The Secondary Father

Textbook Joseph Campbell.

The way Campbell explained it, 
Young Men need a Secondary Father to finish raising them.

Beyond their Biological Father, they need a surrogate, traditionally a minister or a coach or a military officer.

The floatsam and jetsam of a generation washed up on the beach of last resort.

That's why street gangs are so appealing. 

They send you men out, like Knights on Quests to hone their skills and improve themselves.

And all the TRADITIONAL Mentors -- forget it.

Men are presumptive predators. They're leaving Teaching in droves.

Religious Leaders are pariahs.

Sports Coaches are stigmatized as odds-on pedophiles.

Even The Military is sketchy with sexual goings-on.

A Generation of Apprentices 
Without Masters.

Derek Vineyard 

(note the surname) 

is a Reverse-Noah.

" The Question is, what does it mean to see your father naked? 

And especially in an inappropriate manner, like this. 

It’s as if Ham…He does the same thing that happens in the Mesopotamian creation myth, when Tiamat and Apsu give rise to the first Gods, who are the father of the eventual deity of redemption: Marduk. 

The first Gods are very careless and noisy, and they kill Apsu, their father, and attempt to inhabit his corpse. 

That makes Tiamat enraged. 

She bursts forth from The Darkness to do them in. 

It’s like a precursor to the flood story, or an analog to the flood story.

I see the same thing happening, here, with Ham. 

He’s insufficiently respectful of his father. 




The Question is, 
'Exactly what does The Father represent?'

You could say, well, there’s 
The Father That You Have: 
A human being, a man among Men. 


But then there’s The Father-as-such, 
and that’s The Spirit of The Father. 

Insofar as you have a father, you have both at the same time: you have the personal father, a man among other Men—just like anyone other’s father—
but insofar as that man is your father, 
that means that he’s something different than just another person. 

What he is, is the incarnation of The Spirit of The Father. 
To disrespect that carelessly…

And Noah makes a mistake, right?

He produces wine and gets himself drunk. 

You might say, well, if he’s sprawled out there for everyone to see, it’s hardly Ham’s fault, if he stumbles across him. 
But the book is laying out a danger. 

The danger is that, well, 
maybe you catch your father at his most vulnerable moment, 
and if you’re disrespectful, 
then you transgress against  The Spirit of The Father. 

And if you transgress against The Spirit of The Father and lose respect for The Spirit of The Father, 
then that is likely to transform you into a slave.

Bob Sweeney: 
There was a moment, when I used to blame everything and everyone for all the pain and suffering and vile things that happened to me, 
that I saw happen to my people. 

Used to blame everybody. 

Blamed White People, 
Blamed Society, 
Blamed God. 

I didn't get no answers, 
'cause I was asking the wrong questions. 

You have to ask the right questions.

Derek Vinyard: 
Like what?

Bob Sweeney: 
Has anything you've done 
made your life better?
 

" That’s a very interesting idea. 

I think it’s particularly germane to our current cultural situation. 

I think that we’re constantly pushed to see the nakedness of our Father, so to speak, because of the intense criticism that’s directed towards our culture—the patriarchal culture. 

We’re constantly exposing its weaknesses, vulnerabilities, and, let’s say, its nakedness. 

There’s nothing wrong with criticism, but the purpose of criticism is to separate the wheat from the chaff:

It’s not to burn everything to the ground. 

It’s to say, well, we’re going to carefully look at this; we’re going to carefully differentiate; we’re going to keep what’s good, and we’re going to move away from what’s bad.

The criticism isn’t to identify everything that’s bad: it’s to separate what’s good from what’s bad, so that you can retain what’s good and move towards it. 

To be careless of that is deadly.

You’re inhabited by the spirit of the Father, right? 

Insofar as you’re a cultural construction, which, of course, is something that the postmodern neo-Marxists are absolutely emphatic about: you’re a cultural construction. 

Insofar as you’re a cultural construction, then you’re inhabited by the spirit of the Father. 

To be disrespectful towards that means to undermine the very structure that makes up a good portion of what you are, insofar as you’re a socialized, cultural entity. 

If you pull the foundation out from underneath that, what do you have left? 

You can hardly manage on your own. 
It’s just not possible. 
You’re a cultural creation.

Ham makes this desperate error, and is careless about exposing himself to the vulnerability of his father. 

