Ice Maiden (A boy who is truly stuck on a girl!)

I just wouldn't go anywhere near a redhead.

Now don't get me wrong and start calling me a hairist or something like that. Listen to what I have say, then make up your mind.

It all started with Mr Mantolini and his sculptures.

They were terrific, were Mr Mantolini's frozen statues. He carved them out of ice and stood them in the window of his fish shop which was over the road from the pier. A new ice carving every month.

Sometimes it would be a beautiful peacock with its tail fanned out. Or maybe a giant fish thrashing itself to death on the end of a line. One of my favourites was a kangaroo with a little joey peering out of her pouch.

It was a bit sad really. On the first day of every month Mr Mantolini would throw the old statue out the back into an alley. Where it would melt and trickle away into a damp patch on the ground.

A new statue would be in the shop window. Sparkling blue and silver as if it had been carved from a solid chunk of the Antarctic shelf.

Every morning on my way to school, I would stop to stare at his statue. And on the first of the month I would be there after school to see the new one. I couldn't bear to go around the back and watch yesterday's sculpture melt into the mud.

'Why do you throw them out I asked one day?'

Mr Mantolini shrugged. 'You live. You die,' he said.

Mr Mantolini took a deep breath. Now he was going to ask me something. The same old thing he had asked every day for weeks. 'My cousin Tony come from Italy. Next month. You take to school. You friend. My cousin have red hair. You like?'

I gave him my usual answer. 'Sorry,' I said. 'I won't be able to.' I couldn't tell him that it was because I hated red hair. I didn't want to hurt his feelings.

He just stood there without saying anything. He was disappointed in me because we were friends. He knew how much I liked his ice statues and he always came out to talk to me about them. 'You funny boy,' he said. He shook his head and walked inside. I thought I saw tears in Mr Mantolini's eyes. I knew I had done the wrong thing again. And I was sorry. But I didn't want a redhead for a mate.

I felt guilty and miserable all day. But after school I cheered up a bit. It was the first of September. There would be a new ice statue in the window. It was always something to look forward to.

I hurried up to the fish shop and stared through the glass. I couldn't believe what I saw. The ice statue of a girl. It reminded me of one of those Greek sculptures that you see in museums. It had long tangled hair. And smiling lips. Its eyes sparkled like frozen diamonds. I tell you this. That ice girl was something else. She was fantastic.

'You're beautiful,' I said under my breath. 'Beautiful.' Of course she was only a statue. She couldn't see or hear me. She was just a life-sized ice maiden, standing among the dead fish in the shop window. She was inside a glass fridge which kept her cold. Her cheeks were covered with frost.

I stood there for ages just gawking at her. I know it was stupid. I would have died if anyone knew what I was thinking. How embarrassing. I had a crush on a piece of ice.

Every day after that, I visited the fish shop. I was late for school because of the ice maiden. I filled every spare minute of my time standing outside the window. It was as if I was hypnotized. The ice maiden's smile seemed to be made just for me. Her outstretched hand beckoned. 'Get real,' I said to myself. 'What are you doing here? You fool.' I knew I was mad but something kept drawing me back to the shop.

Mr Mantolini wouldn't meet my gaze. He was cross with me.

I pretended the ice girl was my friend. I told her my secrets. Even though she was made of ice, I had this silly feeling that she understood.

Mr Mantolini saw me watching her. But he didn't come outside. And whenever I went inside to buy fish for Mum, he scurried out the back and sent his assistant to serve me.

The days passed. Weeks went by. The ice maiden smiled on and on. She never changed. The boys thought I was nuts standing there gawking at a lump of ice. But she had this power over me - really. Kids started to tease me. 'He's in love,' said a girl called Simone. I copped a lot of teasing at school but still I kept gazing in that window.

As the days went by I grew sadder and sadder. I wanted to take the ice girl home. I wanted to keep her for ever. But once she was out of her glass cage, in the warm air, her smiling face would melt and drip away.

I dreaded the first of October. When Mr Mantolini would take the ice maiden and dump her in the alley. To be destroyed by the warm rays of the sun.

On the last day of September I waited until Mr Mantolini was serving in the shop. 'You can't throw her out,' I yelled. 'She's too lovely. She's real. You mustn't. You can't.' I was nearly going to say, 'I love her,' but that would have been stupid.

