She has no mouth with which to kiss, no hands with which to caress, only the fangs and talons of a beast of prey. To touch the mineral sheen of the flesh revealed in the cool candle gleam is to invite her fatal embrace; in her low, sweet voice, she will croon the lullaby of the House of Nosferatu.

Had he been a cat, he would have bounced backwards from her hands on four fearstiffened legs, but he is not a cat: he is a hero.

Although so young, he is also rational. He has chosen the most rational mode of transportation in the world for his trip round the Carpathians. To ride a bicycle is in itself some protection against superstitious fears, since the bicycle is the product of pure reason applied to motion. Geometry at the service of man! Give me two spheres and a straight line and I will show you how far I can take them. Voltaire himself might have invented the bicycle, since it contributes so much to man's welfare and nothing at all to his bane. Beneficial to the health, it emits no harmful fumes and permits only the most decorous speeds. How can a bicycle ever be an implement of harm?

She is so beautiful she is unnatural; her beauty is an abnormality, a deformity, for none of her features exhibit any of those touching imperfections that reconcile us to the imperfection of the human condition. Her beauty is a symptom of her disorder, of her soullessness.

Her voice is filled with distant sonorities, like reverberations in a cave: now you are at the place of annihilation, now you are at the place of annihilation. And she is herself a cave full of echoes, she is a system of repetitions, she is a closed circuit. "Can a bird sing only the song it knows or can it learn a new song?" She draws her long, sharp fingernail across the bars of the cage in which her pet lark sings, striking a plangent twang like that of the plucked heartstrings of a woman of metal. Her hair falls down like tears.

Abashed the devil stood,
And felt how awful goodness is, and saw
Virtue in her shape how lovely, saw, and pined
His loss.

We make these
ridiculous idols so we can pray to what's behind them,
but what happens after we get up the ladder?
Do we simply stare at what is horrible and forgive it?
Here is the river, and here is the box, and here are
the monsters we put in the box to test our strength
against. Here is the cake, and here is the fork, and here's
the desire to put it inside us, and then the question
behind every question: What happens next?

You're in a car with a beautiful boy, and he won't tell you that he loves you, but he loves you. And you feel like you've done something terrible, like robbed a liquor store, or swallowed pills, or shoveled yourself a grave in the dirt, and you're tired. You're in a car with a beautiful boy, and you're trying not to tell him that you love him, and you're trying to choke down the feeling, and you're trembling, but he reaches over and he touches you, like a prayer for which no words exist, and you feel your heart taking root in your body, like you've discovered something you don't even have a name for.

O how he loves you, darling boy. O how, like always, he invents the monsters underneath the bed to get you to sleep next to him, chest to chest or chest to back, the covers drawn around you in an act of faith against the night.

You're falling now. You're swimming. This is not
harmless. You are not
breathing.

Even when you're standing up
you look like you're lying down, but will you let me kiss your neck, baby?
Do I have to tie your arms down? Do I have to stick my tongue in your
mouth like the hand of a thief,
like a burglary, like it's just another petty theft?

I'm battling monsters, I'm pulling you out of the burning buildings
and you say I'll give you anything but you never come through.

All night I stretched my arms across
him, rivers of blood, the dark woods, singing
with all my skin and bone Please keep him safe.
Let him lay his head on my chest and we will be
like sailors, swimming in the sound of it, dashed
to pieces. Makes a cathedral, him pressing against
me, his lips at my neck, and yes, I do believe
his mouth is heaven, his kisses falling over me
like stars.

A few decades back, Icelandic authorities felt that a good way to keep the Icelanders from killing themselves with the sauce would be to ban beer.
To ban beer.
The logic went something like this: The Icelanders are hopeless alcoholics. They will drink themselves into a stupor on any given evening. Come morning, they will naturally want the hair of the dog, ergo beer. If we give the Icelanders beer, they will drink it like soda pop, and will be locked forever in a vicious cycle of alcoholism. So we'd better just let them drink hard liquor, to save them from themselves.
Er ... yeah. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to spot the holes in that argument. To exacerbate the problem, in the early 1980s a new fad gripped Iceland: that of English beer pubs, the kind that offer draught. Beer pubs sprouted like mushrooms. The only problem was there was no beer to put on the taps.
But the Icelanders don't die without a plan, as on of the more succinct Icelandic idioms puts it. They came up with the idea of mixing light beer (what the Icelanders calls pilsner and which is around 2 % alcohol) with hard liquor (the wicked Brennivin, or just plain old vodka) and putting it in kegs to be served in tap.

Alle du møter, forvandlar deg, meir eller mindre, sjølvsagt, men du blir eit menneske i møtet med andre. Utan andre, er du ingen.

Dei fleste menneske i det vestlige verda nyttar tre fjerdedelar av dagen til å sitje. Denne utviklinga ersjølvsagt utmerka for ein møbelhandlar, men sett i større perspektiv er den alarmerande.

Har du levd et liv på løgn, sluttar du ikkje brått med det ein ettermiddag i februar.