Something like that. He does it without sufficient respect. 

The judgement is that, not only will he be a slave, but so will all of his descendants. 

He’s contrasted with the other two sons, who, I suppose, are willing to give their father the benefit of the doubt. 

When they see him in a compromising position, they handle it with respect, and don’t capitalize on it. 

Maybe that makes them strong. 

That’s what it seems like to me. I think that’s what that story means. 

It has something to do with respect. 

The funny thing about having respect for your culture—and I suppose that’s partly why I’m doing the Biblical stories: they’re part of my culture. 

They’re part of our culture, perhaps. 

But they are certainly part of my culture. 

It seems to me that it’s worthwhile to treat that with respect, to see what you can glean from it, and not kick it when it’s down, let’s say.

Understatement Rocks

PEACHES WEATHER

Walking on the beaches 

Looking at the peaches

I Like to Drink Wine More Than I Used To

Upon exiting the ark on the new land, a shameful Noah goes into isolation in a nearby cave, making wine in which to drown his sorrows. 

Ham expresses disappointment for his father's current state of unseemly drunkenness and nakedness before leaving his kin to live alone. 

Having reconciled at the behest of Ila, Noah blesses the family as the beginning of a new human race and all witness waves of immense celestial rainbows.

VITO CORLEONE

So -- Barzini will move against you first. 

He'll set up a meeting with someone that you

absolutely trust -- guaranteeing your safety. 

And at that meeting, you'll be assassinated. 

(then, as the Don drinks from a glass of wine as Michael watches him) 

I like to drink wine more than I used to -- anyway, I'm drinking more... 

 

MICHAEL
It's good for you, Pop.


VITO CORLEONE 

(after a long pause)
I don't know -

- your wife and children -

- are you happy with them?


MICHAEL
Very happy...


VITO CORLEONE
That's good.
(then)
I hope you don't mind the way I -- I keep going over this Barzini business...


MICHAEL
No, not at all...


VITO CORLEONE
It's an old habit. 

I spent my life trying not to be careless -- women and children can be
careless, but not Men.
(then)
How's your boy?


MICHAEL
He's good --


VITO CORLEONE :
You know he looks more like you every day.


MICHAEL :

(smiling)
He's smarter than I am. 

Three years old, he can read the funny papers


VITO CORLEONE :

(laughs)
Read the funny papers --
(then)
Oh -- well -- eh, I want you to arrange to have a telephone man check all the calls that go in and out of here -- because...


MICHAEL
I did it already, Pop.


VITO CORLEONE
-- ya'know, cuz it could be anyone...


MICHAEL
Pop, I took care of that.


VITO CORLEONE
Oh, that's right -- I forgot.


MICHAEL :
(reaching over, touching his father)
What's the matter? 

What's bothering you?

(then, after the Don doesn't answer)

I'll handle it. 

I told you I can handle it, I'll handle it.


VITO CORLEONE :
(as he stands)
I knew that Santino was going to have to go through all this.

And Fredo -- well --

(then, after he sits besides Michael)

Fredo was -- well --

But I never -- I never wanted this for you. 

I worked my whole life, I don't apologize, to take care of my family.

And I refused -- to be a fool -

Dancing on The String, held by all those -- bigshots.

I don't apologize -- that's my life --
But I thought that -- 

That when it was your time -- that --

That you would be the one to hold the strings.

Senator - Corleone.
Governor - Corleone, or something...


MICHAEL :
Another pezzonovante...


VITO CORLEONE :
Well -- it wasn't enough time, Michael. 

Wasn't enough time...


MICHAEL
We'll get there, Pop -- 

We'll get there...


VITO CORLEONE
Uh... 

(then, after kissing Michael on the cheek) 

Now listen -- 
Whoever comes to you with this Barzini meeting -- 


He's The Traitor. 

Don't forget that.

"And the sons of Noah, that went forth of the ark, were Shem, and Ham, and Japheth: and Ham is the father of Canaan. These are the three sons of Noah: and of them was the whole earth overspread. And Noah began to be an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard. And he drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent. And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without.

"And Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it upon both their shoulders, and went backward, and covered the nakedness of their father; and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father’s nakedness. And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him. And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.

"And he said, Blessed be the Lord God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant. God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servants. And Noah lived after the flood three hundred and fifty years. And all the days of Noah were nine hundred and fifty years: and he died. And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech." 

