In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Spit for Science and the Progress and Promise of Psychiatric GeneticsDanielle M. Dick, PhD (bio)In their paper “Spit for Science and the Limits of Applied Psychiatric Genetics,” Turkheimer and Rodock Greer use results from the Spit for Science (S4S) project to argue that the idea of psychiatric genetics1 yielding actionable results is a folly. Although there is much about which Turkheimer and I agree (I took (...) my first psychology class from him 30 years ago), we fundamentally disagree about the outlook of psychiatric genetics. His paper suggests that our differing conclusions arise from the authors misunderstanding the nature of the S4S project and a difference in our views on the broader purpose of psychiatric genetics.It is the characterization of S4S as a “program of research” that is the foundation for the conclusions Turkheimer and Rodock Greer draw about the unlikely potential for meaningful results from psychiatric genetics. But S4S was never intended to be a program of research. The dataset was established as a registry, owned and administered by Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), and intended as a resource for the field. Accordingly, what is presented as a series of studies that bounce from one topic to another (which the paper mischaracterizes as resulting from “desultory progress”), actually reflects the use of the dataset by many scientific teams, including trainees and early career investigators, to explore various questions. The fact that the project attracted researchers from a diversity of fields (>140 faculty/trainees from 28 departments across VCU and 16 external collaborators) to study the many factors that impact college behavioral and emotional health is, to my mind, one of the strengths of the project.Within my own program of research, S4S is just one of many datasets with which I work; the papers included in their review account for only 3% of my more than 450 papers. Accordingly, my outlook on psychiatric genetics is not based solely, or even largely, upon S4S. As of 2021, I am no longer involved with the project, having ceded its stewardship to another VCU faculty member. Like with the other genetically informative datasets we analyze, the individual papers from S4S reflect the state of the science at the time they were initiated (often years before the eventual publication date). This fact is evident in the evolution of methods applied to S4S and would be true of a review of papers from Collaborative Study on the Genetics of Alcoholism, Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents [End Page 425] and Children, The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, the UK Biobank, or any other dataset made available as a resource for the field. Turkheimer’s paper abstract states “the negligible results have never been acknowledged,” but in fact, many papers have been devoted to discussing small effect sizes in psychiatric genetics (Gordon, 2021).The success of S4S was never intended to be evaluated based on the number of genetic loci identified. Turkheimer wrote, “S4S was not designed to investigate whether individual level genetic data might be useful at the scale of a mid-sized institution including about 10,000 students… it assumed as much.” In fact, they were correct only in the first part of that statement; studying whether individual level genetic data might be useful in a college setting (although a question I find interesting) was never the point of S4S. Turkheimer refers to the findings (of tiny effect sizes, few robust genetic loci identified) as “unexpected” and “surprising”; in fact, we find the results to be neither, as anyone following the progression of the field of psychiatric genetics would agree. The university administrators with whom we worked to launch the study never expected us to deliver actionable individual-level genetic findings. To use that as the benchmark for evaluating the success of S4S, and then to extrapolate to the larger field of psychiatric genetics, misses the point.The ways in which the S4S project made a significant contribution to the field can be found in other metrics. I am most proud of how we used a community-engaged approach (Dick, 2017) and were intentional about the recruitment of underrepresented populations (Dick et al., 2014), which were uncommon in... (shrink)

“I'm not afraid of dying,” he says, despite his plea on arrival. “Listen up, douchebag. Are you calling my cousin or what?” The emergency department might be the only sphere of human exchange where one party—patients (and sometimes family)—are permitted to insult, threaten, and even spit at the very people on whom they depend for help, while the offended parties—physicians, nurses, and other health care providers—must not only tolerate the abuse, but treat their tormentors. Does the ED's collective duty (...) to greater numbers of patients demand a revised ethos of tough love for extreme cases of misbehavior? Can we ask these patients to leave without legal recourse after extending genuine, compassionate efforts to participate in their care—barring evidence of a medical explanation for their toxic comportment or a mental illness that puts them at risk of harming themselves or others? (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Uselessness of Polygenic Scores for Addressing Campus DrinkingBennett Knox (bio), Hannah Allen (bio), and Stephen M. Downes, PhD (bio)Here we articulate a negative answer to Turkheimer and Greer’s question: “Is it possible to envision a genetically informed program that ethically intervenes on campus drinking?” (Turkheimer & Greer, 2024). However, first, we note that the authors cover an immense amount of ground in their paper. They lend insight into (...) how psychiatric genetics, at its very core, is conducted through their detailed examination of a large body of work in one specific area of this large field. A main result of this is to explain the gulf between results and conclusions, work that provides an invaluable service not just to various areas in philosophy and bioethics, but that are deserving of readership by a very wide audience. This gulf is explained via a careful accounting of the statistical measures used to assess the impact of genes on alcohol-related behavior in the college students sampled and comparisons between the strength of these measures and the strength and scope of conclusions drawn by the Spit for Science (S4S) researchers.A brief mention of the statistical measures in question helps set up our main focus. As Turkheimer and Greer note, before advances in sequencing technology, human behavior geneticists generated heritability coefficients for traits of interest. These coefficients were standardly produced from twin study work, which historically was the best way of getting a sense of the relative contribution of genes to a trait of interest as we cannot, or rather should not, conduct breeding experiments on humans. Current descendants of heritability coefficients come from genome-wide