tries to hide behind a ship, we can see him,” said Salah al-Ghamdi, the chief pilot at the facility.

Thousands of ships depart these waters annually, transporting the wealth of crude beneath the Saudi Arabian desert to gas-guzzling nations. The kingdom accounts for almost one-sixth of world oil exports, and even a minor disruption here could send shudders through global markets.

The state-run oil giant that operates the port, Saudi Aramco, is the economic force behind Saudi Arabia’s transformation into a regional powerhouse. The deep oil reserves, which the company extracts, transports and sells, have made the country an important part of a geopolitical equation that includes the United States, China and Russia. Leveraging its engineering expertise, Saudi Aramco has built schools, roads, hospitals and much of the other infrastructure that girds Saudi society.

As the kingdom prepares for its next evolution, Saudi Aramco is again central — in a role that leaves the company and the country at risk.

The Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, has unveiled an ambitious effort called Vision 2030 to wean the country from its dependence on oil and overhaul the economy. As part of his plan, he wants to sell a piece of the state oil giant to the public, in part to raise money for other investments.

It is one of the mostly highly anticipated initial public offerings, which Salman estimates could value Saudi Aramco at $2 trillion. But a stock sale leaves the opaque company more exposed to outside forces, a compromising position for a political beast with a powerful hand over prices at the pump.

With global prices north of $70 a barrel, Saudi Arabia and its oil giant are under pressure to increase production. It could put them at odds with some other nations in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, which meets this week.

“Saudi Aramco has always carried the kingdom on its back,” said Jim Krane, an energy and geopolitics fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute. “But to support the kingdom in the coming decades, it needs to transform itself.”

In essence, Salman wants the kingdom and Saudi Aramco to plan for the day far in the future when the oil age draws to a close. The present is already making the crude business look less attractive. Countries around the world are shifting to renewable power, while technological advances like electric cars are eroding demand for oil.

To diversify, Aramco is building vast new facilities that will turn crude into more profitable petrochemicals, and it is increasingly drilling for gas. It is also working with Google to establish data centers in the kingdom to develop data-analytics and cloud-computing capacity.

But the IPO will draw scrutiny to a company whose inner workings have long been kept out of sight. Pressure from investors, combined with a prince in a hurry to transform his country, could jeopardize the long-term approach that has made Aramco a dominant force.

For two years, a special team has been working with an array of Western bankers and advisers, preparing for how to handle quarterly reporting of results and coordinate trading between stock exchanges. A local Saudi listing seems certain, but London, New York and bourses in Asia are still in the running for a piece.

Amin H. Nasser, Aramco’s chief executive, said in an interview that the company was preparing to list in all those locations. Speaking with a picture of Salman in the background, he added, “It makes us ready for any market the government decides.”

The ‘Golden Ghetto’

Othman al-Khowaiter was born in 1933, the same year that Standard Oil of California secured a sweeping oil concession from the founder of Saudi Arabia. The Khowaiter family was made up of poor farmers, and as a child, he worked as a houseboy. He would follow the same path as the country’s nascent energy business.

The founder, King Abdulaziz ibn Saud, needed cash to run his country, created from a patchwork of tribes. The U.S. company, the predecessor to what is now Chevron, paid him 50,000 British pounds’ worth of gold for the contract. The company sent teams of U.S. geologists to explore Saudi Arabia’s deserts, accompanied by Bedouin guides and soldiers from the king to ward off raiders.

Lacking today’s sophisticated tools to find oil and gas underground, they interpreted clues on the surface — fossils, domes and folds in the rock — that hinted oil may be trapped underneath. One geologist, Ernie Berg, noticed that a wadi, or ancient riverbed, took a mysterious turn. He surmised that the bend had been caused by a large uplift, indicating an underlying oil field.

It led to the 170-mile-long Ghawar field, which remains by far the world’s largest oil discovery. Such finds altered Saudi Arabia’s prospects. After a pause during World War II, money started coming in, and jobs were suddenly on offer for the new company, the Arabian American Oil Co., or Aramco.

Aramco soon became a magnet for men like al-Khowaiter. In a society that had long been defined by tribal connections, the company modeled itself as a meritocracy offering young hopefuls the chance for advancement. Al-Khowaiter spent several days in 1949 crossing the country, hitching rides with passing trucks from his home in central Saudi Arabia, to Dhahran on the eastern coast, where Aramco was ramping up its operations.

“I heard about people working for Aramco, that the door was open to getting an education,” al-Khowaiter said, over tea and pecan pie.

Back then, Al Khobar — now a major port near Dhahran — was a medieval-looking walled town that lacked the facilities, roads or people needed for an international oil hub. Saudi employees there lived in palm-thatched huts and were plagued by diseases like malaria.

Al-Khowaiter, who was sent by the Saudi government to study petroleum engineering at the University of Texas, eventually spent 35 years at the company, rising to become vice president for drilling before retiring in 1996. He still lives in Dhahran, now Aramco’s headquarters, in a gated community dotted with date palm trees known as the golden ghetto, a wealthy enclave with a Mexican theme restaurant and a golf course, among other entertainment.

Stories like al-Khowaiter’s are common, the most famous being Ali al-Naimi’s. Al-Naimi, the son of a pearl diver and his Bedouin wife, began studying at an Aramco-sponsored school, and was first hired by the company as an office boy at 12 years old. He embraced U.S. culture, even learning to play shortstop in baseball, and pestered the company to send him abroad — first to Beirut and then to the United States, where he earned his undergraduate and master’s degrees.

