To see the golden sun and the azure sky, the outstretched ocean, to walk upon the green ea

wishing that we had snow oftener, that English winters were more wintry. How delightful it would be, I thought, to have months of clean snow and a landscape sparkling with frost instead of innumerable grey featureless days of rain and raw winds. I began to envy my friends in such places as the Eastern States of America and Canada, who can count upon a solid winter every year and know that the snow will arrive by a certain date and will remain, without degenerating into black slush, until Spring is close at hand. To have snow and frost and yet a clear sunny sky and air as crisp as a biscuit—this seemed to me happiness indeed. And then I saw that it would never do for us. We should be sick of it in a week. After the first day the magic would be gone and there would be nothing left but the unchanging glare of the day and the bitter cruel nights.

t can, and saw the dragonfly alight on the tip of my rod as it hovered a few inches from the surface of water. It was the arrival of this fly that convinced me beyond any doubt that everything was as it always had been, that the years were a mirage and that there had been no years. The small waves were the same chucking the rowboat under the chin as we fished at anchor, and the boat was the same boat, the same color green and the ribs broken in the same places, and under the floorboards the same freshwater leavings and debris—the wisps of moss, the rusty discarded fishhook, the dried blood from yesterdays catch. We stared silently at the tips of our rods, at the dragonflies that came and went. I lowered the tip of mine into the water, tentatively, pensively dislodging the fly, which darted two feet away, poised, darted two feet back, and came to rest again a little farther up the rod. We would be tired at night and lie down in the accumulated heat of the bedrooms after the long hot day and the breeze would stir almost imperceptibly outside and the smell of the swamp drift in through the rusty screens. Sleep would come easily and in the morning the red squirrel would be on the roof, tapping out his gay routine.

g know they are wretched, for they are full of the truthless ideals which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real they are bruised and wounded. It looks as if they were victims of a conspiracy; for the books they read, ideal by the necessity of selection, and the conversation of their elders, who look back upon the past through a rosy haze of forgetfulness, prepare them for an unreal life. They must discover for themselves that all they have read and all they have been told are lies, lies, lies; and each discovery is another nail drivens into the body on the cross of life. The strange thing is that each one who has gone through that bitter disillusionment adds to it in his turn, unconsciously, by the power within him which is stronger than himself.

. The absence of it is not an assured ground of condemnation, but the presence of it is an invariable sign of goodness of heart. In proportion to the degree in which it is felt will probably be the degree in which nobleness and beauty of character will be attained. Natural beauty is an all-pervading presence. The universe is its temple. It unfolds into the numberless flowers of spring. It waves in the branches of trees and the green blades of grass. It haunts the depths of the earth and the sea. It gleams from the hues of the shell and the precious stone. And not only these minute objects but the oceans, the mountains, the clouds, the stars, the rising and the setting sun—all overflow with beauty. This beauty is so precious, and so congenial to our tenderest and noblest feelings, that it is painful to think of the multitude of people living in the midst of it and yet remaining almost blind to it.

el. The demolition and reconstruction of public life is the result of personal decisions made every day: the decision to give up a seat on the bus; the decision to be patient or pleasant against all the odds; the decision to let that jerk take a left-hand turn from a right-hand lane without rolling down the window and calling him a jerk. Its the resolution to be a civil, social creature. This may be a peak period for the battle against the spread of a waistline and creeping cholesterol. But it is also within our will power to fight the spread of urban rudeness and creeping hostility. Civility doesnt stop nuclear holocaust and doesnt put a roof over the head of the homeless. But it makes a difference in the shape of a community, as surely as lifting weights can make a difference in the shape of a human torso.

odily form. By a succession of adaptations, most of which are favourable and none of which are lethal, living things have invested in particular expectations about the future course of their environments. If those theories are good enough, then life will prosper and multiply; but if they are outmoded by changing conditions, their embodiments will dwindle and perish. Science and art are two things most uniquely human. They witness to a desire to see beyond the seen. They display the crowning successes of the objective and subjective views of the world. But while they spring from a shared source—the careful observation of things—they evoke different theories about the world; what it means, what its inner connections truly are, and what we should judge as important. Science and art have diverged. As science became more successful in its quest to explain the seen by unseen laws of Nature, so art became increasingly subjective, metaphorical, and divorced from realistic representation.

d in particular, music and dancing; which it would be cruelty to bar the sex of, because they are their darlings. But besides this, they should be taught languages, as particularly French and Italian; and I would venture the injury of giving a woman more tongues than one. They should, as a particular study, be taught all the graces of speech, and all the necessary air of conversation; which our common education is so defective in, that I need not expose it. They should be brought to read books, and especially history; and so to read as to make them understand the world, and be able to know and judge of things when they hear of them. To such whose genius would lead them to it, I would deny no sort of learning; but the chief thing, in general, is to cultivate the understandings of the sex, that they may be capable of all sorts of conversation; that their parts and judgments being improved, they may be as profitable in their conversation as they are pleasant.

ere are other appropriate ways of apprehending human experience) is an art of long standing, necessarily so since it springs instinctively from the impulse to enlarge the range of immediate experience; and however camouflaged by the disfiguring jargon of science, it is still in essence what it has always been. History in this sense is story, in aim always a true story; a story that employs all the devices of literary art (statement and generalization, narration and description, comparison and comment and analogy) to present the succession of events in the life of man, and from the succession of events thus presented to derive a satisfactory meaning. The history written by historians, like the history informally fashioned by Mr. Everyman, is thus a convenient blend of truth and fancy, of what we commonly distinguish as "fact" and "interpretation". In primitive times, when tradition is orally transmitted, bards and story-tellers frankly embroider or improvise the facts to heighten the dramatic import of the story. With the use of written records, history, gradually occurred; and with the increase and refinement of knowledge the historian recognized that his first duty is to be sure of his facts, let their meaning be what it may. Nevertheless, in every age history is taken to be a story of actual events from which a significant meaning may be derived; and in every age the illusion is that the present version is valid because the related facts are true, whereas former version are invalid because based upon inaccurate or inadequate facts.

the problem of gravity, since it had been evident to him from the outset that one thing missing from the special theory was gravity. What was "special" about the special theory was that it dealt with things moving in an essentially unimpeded state. But what happened when a thing in motion—light, above all— encountered an obstacle such as gravity? It was a question that would occupy his thoughts for most of the next decade and lead to the publication in early 1917 of a paper entitled " Cosmological Considerations on the General Theory of Relativity. " The special theory of relativity of 1905 was a profound and important piece of work, of course, but as C. P. Snow once observed, if Einstein hadnt thought of it when he did someone else would have, probably within five years; it was an idea waiting to happen. But the general theory was something else altogether. "Without it," wrote Snow in 1979, "it is likely that we should still be waiting for the theory today. "

n touch and within reach of so many people. And yet, weve never been so lonely, either. Which is to say, our loneliness is largely something weve inflicted on ourselves through countless lifestyle. choices, many of them good, some even critical. But in the end, is it all worth it? What is lost when we have e-mail pals on the other side of the world, but dont know our own neighbors? Are bigger salaries, bigger cars, bigger homes worth the price of smaller social circles and diminished relationships? Our loneliness has costs: crime goes up when neighbors dont look out for each other. The burden on public services increases when were not helping each other out. And the din of an iPod is no substitute for genuine connection with another human being. Theres no easy way out of our collective loneliness, and no solutions that come without trade-offs. But some of those trade-offs are worth reconsidering, lest we consume our lives with the things that matter least, at the expense of those that matter most.