Mr Mantolini looked at me and shrugged. 'You live. You die,' he said. 'She ice. She cold. She water.'

I knew it was no good. Tomorrow Mr Mantolini would cast the ice girl out into the alley.

The next day I wagged school. I hid in the alley and waited. The minutes dragged their feet. The hours seemed to crawl. But then, as I knew he would, Mr Mantolini emerged with the ice maiden. He dumped her down by the rubbish bins. Her last resting place was to be among the rotting fish heads in an empty alley.

Mr Mantolini disappeared back into the shop. I rushed over to my ice maiden. She was still covered in frost and had sticky, frozen skin.

My plan was to take her to the butcher. I would pay him to keep the ice maiden in his freezer where I could visit her every day. I hadn't asked him yet. But he couldn't say no, could he?

The sun was rising in the sky. I had to hurry.

The ice maiden still stooped. Still reached out. She seemed to know that her time had come. 'Don't worry,' I said. 'I'll save you.'

I don't know what came over me. I did something crazy. I bent down and gently kissed her on the mouth.

It was a long kiss. The longest kiss ever in the history of the world. My lips stuck to hers. My flesh froze on to the ice. Cold needles of pain numbed my lips. I tried to pull away but I couldn't. The pain made my eyes water. Tears streamed down my face and across the ice maiden's cheeks.

On we kissed. And on. And on. I wanted to pull my mouth away but much as I cared for the ice girl, I didn't want my lips to tear away, leaving bleeding skin as a painful reminder of my madness. There I was, kissing ice lips, unable to move.

I tried to yell for help but I couldn't speak. Muffled grunts came out of my nose. Horrible nasal noises. No one came to help me. The alley echoed with the noise.

I grabbed the ice maiden and lifted her up. She was heavy. Her body was still sticky with frost. My fingers stuck fast. She was my prisoner. And I was hers.

The sun warmed my back. Tears of agony filled my eyes. If I waited there she would melt. I would be free but the ice maiden would be gone. Her lovely nose and chin would drip away to nothing.

But the cold touch of the ice girl was terrible. Her smiling lips burnt my flesh. The tip of my nose was frozen. I ran out of the alley into the street. There was a group of people waiting by a bus-stop near the end of the pier. 'Help, get me unstuck. But don't hurt the ice maiden,' was what I tried to say.
But what came out was, 'Nmn nnmmm nnnn nng ng ng mn nm.'

The people looked at me as if I was crazy. Some of them laughed. They thought I was acting the fool. An idiot pretending to kiss a statue.

I ran over to Mr Mantolini's shop and tried to knock on the window with my foot. I had to balance on one leg, while holding the ice girl in my arms and painfully kissing her at the same time. I fell over with a crunch. Oh agony, oh misery, oh pain. My lips, my fingers, my knees.

There was no sign of Mr Mantolini. He must have been in the back room.

What could I do? I looked out to sea. If I jumped into the water it would melt the ice. My lips and fingers would come free. But the ice maiden would melt. 'Let me go,' I whispered in my mind. But she made no answer.

My hands were numb. Cold pins pricked me without mercy. I ran towards the pier. I spoke to my ice maiden again, without words. 'I'm sorry. I'm sorry, sorry, sorry.'

I jogged along the pier. Further and further. My feet drummed in time with my thoughts. 'Sorry, sorry, sorry.'

I stopped and stared down at the waves. Then I closed my eyes and jumped, still clutching the iceecold girl to my chest. Down, I plunged. For a frozen moment I hung above the ocean. And then, with a gurgle and a groan, I took the ice lady to her doom.

The waves tossed above us. The warm water parted our lips. My fingers slipped from her side. I bobbed up like an empty bottle and saw her floating away. Already her eyes had gone. Her hair was a glassy mat. The smiling maiden smiled no more. She was just a lump of ice melting in the waves.

'No,' I screamed. My mouth filled with salt water and I sank under the sea.

They say that your past life flashes by you when you are drowning. Well, it's true. I re-lived some horrible moments. I remembered the time in a small country school when I was just a little kid. And the only redhead. I saw the school bully Johnson teasing me every day. Once again I sat on the school bench at lunch-time - alone and rejected. Not allowed to hang around with the others. Just because Johnson didn't like red hair. Once again I could hear him calling me 'carrots' and 'ginger'. They were the last thoughts that came to me before the world vanished into salty blackness.

