The Monster lay, a hill of solid flesh. Within, you could hear the sighs and murmurs as the furthest chambers of it died, the organs malfunctioning, liquids running a final instant from pocket to sac to spleen, everything shutting off, closing up forever. It was like standing by a wrecked locomotive or a steam shovel at quitting time, all valves being released or levered tight. Bones cracked; the tonnage of its own flesh, off balance, dead weight, snapped the delicate forearms, caught underneath. The meat settled, quivering.

The Monster, at the first motion, lunged forward with a terrible scream. It covered one hundred yards in six seconds. The rifles jerked up and blazed fire. A windstorm from the beast's mouth engulfed them in the stench of slime and old blood. The Monster roared, teeth glittering with sun.

The rifles cracked again, Their sound was lost in shriek and lizard thunder. The great level of the reptile's tail swung up, lashed sideways. Trees exploded in clouds of leaf and branch. The Monster twitched its jeweler's hands down to fondle at the men, to twist them in half, to crush them like berries, to cram them into its teeth and its screaming throat. Its boulderstone eyes leveled with the men. They saw themselves mirrored. They fired at the metallic eyelids and the blazing black iris,

Like a stone idol, like a mountain avalanche, Tyrannosaurus fell.

Thundering, it clutched trees, pulled them with it. It wrenched and tore the metal Path. The men flung themselves back and away. The body hit, ten tons of cold flesh and stone. The guns fired. The Monster lashed its armored tail, twitched its snake jaws, and lay still. A fount of blood spurted from its throat. Somewhere inside, a sac of fluids burst. Sickening gushes drenched the hunters. They stood, red and glistening.

One fall I gutted a bee tree that a neighbor felled. I took a chain saw and ripped into this toppled old tupelo. The poor tree was cancerous with bee comb. The further I cut into the belly of the tree, the more bees I found. The insects filled a cavity as large as I was. It was a gray, cool autumn day and all the bees were home, now agitated by the surgery. I finally plunged my hand into the mess of comb. Hot! Ninety-five degrees at least. Overcrowded with 100,000 cold-blooded bees, the hive had become a warm-blooded organism. The heated honey ran like thin, warm blood. My gut felt like I had reached my hand into a dying animal.

Even though Ender's aiúa lives on, as all aiúas live on undying, the man we knew is gone from us. His body is gone, and whatever parts of his life and works we take with us, they aren't him any longer, they are ourselves, they are the Ender-within-us just as we also have other friends and teachers, fathers and mothers, lovers and children and siblings and even strangers within us, looking out at the world through our eyes and helping us determine what it all might mean. I see Ender in you looking out at me. You see Ender in me looking out at you. And yet not one of us is truly him; we are each our own self, all of us strangers on our own road. We walked awhile on that road with Ender Wiggin. He showed us things we might not otherwise have seen. But the road goes on without him now. In the end, he was no more than any other man. But no less, either.

“Then we reached the finale,” she remembered, wryly, “and we suddenly lost sight of the harmonies and it sounded like, well, one reviewer mentioned 'the death agonies of a hyena.'”

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of scribbling “Kilroy was here” on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to. […] To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come

One cruel backhand sabre-cut—
“I'm hit! I'm killed!” young David cries,
Throws blindly forward, chokes… and dies.
Steel-helmeted and grey and grim
Goliath straddles over him.

I discussed the matter with professor Fruhestadt. Within a month, at a 100 dollars a piece, he would provide me with the collection I wanted. I have done it: three hundred pigs were slaughtered —and naturally sold at regular prices— and now I have here, in a luminous gallery at the Concord cottage, one of the most original collections of the world.

At both sides, on pine shelfs, a hundred glass jugs are lined up; within them, a hundred hearts of the darkest red are beating. Immersed in the solution that mantains their muscular activity —and which the assistant renews daily— the hundred hearts contract at a tired and irregular, but continous, rhythm. A hundred meat engines working in vain, separated from the machines they once animated.

That eternal heartbeat without purpose nor sense attracts me strongly and suggests strange thoughts. It gives me great pleasure to imagine, seduced by the resemblance, that I possess a hundred human hearts, of bodies once alive and warm; a hundred hearts that suffered, that revelled, that knew the paralysis of fear and the acceleration of love. They are only a pretense of life now: they are free of the creature they once served; they throb worthlessly, for nothing, for no one. Just to amuse myself, for I have never been able to stand the trances of poets and novelists for the “heart”.

This ideal symbol of all the sentimental babble, of all the patetic ejaculations, is here reduced to its mechanic materiality, inside those great jugs. The bodies to which this hearts belonged are dead, the souls have vanished, and this blackened pear-shaped muscle keeps throbbing stupidly behind the glass, as if something beautiful and noble still corresponded to its heartbeats.

For by Art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMON-WEALTH, or STATE, (in latine CIVITAS) which is but an Artificiall Man; though of greater stature and strength than the Naturall, for whose protection and defence it was intended; and in which, the Soveraignty is an Artificiall Soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body; The Magistrates, and other Officers of Judicature and Execution, artificiall Joynts; Reward and Punishment (by which fastned to the seat of the Soveraignty, every joynt and member is moved to performe his duty) are the Nerves, that do the same in the Body Naturall; The Wealth and Riches of all the particular members, are the Strength; Salus Populi (the Peoples Safety) its Businesse; Counsellors, by whom all things needfull for it to know, are suggested unto it, are the Memory; Equity and Lawes, an artificiall Reason and Will; Concord, Health; Sedition, Sicknesse; and Civill War, Death. Lastly, the Pacts and Covenants, by which the parts of this Body Politique were at first made, set together, and united, resemble that Fiat, or the Let Us Make Man, pronounced by God in the Creation.

Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle — they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.

Above any other advantage, the new urban identity politics solves “the vision thing” for the Democratic Party. No longer are we a fractured aggregation of special interests or a spineless hydra of contingent alliances—we are a united front, with a clear, compelling image and an articulated system of values.

The Three Horsemen of the Oncological Apocalypse, Surgery, Chemotherapy, and Radiation.