I remember thinking about this story 30 years ago. I think the meaning of the story stood out for me. When you read complicated materials, sometimes, a piece of complicated material will stand out, for some reason. It’s like it glitters, I suppose. That might be one way of thinking about it. You’re in sync with it, and you can understand what it means. I really experienced that reading the Dao De Jing, which is this document that I would really like to do a lecture on, at some point. I don’t understand some of the verses, but others stand right out, and I can understand them. 

I think I understood what this part of the story of Noah meant. We talked a little bit about what nakedness meant in the story of Adam and Eve. The idea, essentially, was that, to know yourself naked is to become aware of your vulnerability—your physical boundaries in time and space and your fundamental, physiological insufficiencies as they might be judged by others. 

There’s biological insufficiency that’s built into you, because you’re a fragile, mortal, vulnerable, half insane creature, and that’s just an existential truth. And then, of course, merely as a human being—even with all those faults—there are faults that you have that are particular to you, that might be judged harshly by the group…Well, will definitely be judged harshly by the group. And so to become aware of your nakedness is to become self-conscious, to know your limits, and to know your vulnerability. 

That’s what is revealed to Ham when he comes across his father naked. 

The question is, what does it mean to see your father naked? 

And especially in an inappropriate manner, like this. It’s as if Ham…

He does the same thing that happens in the Mesopotamian creation myth, when Tiamat and Apsu give rise to the first Gods, who are the father of the eventual deity of redemption: Marduk. 

The first Gods are very careless and noisy, and they kill Apsu, their father, and attempt to inhabit his corpse.

That makes Tiamat enraged. She bursts forth from the darkness to do them in. 

It’s like a precursor to the flood story, or an analog to the flood story. 

I see the same thing happening, here, with Ham -

He’s insufficiently respectful of his father. 

The question is, exactly what does the father represent? 

You could say, well, there’s the father that you have: a human being, a man among men. 

But then there’s the Father as such, and that’s the spirit of the Father. 

Insofar as you have a father, you have both at the same time: you have the personal father, a man among other men—just like anyone other’s father—but insofar as that man is your father, that means that he’s something different than just another person. 

What he is, is the incarnation of the spirit of The Father. 

To disrespect that carelessly… 

Noah makes a mistake, right? 

He produces wine and gets himself drunk. You might say, well, if he’s sprawled out there for everyone to see, it’s hardly Ham’s fault, if he stumbles across him. 

But the book is laying out a danger. 

The danger is that, well, maybe you catch your father at his most vulnerable moment, and if you’re disrespectful -

Then you transgress against The Spirit of The Father. 

And if you transgress against The Spirit of The Father and lose respect for The Spirit of The Father, then that is likely to transform you into a slave. 

That’s a very interesting idea. I think it’s particularly germane to our current cultural situation. I think that we’re constantly pushed to see the nakedness of our Father, so to speak, because of the intense criticism that’s directed towards our culture—the patriarchal culture. We’re constantly exposing its weaknesses, vulnerabilities, and, let’s say, its nakedness. There’s nothing wrong with criticism, but the purpose of criticism is to separate the wheat from the chaff: it’s not to burn everything to the ground. It’s to say, well, we’re going to carefully look at this; we’re going to carefully differentiate; we’re going to keep what’s good, and we’re going to move away from what’s bad. 

The criticism isn’t to identify everything that’s bad: it’s to separate what’s good from what’s bad, so that you can retain what’s good and move towards it. To be careless of that is deadly. You’re inhabited by the spirit of the Father, right? Insofar as you’re a cultural construction, which, of course, is something that the postmodern neo-Marxists are absolutely emphatic about: you’re a cultural construction. Insofar as you’re a cultural construction, then you’re inhabited by the spirit of the Father. To be disrespectful towards that means to undermine the very structure that makes up a good portion of what you are, insofar as you’re a socialized, cultural entity. If you pull the foundation out from underneath that, what do you have left? You can hardly manage on your own. It’s just not possible. You’re a cultural creation. 