But I didn't drown. In a way my hair saved me. It must have been easy for them to spot my curly locks swirling like red seaweed thrown up from the ocean bed.

Mr Mantolini pulled me out. He and his cousin. I could hear him talking even though I was only half conscious. 'You live. But you not die yet.'

I didn't want to open my eyes. I couldn't bear to think about what I had done to the ice maiden. I was alive but she was dead. Gone for ever.

In the end I looked up. I stared at my rescuers.

Mr Mantolini and his cousin.

She had red tangled hair. And smiling lips. Her eyes sparkled like frozen diamonds. I tell you this. That girl Tony was something else. She was fantastic.

'You're beautiful,' I said under my breath. 'Beautiful.

' Mr Mantolini's ice statue had been good. But not as good as the real thing. After all, it had only been a copy of his cousin Tony. I smiled up at her. And she smiled back. With a real smile.

I guess that's when I discovered that an ice maiden who is dead is not sad. And a nice maiden who is red, is not bad.

Not bad at all.

Paul Jennings / Thirteen Unpredictable Tales

Paul Jennings was born in England in 1943 and emigrated to Australia aged six. The trip for the family cost ten pounds - the Australian government paid the rest of the fare in those days.

Paul taught disabled and socially deprived children for six years and then worked as a speech therapist. He later lectured in special education before his appointment as Senior Lecturer in Language and Literature at the Warrnambool Institute, where he worked for ten years before becoming a full-time writer in 1989.

Paul's stories are funny, weird and wacky with surprising endings. He wants all children to have their noses in the same books and reluctant readers to discover that reading is fun. 'Books are fantastic. That's what I want my readers to think.' Since Unreal! was published in 1985, Paul's books have sold over two million copies. He has won many 'Children's Choice' awards and in January 1995 was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia for Services to Children's Literature.

http://www.pauljennings.com.au/

Snake Catcher: Stories / Naiyer Masud

Translated from the Urdu by Muhammad Umar Memon

Snake Catcher
http://www.urdustudies.com/pdf/18/15NMSnakeCatcher.pdf

Resting Place
http://www.urdustudies.com/pdf/18/16NMRestingPlace.pdf

Epistle
http://www.urdustudies.com/pdf/18/17NMEpistle.pdf

Ganjefa
http://www.urdustudies.com/pdf/18/18NMGanjefa.pdf

Custody
http://www.urdustudies.com/pdf/18/19NMCustody.pdf

Weather Vane
http://www.urdustudies.com/pdf/18/20NMWeathervane.pdf

Allam and Son
http://www.urdustudies.com/pdf/18/22NMAllamSon.pdf

The Big Garbage Dump
http://www.urdustudies.com/pdf/18/23NMGarbageDump.pdf

Postscript: Hard copy -- Obscure Domains of Fear and Desire, The Woman in Black and Lamentation.

'The most extraordinary fictional voice to have emerged in world literature this decade' -- Amit Chaudhuri

‘Even shorn of its immense humanity, Masud's lyricism would dazzle, for he is, without doubt, a poet's storyteller' —Agha Shahid Ali

Readers and critics have compared Masud to Kafka, Borges and Murakami. But it is best to speak of his style as pure Masud, for no other writer has rendered a fictional world quite like that of this master storyteller. His prose is spare and seductive and his stories have a shimmering, elusive quality. Although individually perfectly formed and complete, yet each story appears to have no beginning or end, drawing the reader into a seamless narrative structure. The coming of age of a young boy who looks for domains of fear and desire in the houses he inspects, a man's life shaped by his father's dreams and his mother's devotion, a walk down memory lane to fulfil a mother's dying wish, a beautiful girl with deformed feet—the reader begins to inhabit a world where illusions are as stark as day, and experience Masud's writing in a metaphysical, almost Sufi-like, sense.

‘This is a definitive volume, spanning [Masud's] early to latest writings, leaving the reader spellbound by his elliptical and dramatic prose. Professor Memon deserves special thanks for his meticulous translations and thoughtful introduction'—Sara Suleri-Goodyear

Naiyer Masud was born in 1936 in Lucknow. A scholar of Persian and Urdu, and a renowned translator of Kafka, he began writing stories in early boyhood. He has published three highly acclaimed collections in Urdu, including Seemiya and Essence of Camphor.

