The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

The true story of a woman whose enormous gift to science was shamefully repaid

By Laura Miller

The scientific story told in Rebecca Skloot's "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" is marvel enough: Lacks died in 1951, but also lives on in the form of cells, taken from a single biopsy, that have proven easier to grow in a lab than any other human tissue ever sampled. So easy, in fact, that one scientist has estimated that if you could collect all of the cells descended from that first sample on a scale, the total would weigh 50 million metric tons. Lacks' famous cell line, known as HeLa, has played a key role in the development of cures and treatments for polio, AIDS, infertility and cancer, as well as research into cloning, gene mapping and radiation.

There's a run-of-the-mill "The Cells That Changed the World" book in that premise, and one with a better claim to credibility than most of the "Changed the World" titles that have flooded bookstores since Dava Sobel's "Longitude" became a surprise bestseller 14 years ago. But "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" is far from run-of-the-mill -- it's indelible. Skloot (whom -- full disclosure -- I know slightly) spent a decade tracking down Lacks' surviving family and winning over their much-abused trust, a process that becomes part of the story she tells. Actually, it often takes over the story entirely. Just as the DNA in a cell's nucleus contains the blueprint for an entire organism, so does the story of Henrietta Lacks hold within it the history of medicine and race in America, a history combining equal parts of shame and wonder.

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Justinguitar.com

THE site for everything guitar.  Lessons for all abilities.

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Tako Poke

Tako Poke  (Octopus salad)

INGREDIENTS
1 lb. cooked tako (octopus), blanched and thinly sliced
1/4 cup roughly chopped onions
1/4 cup finely julienned green onions
1 tsp. finely chopped ginger
1 tbsp. chopped seaweed (ogo)
1 tbsp. sesame oil
1/2 tsp. roasted sesame seeds
1/4 cup shoyu
Chili sauce
Hawaiian rock salt

INSTRUCTIONS
Slice the cooked tako sideways. In a small mixing bowl combine tako with remaining ingredients. Season to taste. Chill and serve.  If ogo is hard to come by, any crunchy, slender stemmed greens will do.

Tofu
Tofu (firm) works equally well with this recipe.

TED

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Get Happy

Corned Beef Souped up with Kim Chee and Sausage

Even if your Crock-Pot makes few appearances in your life, March is the time to drag it out from under the counter behind the big pots.

St. Patrick's Day corned beef is one of those foolproof slow-cooker meals: Put in pot with liquid and spice packet, turn to low, go away for 10 hours.

But for Part 3 of my series, "Slow Ono," a monthly exploration of local-style slow-cooking, I've got something different you can try this March 17. Idea credit goes to Wade Ueoka, a chef with Alan Wong's restaurant, who once made a pot of corned beef soup at home. He used Italian sausage, russet potatoes and savoy cabbage, but suggested trying kim chee and any type of sausage. I suggested araimo, or Japanese taro, in place of the potatoes.

It was beginning to sound slooow ono.

It so happens that Don Quixote was having a sale on Kukui Sausage Co. products -- I picked the pastele variety made with pork and bananas. It was a good choice, along with the araimo, which cooks up buttery soft and absorbs all the flavors. Speaking of flavors, I threw in a scoop of guava jelly to give the soup a sweet edge. If this sounds too weird you can leave it out, but I found it gives the broth a rich, intriguing taste.

Now, note that this soup is not at all lean. A variation at the end of the recipe offers ways to cut back the fat and sodium.

Spicy Corned Beef Soup with Kim Chee and Guava

2-1/2 to 3 pounds corned beef, cut in 10 to 12 chunks

1 large onion, in think wedges
1 pound sausage (Italian, Portuguese or any other type)
4 large cloves garlic, crushed
1 to 2 teaspoons crushed red pepper
1 cup water
1 sprig rosemary
2 pounds araimo (small Japanese taro), peeled, or 2 large potatoes, peeled and cut in large pieces
12 ounces won bok or head cabbage kim chee, drained
1/2 cup guava jelly

4 cups spicy greens (watercress, sliced mustard cabbage or sliced chard)

Soak corned beef in water 1 hour; drain to reduce salt.

Place meat, onions and sausage in 6-quart slow-cooker. Add garlic. Sprinkle with crushed pepper. Add water. Top with rosemary. Place araimo or potato on top (they will get too soft if mixed in with meat). Cook 8 to 9 hours on low.