Ham makes this desperate error, and is careless about exposing himself to the vulnerability of his father. Something like that. He does it without sufficient respect. The judgement is that, not only will he be a slave, but so will all of his descendants. He’s contrasted with the other two sons, who, I suppose, are willing to give their father the benefit of the doubt. When they see him in a compromising position, they handle it with respect, and don’t capitalize on it. Maybe that makes them strong. That’s what it seems like to me. I think that’s what that story means. It has something to do with respect. The funny thing about having respect for your culture—and I suppose that’s partly why I’m doing the Biblical stories: they’re part of my culture. They’re part of our culture, perhaps. But they are certainly part of my culture. It seems to me that it’s worthwhile to treat that with respect, to see what you can glean from it, and not kick it when it’s down, let’s say. 

And so that’s how the story of Noah ends. The thing, too, is that Noah is actually a pretty decent incarnation of the spirit of the Father, which, I suppose, is one of the things that makes Ham’s misstep more egregious. I mean, Noah just built an ark and got everybody through the flood, man. It’s not so bad, and so maybe the fact that he happened to drink too much wine one day wasn’t enough to justify humiliating him. I don’t think it’s pushing the limits of symbolic interpretation to note on a daily basis that we’re all contained in an ark. You could think about that as the ark that’s been bequeathed to us by our forefathers: that’s the tremendous infrastructure that we inhabit, that we take for granted because it works so well. It protects us from things that we cannot even imagine, and we don’t have to imagine them, because we’re so well protected. 

One of the things that’s really struck me hard about the disintegration and corruption of the universities is the absolute ingratitude that goes along with that. Criticism, as I said, is a fine thing, if it’s done in a proper spirit, and that’s the spirit of separating the wheat from the chaff. But it needs to be accompanied by gratitude, and it does seem to me that anyone who lives in a Western culture at this time and place in history, and who isn’t simultaneously grateful for that, is half blind, at least. 

It’s never been better than this, and it could be so much worse—and it’s highly likely that it will be so much worse, because, for most of human history, so much worse is the norm.

Yelling at a Fool.

Fr. Gabriel,

Warrior-Priest : 

Is that for you... or Negan? 

Rosita Espinoza :

It's for him. 

Fr. Gabriel,

Warrior-Priest :

How will you do it? 

Rosita Espinoza :

I'll pull the trigger. 

Fr. Gabriel,

Warrior-Priest :

They'll kill you. 

Rosita Espinoza :

As long as he goes first. 

Why do you have to die? 

Rosita Espinoza :

Because he has to. 

Fr. Gabriel,

Warrior-Priest :

I agree. But... 

...Why do you? 

There's, uh... ...No need to lie to me if... 

this is our last conversation. 

Rosita Espinoza :

If Abraham was alive, we could fight. 

If Glenn was, Maggie's kid would have a Father. 

Michonne and Carl can fight. 

They have Rick. 

Aaron has Eric. 

Eugene Knows Things. 

Daryl's Strong. 

Fr. Gabriel,

Warrior-Priest :

What about Sasha? 

Look at me, Rosita. 

It shouldn't have been you. 

It shouldn't have been anyone. 

We'll win, but we need to wait for the right moment or create it... together. 

And you're a part of that together. 

Don't Do This. 

We Need You.

Rosita:

I didn't find any guns.  

In case you were wondering. 

I was out there all day and not a damn one. Not a real one. 

Thing is, I had a gun. I was gonna use it to kill Negan. 

I was ready to. 

And if I had done it, like I'd planned to, Negan would be dead right now. 

And, yeah, maybe I'd be dead, too, but who gives a damn? 

Eugene would still be here. 

Olivia would still be alive. 

Spencer would still be alive. 

And now they're gone, and I'm here because I was stupid enough to listen to you. 

Fr. Gabriel,

Warrior-Priest :

But you were. 

And you did. 

Rosita Espinoza :

You stand there telling people about their lives. 

Fr. Gabriel,

Warrior-Priest : 

Only if they come Here. 

Like you. Right now. 

Rosita Espinoza :

You don't know shit about shit. 

Fr. Gabriel,

Warrior-Priest : 

You're right. 

I don't. 

I said that you weren't supposed to die and that you shouldn't do the thing that you were planning to do because we needed you -- still do. 

Even a fool like me could see that. 

It's easier to be dead, 
and if it's my fault you're alive, well, 
I'm just gonna have to live with that. 

I decided to meddle. 

But I did something I thought was right, and I knew the stakes were very high. 

You can certainly blame me for the fact that you have a Life, but after that what are you going to do with it? 