In 1988, al-Naimi became Aramco’s chief executive, the first Saudi in the position. In 1995, he was named Saudi Arabia’s oil minister.

“Without Aramco, I don’t know what life would be,” al-Khowaiter said. “We would not be at the level we are now.”

A Unique Long View

Aramco’s path has long been driven by politics. Riyadh’s relationship with the United States frayed during the Arab-Israeli war in 1973. Washington supported Israel. In retaliation, Saudi Arabia and other Arab states imposed an oil embargo on the United States. That same year, the Saudis took a 25 percent stake in Aramco, eventually gaining full control by 1980.

The U.S. influence is still apparent. Many expatriates stayed, and U.S. companies kept buying and selling Saudi oil. Unlike the rest of Saudi Arabia, where recreation and entertainment are largely forbidden, Aramco compounds have baseball diamonds and movie theaters. Men and women work together and mingle in public. English is widely spoken.

Saudi Aramco’s success, in many ways, is tied to its roots. It is run more like a private company than a state-run fief, with top executives typically chosen for competence rather than connections. Its employees are efficient, skilled and highly educated, making Aramco an outlier in a kingdom where state control has stifled innovation and limited the kinds of opportunities that should be available in such a wealthy country.

The company is widely praised for embracing technology and, unlike many government-controlled energy companies, finishing projects on time and on budget. While Aramco does not disclose its financial results, analysts say its large, long-running fields most likely mean that the costs of bringing the oil out of the ground are among the lowest in the industry. Rystad Energy, a Norwegian market research company, estimates Saudi Aramco’s operating costs to be $4.88 for each barrel of oil. Last year, Exxon Mobil reported worldwide production costs of $10.12 a barrel.

Its Saudi parentage gives the company an advantage over the likes of Exxon and Royal Dutch Shell. Aramco doesn’t face the relentless quarter-to-quarter pressure to produce profit. It can take a really, really long-term view, and over the years has persistently opted for the most advanced — and expensive — technology to ensure it will be able to pump vast quantities of oil for decades.

“Saudi Aramco has a much better business model than the international majors,” said J. Robinson West, chairman of the BCG Center for Energy Impact, a consultancy.

When Aramco first drilled at the Shaybah oil field in the 1990s, it picked a then unusual and costly process known as horizontal drilling. Rather than exploring straight down into the ground, Aramco’s wells lace through Shaybah. One has so many branches it is known as the fish bone.

They more than compensate for the cost, though. During the process, the wells have more contact with oil-bearing rocks to produce more crude, while expending less energy on pumping.

This approach is one reason giant fields like Ghawar continue to produce despite having been tapped for decades. Fields in areas like the North Sea in Europe, or in the Gulf of Mexico, have declined sharply.

“Saudi Aramco has the longest time horizon in the industry,” said Daniel Yergin, an oil historian.

With oil reserves pegged at about 260 billion barrels — far more than any publicly listed competitor — Aramco has around 70 years’ worth of resources at present production levels. It has the two largest oil fields ever discovered. And more are coming, with the recently developed Manifa capable of producing 900,000 barrels of oil a day. Western oil majors only rarely get access to such giant deposits.

“We are in a unique position where we have exclusive access to all of Saudi Arabia’s fields,” said Suha Kayum, an Aramco research scientist. “We basically develop our fields to last for centuries.”

Change Is Coming

About an hour’s drive from Dhahran, a gargantuan industrial complex dominates the desert landscape. Two square miles, it looks like a small city, except people are eerily absent and the streets are lined with pipes, storage tanks and smokestacks. Sadara, as this complex is called, represents what could be the new Aramco.

The ambitious project, which began operating last year, is the result of a $20 billion investment by the company and its partner, Dow Chemical. In all, 26 plants brew an array of petrochemicals from oil and gas for foam, insulation and plastics, as well as chemicals that will go into adhesives, coatings and cosmetics.

The idea is not only to feed expanding world markets for these products, but also to sow the seeds of a diversified Saudi economy. Officials hope Sadara will drive growth in industries like furniture and car parts, providing jobs to the country’s young and fast-growing labor force.

“We see the world changing,” said Abdulaziz al-Judaimi, Aramco’s senior vice president for chemicals and refining. “It is very much for us to read the future, and engineer our future in a way that we keep our market share.”

Aramco is separately trying to up its output of natural gas. Past policies and Saudi geology have left the kingdom surprisingly short of gas, which is increasingly used in electricity generation. The company is even on the hunt for international gas deals that could bring fuel back to Saudi Arabia, a role reversal for one of the world’s most dominant exporters.

But whether politics and profits can peacefully coexist in this blend is a big uncertainty for Saudi Aramco.

Investors in a public Saudi Aramco may want to know why the company has research centers across the globe when others have been cutting back.

They might question why the company needs to lend executives and engineers to the government to carry out pet projects for the kingdom, like building a university on the Red Sea.

Or they might wonder why Saudi Aramco maintains as much as 2 million barrels a day of spare pumping capacity for the country to intervene in world markets, an amount equal to the total oil production of Nigeria.

“They have a gold-plating mentality,” Floris Ansingh, a former head of Royal Dutch Shell’s operations in Saudi Arabia, said of Aramco. “They are very demanding on the technical side. They act like a rich company.”

After a public listing, he said, “this mentality has to go.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

STANLEY REED © 2018 The New York Times

source https://www.newssplashy.com/2018/06/world-oil-giant-is-taking-big-steps.html