Remove araimo or potatoes and rosemary. Stir in kim chee and jelly. Cook another hour, or until meat is tender.

Skim fat. Taste broth. If it is too salty, add 1 to 2 cups water. Mix in greens and let steep briefly until wilted. Return araimo or potatoes to pot. Serves 10.

Approximate nutritional information, per serving (using Portuguese sausage and assuming 1 cup water is added in end): 600 calories, 34 g total fat, 12 g saturated fat, 110 mg cholesterol, greater than 1,500 mg sodium, 46 g carbohydrate, 5 g fiber, 11 g sugar, 28 g protein.

To reduce sodium and fat: Replace sausage with 2 cans garbanzo beans and/or eliminate kim chee and add another teaspoon chili peppers. You could also refrigerate the broth to let the fat solidify, then scoop it out.

 

A simpler approach

For basic Crock-Pot corned beef, place sliced onions in bottom of a 5- or 6-quart slow-cooker. Lay a 3- to 4-pound corned beef on top, with contents of spice packet. Add 1 cup water or (better) beer. Place large pieces of carrots and potatoes on top. Cook on low 8 to 10 hours, until meat is very tender. To keep potatoes and carrots from getting too soft, remove early. Add sliced cabbage to pot in last 30 minutes.

To add a little isle style, mix equal parts guava jelly and mustard and spread over corned beef before cooking. The broth will take on a deep, sweet flavor.

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What Is It About 20-Somethings?

Why are so many people in their 20s taking so long to grow up?
Annie Ling

[ed. note:  I love the 20s.  They remind me of the 60s --in a good way.  The young people of this generation are clear-eyed, creative, pragmatic and smart, which this article does nothing to dispel].

This question pops up everywhere, underlying concerns about “failure to launch” and “boomerang kids.” Two new sitcoms feature grown children moving back in with their parents — “$#*! My Dad Says,” starring William Shatner as a divorced curmudgeon whose 20-something son can’t make it on his own as a blogger, and “Big Lake,” in which a financial whiz kid loses his Wall Street job and moves back home to rural Pennsylvania. A cover of The New Yorker last spring picked up on the zeitgeist: a young man hangs up his new Ph.D. in his boyhood bedroom, the cardboard box at his feet signaling his plans to move back home now that he’s officially overqualified for a job. In the doorway stand his parents, their expressions a mix of resignation, worry, annoyance and perplexity: how exactly did this happen?

It’s happening all over, in all sorts of families, not just young people moving back home but also young people taking longer to reach adulthood overall. It’s a development that predates the current economic doldrums, and no one knows yet what the impact will be — on the prospects of the young men and women; on the parents on whom so many of them depend; on society, built on the expectation of an orderly progression in which kids finish school, grow up, start careers, make a family and eventually retire to live on pensions supported by the next crop of kids who finish school, grow up, start careers, make a family and on and on. The traditional cycle seems to have gone off course, as young people remain un­tethered to romantic partners or to permanent homes, going back to school for lack of better options, traveling, avoiding commitments, competing ferociously for unpaid internships or temporary (and often grueling) Teach for America jobs, forestalling the beginning of adult life.

The 20s are a black box, and there is a lot of churning in there. One-third of people in their 20s move to a new residence every year. Forty percent move back home with their parents at least once. They go through an average of seven jobs in their 20s, more job changes than in any other stretch. Two-thirds spend at least some time living with a romantic partner without being married. And marriage occurs later than ever. The median age at first marriage in the early 1970s, when the baby boomers were young, was 21 for women and 23 for men; by 2009 it had climbed to 26 for women and 28 for men, five years in a little more than a generation.

We’re in the thick of what one sociologist calls “the changing timetable for adulthood.” Sociologists traditionally define the “transition to adulthood” as marked by five milestones: completing school, leaving home, becoming financially independent, marrying and having a child. In 1960, 77 percent of women and 65 percent of men had, by the time they reached 30, passed all five milestones. Among 30-year-olds in 2000, according to data from the United States Census Bureau, fewer than half of the women and one-third of the men had done so. A Canadian study reported that a typical 30-year-old in 2001 had completed the same number of milestones as a 25-year-old in the early ’70s.