How are you going to make what needs to happen happen? 

Anything is possible until your heart stops beating. 

Certainly more than yelling at a fool.

 

Martha

It's Really a Miracle of Evolution

You SAY You Want to Save The World, But You Don't Want it to CHANGE....

George Lucas on toxic fandom and The Phantom Menace 1999 - BBC Newsnight

This is what George Lucas had to say about racial stereotyping and toxic fandom in The Phantom Menace back in 1999.

You Say You Want a Revolution, Well...

Y'know....

We All Wanna Change The World. 

PEACE IN OUR TIME

It’s not the job of the artist to give the audience what the audience wants.  

If the audience knew what they needed, then they wouldn’t be the audience.  

They would be the artists.  

It is the job of artists to give the audience what they need. "

- Alan Moore

Piss Off, Ghost!

Yes, the Devil is in your hands, and I will suck it out. 

Now, I will not cast this ghost out with a fever, for the new spirit inside me has shown me I have a new way to communicate. It is a gentle whisper. 

Get out of here, ghost. Get out of here, ghost. Get out. Get out of here, ghost. Get out of here, ghost. Get out of here, ghost. Get out of here, and don't you dare turn around and come back, for if you do, all the armies of my boot will kick you in the teeth, and you will be cast up and thrown in the dirt and thrust back to Perdition! 

And as long as I have teeth, I will bite you! And if I have no teeth, I will gum you! And as long as I have fists, I will bash you! 

Now, get out of here ghost! Get out of here, ghost!

Get out of here, ghost! Egh! YEOW! And it left!

The Eater of Worlds

" All right, so here’s how the book opens: "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters." This is a hard narrative section to get a handle on because, in order to understand it properly, you have to actually look behind it. There are a lot of pieces of old stories in the Old Testament that flesh out the meaning of these lines. I can give you a quick overview of it. One of the ideas that lurks underneath these lines—although you can't tell, because it's in English. You have to look at the original language, and, of course, I don't speak the original language. I’ve had to use secondary sources, too bad for me. But the "without form and void," and the deep idea—you see, that's associated with this notion of endless, deep potential. For example, words that are used to represent "without form and void" are something like—I’m going to get this partly wrong—tohu wa-bohu. Another one is tehom. It’s important to know this, because those words are associated with an earlier Mesopotamian word, which is Tiamat. 

Tiamat was a dragon-like creature who represented the salt water. Tiamat had a husband named Apsu. Tiamat and Apsu were locked together in a kind of sexual embrace. I would say that's potential and order, or chaos and order. They were locked together, and it was that union of chaos and order that gave rise in the old Mesopotamian myth, the Enuma Elis, to being, to the old Gods first, and then, eventually, as creation progressed, to human beings themselves. 

There's this idea lurking underneath these initial lines that God is akin to that which confronts the unknown, carves it into pieces, and makes the world out of its pieces. The thing that it confronts is something like a predatory reptile, a dragon, or a serpent. I think part of the reason for that—and this is a very deep and ancient idea—is that…This is where it gets so complicated to do the translation. It’s partly how human beings created our world. We went out beyond the confines of our safe spaces—let's say our safe spaces defined by the tree or the fire—and we actively voyaged outward to the places that we were afraid of and didn't understand. We conquered and encountered things out there: animals, mammoths, snakes, and predators of all sorts. It was as a consequence of that active, brave engagement with the terrifying domain of what we did not understand that the world, in fact, was generated. That idea lurks deeply inside the opening lines of Genesis. 

It’s a profound idea, in my estimation. I think, also, that the way our brains are structured—and this is something that I’m going to try to develop more today—is the ancient circuits that our ancestors used to deal with the space beyond the home territory which they had already explored. Unknown territory is characterized by promise, because there are new things out there, but also by intense danger. We’re prey animals, especially millions of years ago when we were very young. We had to go out there and encounter things that were terribly dangerous. There was a kind of, let's say, paternal courage that went along with that. It was the spirit of paternal courage that enabled the conquering of the unknown, and there’s no difference between the conquering of the unknown and the creation of habitable order. 