Muhammad Umar Memon is professor of Islamic studies, Urdu and Persian at the University of Wisconsin. He is the author of The Color of Nothingness: Modern Urdu Short Stories and The Tale of the Old Fisherman: Contemporary Urdu Short Stories.

Junie B. Jones

http://www.randomhouse.com/kids/junieb/

Is Junie B. Jones Talking Trash?

AT her all-day princess-theme party for her graduation from preschool, Lyra Alvis had her face painted, went first down the water slide and was even allowed to eat the flower on the cake. “It was the best day of my life,” said Lyra, 5, who lives in Nashville.

At least until bedtime. That is when her father, Lance Alvis, did something he’d never done before: Midway through a book that was a gift from a friend, he insisted she pick out something different to read.

“But I love this book,” Lyra said.

The paperback in question was about Junie B. Jones, the hero of a popular Random House early reading series that has divided parents since it was introduced 15 years ago. With more than 43 million copies in print and a stage show touring the country, the series has its share of die-hard fans and is required summer reading at many elementary schools.

But more than a few parents have taken issue with Junie B., as she is called. Their disagreement is a pint-size version of the lingering education battle between advocates of phonics, who believe children should be taught proper spelling and grammar from the outset, and those who favor whole language, a literacy method that accepts misspellings and other errors as long as children are engaged in reading and writing.

The spunky kindergartener (first grader in more recent volumes) is prone to troublemaking, often calls people names and isn’t averse to talking back to her teachers. And though she is the narrator of the stories, she struggles with grammar. Her adverbs lack the suffix “ly”; subject and object pronouns give her problems, as do possessives; she usually isn’t able to conjugate irregular past tense verbs; and words like funnest and beautifuller are the mainstays of her vocabulary.

Children, however, are not usually strict grammarians. And it’s rare to find a child that isn’t quickly seduced by these silly, often slapstick stories. Even adults who are rankled by Junie B.’s impulsive, oft-unpunished shenanigans (playing with scissors or head-butting other children, for instance), can occasionally laugh at her odd little-girlisms. They include her passion for fixing toilets with her “grampa,” her desire to name her little brother “Mrs. Gutzman” after her favorite cafeteria lady, or her belief that green cucumber-like vegetables are named “Sue Keeny.”

Parenthood, though, is full of choices. Breast-feeding: Yea or nay? Muesli or Cap’n Crunch? Public or private school?

And now: To Junie B. or not to Junie B.?

The series has been banned in Lewis and Susan Bartell’s home in Old Westbury, N.Y.

“My dad doesn’t like the grammar,” said the Bartells’s youngest, Mollie, 9. “And I guess that’s important, because maybe when you grow up and you’re at work and you say, ‘I runned,’ people will get annoyed at you.”

She added: “I’m also not allowed to watch R-rated movies, but nobody is these days.”

The series, which had its 27th installment in February, has, like the Harry Potter series, been on the New York Times children’s book series best-seller list since the list was started three years ago.

“Of our series books, it’s the most popular one we have that’s about a little girl,” said Elizabeth Bird, a librarian at the Donnell Library Center’s Central Children’s Room in Midtown Manhattan. “But it splits people down the middle. There are parents who will defend her till their death and those that call her loathsome. It’s unusual to find that sort of divide for early chapter books. They’re just not the sort of books that usually get much attention.”

Among librarians and teachers, Junie B. has become as familiar a name as Ramona, Pippi or Eloise, but unlike her predecessors she hasn’t been around quite long enough to straddle multiple generations. Many parents in their 20s, 30s and 40s are only now discovering the series as their children enter kindergarten and grammar school.

With every new kindergarten class comes attempts to ban the books. In 2004 Barbara Park was selected as one of the American Library Association’s 10 Most Frequently Challenged Authors, alongside Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou and John Steinbeck.

“I’ve never been in such good company!” said Ms. Park, 60, who before creating the impish heroine wrote nonserialized books for slightly older children. In the early ’90s, Random House approached her about writing an easy-to-read chapter book series because they wanted a humorous main character, and she’d become known for an ability to make children laugh.

“I didn’t know if my humor could really go down to the 5- or 6-year-old reading level,” said Ms. Park, who lives in Scottsdale, Ariz. “But I said I’d try, and the way I decided to go about that was to write in first person as a 5-year-old. That’s the way I best like to write, putting myself in the head of a character.