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Getting To Know You

Sake-Steamed Chicken With Ginger and Scallions

Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times

[ed. note:  This works well for fish, too.  Reduce the simmering time.]

Time: 1 1/2 to 2 hours

1 3 1/2 pound chicken, rinsed and patted dry
1 1/2 cups dry sake
Kosher salt
2 tablespoons soy sauce
2 tablespoons orange juice
2 teaspoons rice vinegar
1 1/2 teaspoons lemon juice
1 1/2 teaspoons mirin or sweet sherry
1 tablespoon chopped ginger root
1 large garlic clove, minced
3 thinly sliced scallions
2 tablespoons sesame seeds, preferably black.

1. Place a steamer basket in the bottom of a large stockpot. Pour in equal amounts of sake and water, enough to reach the bottom of the steamer basket. Bring to a boil.

2. Generously salt the chicken inside and out; set breast side up in the steamer basket. Reduce the heat to low and cover. Steam the chicken until the juices run clear when pierced with a knife, about 1 to 1 1/2 hours. Turn off the heat and allow to cool for about 20 minutes.

3. To prepare the sauce, in a small bowl whisk together the soy sauce, orange juice, rice vinegar, lemon juice, mirin, ginger and garlic.

4. Remove the chicken from the pot and place on a large cutting board; carve and set pieces on a platter. Spoon some of the sauce over the meat and sprinkle with scallions and sesame seeds. Serve extra sauce on the side for dipping.

Yield: 4 servings.

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Wash Day

 

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Smarter, Happier, More Productive

'I don’t own a computer, have no idea how to work one,’ Woody Allen told an interviewer recently. Most of us have come to find computers indispensable, but he manages to have a productive life without one. Are those of us with computers really better off?

There are two ways that computers might add to our wellbeing. First, they could do so indirectly, by increasing our ability to produce other goods and services. In this they have proved something of a disappointment. In the early 1970s, American businesses began to invest heavily in computer hardware and software, but for decades this enormous investment seemed to pay no dividends. As the economist Robert Solow put it in 1987, ‘You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.’ Perhaps too much time was wasted in training employees to use computers; perhaps the sorts of activity that computers make more efficient, like word processing, don’t really add all that much to productivity; perhaps information becomes less valuable when it’s more widely available. Whatever the case, it wasn’t until the late 1990s that some of the productivity gains promised by the computer-driven ‘new economy’ began to show up – in the United States, at any rate. So far, Europe appears to have missed out on them.

The other way computers could benefit us is more direct. They might make us smarter, or even happier. They promise to bring us such primary goods as pleasure, friendship, sex and knowledge. If some lotus-eating visionaries are to be believed, computers may even have a spiritual dimension: as they grow ever more powerful, they have the potential to become our ‘mind children’. At some point – the ‘singularity’ – in the not-so-distant future, we humans will merge with these silicon creatures, thereby transcending our biology and achieving immortality. It is all of this that Woody Allen is missing out on.

But there are also sceptics who maintain that computers are having the opposite effect on us: they are making us less happy, and perhaps even stupider. Among the first to raise this possibility was the American literary critic Sven Birkerts. In his book The Gutenberg Elegies (1994), Birkerts argued that the computer and other electronic media were destroying our capacity for ‘deep reading’. His writing students, thanks to their digital devices, had become mere skimmers and scanners and scrollers. They couldn’t lose themselves in a novel the way he could. This didn’t bode well, Birkerts thought, for the future of literary culture.

Suppose we found that computers are diminishing our capacity for certain pleasures, or making us worse off in other ways. Why couldn’t we simply spend less time in front of the screen and more time doing the things we used to do before computers came along – like burying our noses in novels? Well, it may be that computers are affecting us in a more insidious fashion than we realise. They may be reshaping our brains – and not for the better. That was the drift of ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid?’, a 2008 cover story by Nicholas Carr in the Atlantic. Carr, a technology writer and a former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review, has now elaborated his indictment of digital culture into a book, The Shallows.