The thing is that, as our cognitive faculties have developed to the point where we’re capable of very high levels of abstraction, the underlying biological architecture has remained the same. For example, when you’re having an argument about something fundamental with someone that you love, you’re trying to structure the world around you, jointly, to create a habitable space that you can both exist within. You’re using the abstracted version of the same circuits. You're using the same circuits that our archaic ancestors would have used when they would have went out into the unknown itself to encounter beasts, predators, and geographical unknowns. It's the same circuit. It's just that we do it abstractly now instead of concretely. But, of course, it has to be the same circuit, because evolution is a very conservative force. What else would it be? This is also why I think it’s so easy for us to demonize those people who are our enemies. Our enemies confront us with what we don't want to see, and, because of that, our first response is to use snake detection circuitry on them. That accounts for our almost immediate capacity to demonize. There’s a reason for that. It’s not a trivial thing. First of all, it's a very fast response. And second of all, it's a response that's worked for a very, very, very long time. 

Ancient representations of reality were sort of a weird meld of observable phenomena—things we would consider objective facts—and the projection of subjective truth. I’ll show you how the Mesopotamians viewed the world. They had a model of the world as a disc. If you go out in a field at night, what does the world look like? Well, it’s a disc. It’s got a dome on top of it. That was basically the Mesopotamian view of the world, and the view of the world of people who wrote the first stories in the Bible. There was water on top of the dome. Well, obviously. It rains, right? Where does the water come from? There’s water around the dome. The disc is made of land, and then underneath that there’s water. How do you know that? Well, drill. You’ll hit water; it’s under the earth. Otherwise, how would you hit the water? And then what’s under that? Fresh water. And then what’s under that? If you go to the edge of the disc, you hit the ocean. It’s salt water. So it’s a dome with water outside of it, and then it’s a disc that the dome sits on, and then underneath that there’s fresh water, and then underneath that there’s salt water. That was roughly the Mesopotamian world.

That’s a mix of observation and imagination, because that isn’t the world, but it is the way the world appears. It’s a perfectly believable cosmology. The sun rises and the sun sets on that dome. It’s not like the thing is bloody well spinning. Who would ever think that up? It’s obvious that the sun comes up and goes down, and then travels underneath the world and comes back up again. There's nothing more self-evident than that. That’s that strange intermingling of subjectively fantasy, right at the level of perception and actually observable phenomena. All of the cosmology that’s associated with the Biblical stories is exactly like that: it’s half psychology and half reality, although the psychological is real, as well.

The Knights of Amity

Mother of an Eaten Son : 

Chief Brody?

The Chief : 

Yes?

[Mrs. Kintner slaps Brody and sobs]

Mother of an Eaten Son : 

I just found out - that a girl got killed here last week.

And you knew it! 

You knew there was a shark out there! 

You knew it was dangerous! 

But you let people go swimming anyway? 

You knew all those things! 

But still my boy is dead now. 

And there's nothing you can do about it. 

My boy is dead. 

I wanted you to know that.

[Mrs. Kintner walks away]

Call Me "Mayor" : 

I'm sorry, Martin. 

She's Wrong.

The Chief : 

No, she's not.

Hippies Get Eaten

The European Dragon Both Hordes and Guards. 

It Guards and Hordes Two Things - 

It Hordes Gold 

and 

 It Guards Virgins

AND THE DRAGON CAN'T MAKE USE OF EITHER OF THEM...

Do you not know I am a woman? when I think, I must speak. Sweet, say on.

Lion

Cause every once in a while, 

The Lion has to show The Jackals, 

Who He Is.

I Volunteer

Global (adj.) : "All The World"

My father loved Sir Rowland as his soul,
And all the world was of my father's mind:
Had I before known this young man his son,
I should have given him tears unto entreaties,
Ere he should thus have ventured.

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.
And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

Re-enter ORLANDO, with ADAM

Junior Has Two Daddies

St. Joan Alone

"Do not think you can frighten me by telling me that I am alone. 

France is alone; and God is alone; and what is my loneliness before the loneliness of my country and my God? 

I see now that the Loneliness of God is His Strength: what would He be if He listened to your jealous little counsels? 

Well, my loneliness shall be my strength too; it is better to be alone with God: His friendship will not fail me, nor His counsel, nor His love. 

In His Strength I Will Dare, and Dare, 

and Dare, Until I die. 

I will go out now to the Common People, and let the love in their eyes comfort me for the hate in yours."

sovereignty (n.)

sovereign (adj.)

suzerainty (n.)