“I knew she’d make mistakes in every area of her life, socially and grammatically, and that’d be O.K.,” she said. “All of my characters are less than perfect. I find the term ‘perfect child’ to be an oxymoron.”

When the series began, most of the response from parents was overwhelmingly positive. But within a year, inflammatory letters trickled in.

“The first negative letter was from a grandmother in Minnesota who was annoyed that Junie B. had acted out and that she wasn’t using the Queen’s English,” Ms. Park said. “This woman was incensed.”

She insists that the majority of her mail is positive, but the negative responses sting, and she’s loath to talk about them.

“I’ve stopped reading about my books on the Internet because it’s too hurtful,” she said. “People act as if I’m teaching children how to blow up cats. The worst thing she does is maybe call someone stupid, but that’s just her being a 5-year-old. You’d hear worse than that walking across any playground! And when she acts out, kids who are reading it know that she’s doing something wrong.”

Mr. Alvis wasn’t so sure about that. Nor are some of the more vocal parents who discuss the books on Web sites like Craigslist and UrbanBaby. Most of the books have earned an average rating of at least four stars out of five from Amazon readers, but the negative reviews are brutal.

“I am going to throw them out,” one said. “I wouldn’t give them away, because I don’t want anyone else to read them.”

Another wrote, “I find this the mental equivalent of toxic waste.” But those who loved the series are often flummoxed that parents would say that any book that a child enjoys should be deemed unacceptable.

“These are books that are funny and interesting,” said Michael Reinemer of Annandale, Va., who reads the Junie B. Jones books to his youngest son, Leif, 5. “I think they encourage him to want to read. Kids can find humor in the way things go wrong.”

And what of the language?

“If you read ‘Huckleberry Finn’ you can’t help but notice the terrible grammar, but that doesn’t make it an unenjoyable read,” he said. “Sure, maybe Junie B. isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. But when she does things wrong or says things incorrectly, it provides an opportunity to talk about how things should be.”

Sandra Scales of Fairfax, Va., tried going that route with her 9-year-old daughter Caitlyn Siwek, “but I think it took me like a month to read one book because there were so many misspelled words that I didn’t understand, and we had to talk about every little thing,” Caitlyn said. Ms. Scales discovered the books when Caitlyn checked one out of the library and started reading them aloud while Ms. Scales was driving.

“She spelled out a word she didn’t know, but it was spelled wrong, so I said, ‘Let me see that, that can’t be right,’ ” Ms. Scales said. After delving a little further into the text, she wrote to Random House. They wrote that books for children don’t always have to be educational to be valuable.

“No wonder we have declining literacy and writing proficiency rates in this country!” Ms. Scales said. “In the letter they said that it was written in ‘vernacular.’ My thought was, ‘vernacular?’ ‘Tom Sawyer’ is written in ‘vernacular,’ and no one would consider it an easy read for a young child.”

Not long thereafter, she began to debate the series with other parents on About.com, which is owned by The New York Times Company. On that Web site, she found that her distaste for the books was on par with her distaste for the people defending them. “People who were taking exception to the people who take exception to the series were the ones using words like ‘dumb’ and ‘stupid,’ ” she said. “There’s this bizarre bullying thing that happened.”

Jill Ratzan, a doctoral student in library and information science at Rutgers University, said Junie B.’s English is actually more complex and interesting than most realize — and possibly more “correct.”

“I believe ‘perfect grammar’ is any grammar that works,” said Ms. Ratzan, whose paper on the series, “You Are Not the Boss of My Words,” was published in the journal Children and Libraries in 2005. “Junie B is actually following the precise rules of English. What she’s not following are the exceptions.”

For example, she said, “As adult English speakers, we know that the word ‘run’ has an exception in the past tense and is therefore ‘ran.’ But other verbs, you’d just add ‘ed,’ and she’s following that rule to the letter, even though she’s at an age where she has not yet been taught formal grammatical rules. She just knows them.”

Ms. Ratzan also notes that the trend of language’s evolution is toward this kind of regularization, which means Junie B. might be teaching children the English of the future. But, she said, “Just because they read ‘funnest’ doesn’t mean they’ll learn to say that. I’ve never heard a kid speak in a Yorkshire accent because they read ‘The Secret Garden’ or say ‘Have you any wool?’ ”

In the weeks since that fateful bedtime argument, Mr. Alvis has softened. “The turning point was when I asked Lyra if she wanted to act like or talk like Junie B. Jones. She looked at me like I was insane,” he said.