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Time Passing

So here's the problem. If you don't believe in God or an afterlife; or if you believe that the existence of God or an afterlife are fundamentally unanswerable questions; or if you do believe in God or an afterlife but you accept that your belief is just that, a belief, something you believe rather than something you know -- if any of that is true for you, then death can be an appalling thing to think about. Not just frightening, not just painful. It can be paralyzing. The fact that your lifespan is an infinitesimally tiny fragment in the life of the universe, and that there is, at the very least, a strong possibility that when you die, you disappear completely and forever, and that in five hundred years nobody will remember you and in five billion years the Earth will be boiled into the sun: this can be a profound and defining truth about your existence that you reflexively repulse, that you flinch away from and refuse to accept or even think about, consistently pushing to the back of your mind whenever it sneaks up, for fear that if you allow it to sit in your mind even for a minute, it will swallow everything else. It can make everything you do, and everything anyone else does, seem meaningless, trivial to the point of absurdity. It can make you feel erased, wipe out joy, make your life seem like ashes in your hands. Those of us who are skeptics and doubters are sometimes dismissive of people who fervently hold beliefs they have no evidence for simply because they find them comforting -- but when you're in the grip of this sort of existential despair, it can be hard to feel like you have anything but that handful of ashes to offer them in exchange.

But here's the thing. I think it's possible to be an agnostic, or an atheist, or to have religious or spiritual beliefs that you don't have certainty about, and still feel okay about death. I think there are ways to look at death, ways to experience the death of other people and to contemplate our own, that allow us to feel the value of life without denying the finality of death. I can't make myself believe in things I don't actually believe -- Heaven, or reincarnation, or a greater divine plan for our lives -- simply because believing those things would make death easier to accept. And I don't think I have to, or that anyone has to. I think there are ways to think about death that are comforting, that give peace and solace, that allow our lives to have meaning and even give us more of that meaning -- and that have nothing whatsoever to do with any kind of God, or any kind of afterlife.

Here's the first thing. The first thing is time, and the fact that we live in it. Our existence and experience are dependent on the passing of time, and on change. No, not dependent -- dependent is too weak a word. Time and change are integral to who we are, the foundation of our consciousness, and its warp and weft as well. I can't imagine what it would mean to be conscious without passing through time and being aware of it. There may be some form of existence outside of time, some plane of being in which change and the passage of time is an illusion, but it certainly isn't ours.

And inherent in change is loss. The passing of time has loss and death woven into it: each new moment kills the moment before it, and its own death is implied in the moment that comes after. There is no way to exist in the world of change without accepting loss, if only the loss of a moment in time: the way the sky looks right now, the motion of the air, the number of birds in the tree outside your window, the temperature, the placement of your body, the position of the people in the street. It's inherent in the nature of having moments: you never get to have this exact one again.

And a good thing, too. Because all the things that give life joy and meaning -- music, conversation, eating, dancing, playing with children, reading, thinking, making love, all of it -- are based on time passing, and on change, and on the loss of an infinitude of moments passing through us and then behind us. Without loss and death, we don't get to have existence. We don't get to have Shakespeare, or sex, or five-spice chicken, without allowing their existence and our experience of them to come into being and then pass on. We don't get to listen to Louis Armstrong without letting the E-flat disappear and turn into a G. We don't get to watch "Groundhog Day" without letting each frame of it pass in front of us for a 24th of a second and then move on. We don't get to walk in the forest without passing by each tree and letting it fall behind us; we don't even get to stand still in the forest and gaze at one tree for hours without seeing the wind blow off a leaf, a bird break off a twig for its nest, the clouds moving behind it, each manifestation of the tree dying and a new one taking its place.

And we wouldn't want to have it if we could. The alternative would be time frozen, a single frame of the film, with nothing to precede it and nothing to come after. I don't think any of us would want that. And if we don't want that, if instead we want the world of change, the world of music and talking and sex and whatnot, then it is worth our while to accept, and even love, the loss and the death that make it possible.

Here's the second thing. Imagine, for a moment, stepping away from time, the way you'd step back from a physical place, to get a better perspective on it. Imagine being outside of time, looking at all of it as a whole -- history, the present, the future -- the way the astronauts stepped back from the Earth and saw it whole.

Keep that image in your mind. Like a timeline in a history class, but going infinitely forward and infinitely back. And now think of a life, a segment of that timeline, one that starts in, say, 1961, and ends in, say, 2037. Does that life go away when 2037 turns into 2038? Do the years 1961 through 2037 disappear from time simply because we move on from them and into a new time, any more than Chicago disappears when we leave it behind and go to California?

It does not. The time that you live in will always exist, even after you've passed out of it, just like Paris exists before you visit it, and continues to exist after you leave. And the fact that people in the 23rd century will probably never know you were alive... that doesn't make your life disappear, any more than Paris disappears if your cousin Ethel never sees it. Your segment on that timeline will always have been there. The fact of your death doesn't make the time that you were alive disappear.

And it doesn't make it meaningless. Yes, stepping back and contemplating all of time and space can be daunting, can make you feel tiny and trivial. And that perception isn't entirely inaccurate. It's true; the small slice of time that we have is no more important than the infinitude of time that came before we were born, or the infinitude that will follow after we die.

But it's no less important, either.

I don't know what happens when we die. I don't know if we come back in a different body, or if we get to hover over time and space and view it in all its glory and splendor, or if our souls dissolve into the world-soul the way our bodies dissolve into the ground, or if, as seems very likely, we simply disappear. I have no idea. And I don't know that it matters. What matters is that we get to be alive. We get to be conscious. We get to be connected with each other, and with the world, and we get to be aware of that connection and to spend a few years mucking about in its possibilities. We get to have a slice of time and space that's ours. As it happened, we got the slice that has Beatles records and Thai restaurants and AIDS and the Internet. People who came before us got the slice that had horse-drawn carriages and whist and dysentery, or the one that had stone huts and Viking invasions and pigs in the yard. And the people who come after us will get the slice that has, I don't know, flying cars and soybean pies and identity chips in their brains. But our slice is no less important because it comes when it does, and it's no less important because we'll leave it someday. The fact that time will continue after we die does not negate the time that we were alive. We are alive now, and nothing can erase that.

by Greta Christina, Greta's Blog |  Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Repost]

A Delaration of Cyber War

All over Europe, smartphones rang in the middle of the night. Rolling over in bed, blinking open their eyes, civilians reached for the little devices and, in the moment of answering, were effectively drafted as soldiers. They shook themselves awake as they listened to hushed descriptions of a looming threat. Over the next few days and nights, in mid-July of last year, the ranks of these sudden draftees grew, as software analysts and experts in industrial-control systems gathered in makeshift war rooms in assorted NATO countries.  Government officials at the highest levels monitored their work. They faced a crisis which did not yet have a name, but which seemed, at first, to have the potential to bring industrial society to a halt.

A self-replicating computer virus, called a worm, was making its way through thousands of computers around the world, searching for small gray plastic boxes called programmable-logic controllers—tiny computers about the size of a pack of crayons, which regulate the machinery in factories, power plants, and construction and engineering projects. These controllers, or P.L.C.’s, perform the critical scut work of modern life. They open and shut valves in water pipes, speed and slow the spinning of uranium centrifuges, mete out the dollop of cream in each Oreo cookie, and time the change of traffic lights from red to green.

Although controllers are ubiquitous, knowledge of them is so rare that many top government officials did not even know they existed until that week in July. Several major Western powers initially feared the worm might represent a generalized attack on all controllers. If the factories shut down, if the power plants went dark, how long could social order be maintained? Who would write a program that could potentially do such things? And why?

As long as the lights were still on, though, the geek squads stayed focused on trying to figure out exactly what this worm intended to do. They were joined by a small citizen militia of amateur and professional analysts scattered across several continents, after private mailing lists for experts on malicious software posted copies of the worm’s voluminous, intricate code on the Web. In terms of functionality, this was the largest piece of malicious software that most researchers had ever seen, and orders of magnitude more complex in structure. (Malware’s previous heavyweight champion, the Conficker worm, was only one-twentieth the size of this new threat.) During the next few months, a handful of determined people finally managed to decrypt almost all of the program, which a Microsoft researcher named “Stuxnet.” On first glimpsing what they found there, they were scared as hell.