In the Bartell household, however, Junie B. Jones continues to be girla non grata.

“But that’s O.K. I’m reading a really good book about a boy whose parents think some of his video games are inappropriate,” Mollie said. “It’s called ‘Diary of a Wimpy Kid.’ ”

The Concept Of Existential Aloneness

"In addition to realizing that you are unique in this world, you must also accept that you are always alone. Yes, alone!

No one can ever feel what you are feeling, whether you are surrounded by hundreds of thousands of people, or making love with one person, or by yourself in a closet. Your inevitable "existential aloneness" simply means that your human existence is unavoidably predicated on your being alone with your own unique feelings and thoughts.

Your recognition of your existential aloneness can either be very freeing or highly enslaving, depending upon what you choose to do with it. But in either case, you will not ever change it. You can, however, choose to make it a freeing experience by making it work for you, as I have encouraged many clients to do.

Consider the example of Ralph, a forty-six-year-old executive who came to me for counseling some years ago.

Ralph's confrontation with his existential aloneness had come suddenly. He told me how he had been sitting in his living room one evening staring at his wife, who was preoccupied reading the newspaper, oblivious to the swirling vortex of thoughts in his head. All at once he had the eerie feeling that this person to whom he had been married for twenty-four years didn't even know him, that she was like a total stranger sitting there in his living room. He realized for the very first time that this person would never, ever know the private inner workings of Ralph.

The feeling was very spooky, and Ralph didn't know quite what to do with it, except to seek counseling. In our early sessions he felt he had to do something about it, like get a divorce or run away. But as he came to grips with this fundamental truth about what it means to be a human being, he learned to see his fundamental aloneness from a totally different perspective--a freeing perspective, if you will. Since his wife could never feel what he was feeling, he should stop expecting her to understand him and "be with him" all the time. Conversely, he realized that his wife was existentially alone too, and so he could relieve himself of the burden of always trying to be as one with her and experience what she was feeling, which led to needless guilt when he failed. Armed with this insight, he could stop his infernal, self-dooming quest for someone to feel what he was feeling, and could get on with pulling all his own strings. He could also eliminate his wasteful expectations for his wife and get off her back, too.

Before long, Ralph felt like a new man--all because he had been freed from the senseless attempt to have someone join him inside his own unique body and mind.

It is important to see how Ralph might have turned his insight of existential aloneness into disaster, as so many people do, by telling himself that he was a prisoner of his human condition, and that no one would ever understand him. He had done a lot of complaining that his wife "didn't understand" him before coming to me for counseling, and his sudden intuition that she was in one way a "stranger" could have aggravated that behavior and made the situation seem hopeless. But as we examined existential aloneness together, Ralph recognized the futility of trying to get anyone to be with him internally, that while people can share many things, and get very close to each other, the plain truth is they can only know each other's surfaces. Their inner beings are strictly off-limits by virtue of their very humanity.

Existential aloneness can be a source of great strength as well as a source of big trouble. Whenever you even tempted to use other people's lives as models of how you should run your own, think of this line by Henrik Ibsen, the nineteenth-century Norwegian dramatist: "The strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone."

Now you can interpret this as an antisocial, selfish attitude, if that is what you wish to do--or you can look hard at what is dictated by the parameters of your own reality. The fact is that the people who have had the greatest impact on mankind, who have helped the greatest number of people, are those who have consulted their own inner feelings, rather than doing what everyone else said they should do. In this context, strength means being able to stop trying to get everyone else to feel what you are feeling, and stand up for what you believe.

To go back to my former client Ralph: He still recalls that moment in his living room as one of the most important of his life, because not only did it get him into counseling and give him the freedom to halt his lifelong, albeit futile, effort to have his wife and children feel what he was feeling, it also gave him the strength to be himself in a more powerful and positive way. He still believes that no man is entirely an island who can function as an antisocial hermit, but he now knows, by virtue of having experienced it, that internally we are islands unique unto ourselves, and that coming to grips with that idea will help all of us build bridges to others, rather than erecting barriers by being upset when we see that others are not like us."