“Zero Day”

One month before that midnight summons—on June 17—Sergey Ulasen, the head of the Anti-Virus Kernel department of VirusBlokAda, a small information-technology security company in Minsk, Belarus, sat in his office reading an e-mail report: a client’s computer in Iran just would not stop rebooting. Ulasen got a copy of the virus that was causing the problem and passed it along to a colleague, Oleg Kupreev, who put it into a “debugger”—a software program that examines the code of other programs, including viruses. The men realized that the virus was infecting Microsoft’s Windows operating systems using a vulnerability that had never been detected before. A vulnerability that has not been detected before, and that a program’s creator does not know exists, is called a “zero day.” In the world of computer security, a Windows zero-day vulnerability signals that the author is a pro, and discovering one is a big event. Such flaws can be exploited for a variety of nefarious purposes, and they can sell on the black market for as much as $100,000.

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Billy and Lester

The show’s performance of “Fine and Mellow” reunited Billie Holiday with her estranged long-time friend Lester Young for the final time. Jazz critic Nat Hentoff, who was involved in the show, recalled that during rehearsals, they kept to opposite sides of the room. Young was very weak, and Hentoff told him to skip the big band section of the show and that he could sit while performing in the group with Holiday.

During the performance of “Fine and Mellow”, Webster played the first solo. “Then”, Hentoff remembered: Lester got up, and he played the purest blues I have ever heard, and [he and Holiday] were looking at each other, their eyes were sort of interlocked, and she was sort of nodding and half–smiling. It was as if they were both remembering what had been—whatever that was. And in the control room we were all crying. When the show was over, they went their separate ways.

Within two years, both Young and Holiday had died.





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Early Bird

Tuscan Tomato Sauce

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ingredients

Makes: quart 

• 1/4-1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil
• 1/2 cup minced red onion
• 1/4 cup minced carrot
• 1/4 cup minced celery
• 4 cloves garlic, peeled and minced
• 1 tablespoon minced sage
• 1 tablespoon chopped thyme leaves
• 2 quarts tomato puree
• Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper

Directions

Heat the oil in a large high-sided skillet or Dutch oven over medium-high. Add the onion, carrot and celery and fry, stirring frequently, until the vegetables begin to soften, about 5 minutes. Add the garlic and herbs and fry until the vegetables begin to color, about 5 minutes more. Add the tomato puree, season lightly with salt and pepper and bring the sauce to a boil. Reduce the heat to low and simmer the sauce, stirring occasionally, until the sauce darkens and concentrates, about 2 hours. Adjust the seasoning with salt and pepper.

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How To Detect Lies

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Introduction to Detecting Lies:

The following techniques to telling if someone is lying are often used by police, forensic psychologists, and security experts. This knowledge is also useful for managers, employers, and for anyone to use in everyday situations where telling the truth from a lie can help prevent you from being a victim of fraud/scams and other deceptions.

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Nice Mutt

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How to be a Ninja

The World As I See It - An Essay by Albert Einstein

"How strange is the lot of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he senses it. But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people -- first of all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness is wholly dependent, and then for the many, unknown to us, to whose destinies we are bound by the ties of sympathy. A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving... "I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves -- this critical basis I call the ideal of a pigsty. The ideals that have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth. Without the sense of kinship with men of like mind, without the occupation with the objective world, the eternally unattainable in the field of art and scientific endeavors, life would have seemed empty to me. The trite objects of human efforts -- possessions, outward success, luxury -- have always seemed to me contemptible. 

"My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other human beings and human communities. I am truly a 'lone traveler' and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties, I have never lost a sense of distance and a need for solitude..."

"My political ideal is democracy. Let every man be respected as an individual and no man idolized. It is an irony of fate that I myself have been the recipient of excessive admiration and reverence from my fellow-beings, through no fault, and no merit, of my own. The cause of this may well be the desire, unattainable for many, to understand the few ideas to which I have with my feeble powers attained through ceaseless struggle. I am quite aware that for any organization to reach its goals, one man must do the thinking and directing and generally bear the responsibility. But the led must not be coerced, they must be able to choose their leader. In my opinion, an autocratic system of coercion soon degenerates; force attracts men of low morality... The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the political state, but the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and the sublime, while the herd as such remains dull in thought and dull in feeling. "This topic brings me to that worst outcrop of herd life, the military system, which I abhor... This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism -- how passionately I hate them! 

"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery -- even if mixed with fear -- that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man... I am satisfied with the mystery of life's eternity and with a knowledge, a sense, of the marvelous structure of existence -- as well as the humble attempt to understand even a tiny portion of the Reason that manifests itself in nature."


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