Dr. Wayne W. Dyer / Pulling Your Own Strings

Freedom: The Courage to Be Yourself / Osho

"Freedom means the capability to say yes when yes is needed, to say no when no is needed, and sometimes to keep quiet when nothing is needed--to be silent, not to say anything. When all these dimensions are available, there is freedom." -- Osho / Freedom: The Courage to Be Yourself

The Bridge Across Forever / Richard Bach

If you've ever felt alone in a world of strangers, missing someone you've never met, you'll find a message from your love in The Bridge Across Forever / Richard Bach.

"I stood looking out the window at nothing, noise roaring in my head.

She's wrong. Of course she's wrong. The woman doesn't understand who I am or how I think.

Too bad, I thought.

Then I crumpled her letter and threw it away."

"What if we're soulmates, I thought while she sobbed. What if we're the ones we've been looking for our whole lives long. We've touched and we've shared this quick taste of what love on earth can be, and now, because of my fears, are we going to separate and never meet again? Will I go on the rest of my days looking for the one I've already found, and was too frightened to love?

"There are no mistakes. The events we bring upon ourselves, no matter how unpleasant, are necessary in order to learn what we need to learn; whatever steps we take, they're necessary to reach the places we've chosen to go."

Bestselling author Richard Bach explores the meaning of fate and soul mates in this modern-day fairytale based on his real-life relationship with actor Leslie Parrish. "This is a story about a knight who was dying, and the princess who saved his life," Bach writes in his opening greeting. "It's a story about beauty and beasts and spells and fortresses, about death-powers that seem and life-powers that are." Yes, it is all that, and more. On the earthly plane this is about the riveting love affair between two fully human people who are willing to explore time travel and other dimensions together even as they grapple with the earthly struggles of intimacy, commitment, smothering, and whose turn it is to cook.

THE PRINCE AND THE MAGICIAN

Once upon a time there was a young prince who believed in all things but three. He did not believe in princesses, he did not believe in islands, he did not believe in God. His father, the king, told him that such things did not exist. As there were no princesses or islands in his father’s domains, and no sign of God, the young prince believed his father.But then, one day, the prince ran away from his palace. He came to the next land. There, to his astonishment, from every coast he saw islands, and on these islands, strange and troubling creatures whom he dared not name. As he was searching for a boat, a man in full evening dress approached him along the shore.‘Are those real islands?’ asked the young prince.‘Of course they are real islands,’ said the main in evening dress.‘And those strange and troubling creatures?’ ‘They are all genuine and authentic princesses.’‘Then God also must exist!’ cried the prince.‘I am God,’ replied the man in full evening dress, with a bow. The young prince returned home as quickly as he could.‘So you are back,’ said his father, the king.‘I have seen islands, I have seen princesses, I have seen God,’ said the prince reproachfully.The king was unmoved.‘Neither real islands, nor real princesses, nor a real God, exist.’‘I saw them!’‘Tell me how God was dressed.’‘God was in full evening dress.’‘Were the sleeves of his coat rolled back?’The prince remembered that they had been. The king smiled.‘That is the uniform of a magician. You have been deceived.’At this, the prince returned to the next land, and went to the same shore, where once again he came upon the man in full evening dress.‘My father, the king, has told me who you are,’ said the young prince indignantly. ‘You deceived me last time, but not again. Now I know that those are not real islands and real princesses, because you’re a magician.’The man on the shore smiled.‘It is you who are deceived, my boy. In your father’s kingdom there are many islands and many princesses. But you are under your father’s spell, so you cannot see them.’The prince returned pensively home. When he saw his father, he looked him in the eyes.‘Father, is it true that you are not a real king, but only a magician?’The king smiled and rolled back his sleeves.‘Yes my son, I am only a magician.’‘Then the man on the shore was God.’‘The man on the shore was another magician.’‘I must know the real truth, the truth beyond magic.’ ‘There is no truth beyond magic.’ said the king.The prince was full of sadness.He said, ‘I will kill myself.’The king by magic caused death to appear. Death stood in the door and beckoned to the prince. The prince shuddered. He remembered the beautiful but unreal islands and the unreal but beautiful princesses.‘Very well,’ he said. ‘I can bear it.’‘You see, my son,’ said the king, ‘you too now begin to be a magician.’

From The Magus – John Fowles, published by Jonathan Cape, 1977.