association studies (GWAS), which can be conducted on large groups of unrelated people. One key measure of interest arising from GWAS is a polygenic score (PGS), which “can be thought of as an observed manifestation at the individual level of the abstract variance ratio estimated by a heritability” (Turkheimer & Greer, 2024). Turkheimer and Greer focus on R2 values, which roughly “describe the magnitude of the relationship between the polygenic score and the phenotypes [of interest]” [End Page 437] (Turkheimer & Greer, 2024). They point out that the largest R2 reported in an S4S study is 6.5% (0.065). R2 are taken to be small at 0.01, medium at 0.09, and large at 0.25 in many areas of social science research but there are fields, for example, drug assay work, where only much higher R2 values are considered indication of a large effect. By this assessment, most of the R2 values reported by the S4S researchers, or calculated by Turkheimer and Greer when not reported, are very, very small, sitting well below the level of small effect of 0.01.Given these very low R2 measures, we agree with Turkheimer and Greer that S4S researchers did not uncover genetic information that could be informative, let alone actionable, for administrators concerned with campus drinking. However, it is worth asking what it would have looked like if S4S had produced such information. Suppose that S4S had been wildly successful, producing the Gattaca-like genetic information of “polygenic scores making reliable predictions that individuals had a 35% chance of developing a psychiatric disorder [here, alcoholism]” (Turkheimer & Greer, 2024). If a student was given their PGS, how are they to interpret it and act on it? How would this information be put to use by an administrator to address the problem of campus drinking?For the information to be leveraged at all, it would require consent from a significant number of students to have their PGS calculated and made available to themselves or administrators. Were scores to be calculated without active consent from the student (perhaps by using the sample provided to S4S), this would be a serious ethical violation. But even if a sufficient number of students did consent to having their PGS for alcoholism calculated, it is still not clear how this information could be used in an ethical manner to address the problem of campus drinking.If this student was already aware of a family history of alcoholism, then the PGS might do little more than quantify... (shrink)

To the Editor: Last year I sent a vial of my spit to a prominent direct-to-consumer genetic testing company. The company's Web site promised that, in return, I would get genetic risk information that would allow me to "make life-style choices" and "make more informed decisions" about my health—in other words, personalize my health behaviors and medical care.When the results arrived I found little that was helpful. There was lots of fun and interesting information. It was, after all, information (...) about me—one of my absolute favorite topics. And the data were presented in a sophisticated and engaging manner that made them easy to understand. But was there any information that should or would nudge me toward adopting .. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Crushing Pressures and Radical IdeasJohn Z. Sadler, MD (bio)Back in 2011, I wrote a paper for the Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, an Australian journal, for a special issue dedicated to ethical issues associated with psychiatric genetics research. The editor was particularly excited by the recent findings of the 5-HTT allele in psychiatric illness. I had different ideas about what I wanted to write about, and the editor, Michael Robertson, (...) graciously considered them and ultimately published the paper. At the time I was interested in the colossal investment of National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH) research dollars in psychiatric genetic research; at the time I was troubled at the lack of on-the-ground clinical implications of this research investment, and figured an Australian journal and referees would be more generous to a critical paper on U.S. funding priorities. I dug into the National Institutes of Health (NIH), NIMH, and National Science Foundation websites and found some crude dollar evidence of respective expenditures for research funding in various disorders and focus areas, and compared these investments to psychiatric genetic research funding commitments. I will not go into details (Sadler, 2011), but the gist was that the psychiatric genetics research enterprise was and had been an extraordinarily expensive enterprise, when other research questions that could be immediately implementable into clinical care improvements remained marginally funded at best. The paper was not read widely and other than a couple of annoyed responses from psychiatric genetic researchers, not much came of it.This concern about funding priorities was one of the reasons why I was pleased to see this paper by Turkheimer and Greer which explores the long term results of the Spit for Science (S4S) initiative, which was launched grandly the same year as my paper’s whisper from down under. I hope this Philosophical Case Conference explores the many dimensions of interest for this paper, which is extraordinarily careful and even handed in its attitude, while at the same time being incisive in its analysis.My focus here is not in the science per se, which is beyond my competence. I’m interested in Turkheimer and Greer’s (T&G) conceptual overview of this research program. More specifically, I focus on T&G’s highlighting of the extraordinary willingness of the S4S authors to interpret prevailingly negative results in the most generous, even misleading, degree possible. I try to provide some possible ways of understanding this kind of research rhetoric exhibited by a cohort of highly respected, very successful scientists.I acknowledge the well-described varieties of interpretive bias that all of us are subject to. First on the list must be confirmation bias, our tendency to interpret situations in terms consistent [End Page 447] with our preconceived notions—in this case, the idea that genetics has something important to do with addictive disorders. Another might be epistemic overconfidence—the tendency to fail at interpretive skepticism in favor of one’s preferred conclusion. Related to this may also be interpretive momentum, the tendency to maintain a conviction about the correctness of one’s expectations and disregard inconsistent findings over the course of a research program—in this case, the multiple S4S studies (O’Sullivan & Schofeld, 2018). However, these kinds of biases tend to “blame” the individual authors’ thinking styles. I opine, though, that other vectors shaping the declaring-success rhetoric are more important.These sources have to do with the state of practice in doing biomedical science research in universities and particularly academic medical centers (AMCs) today. I identify several causal vectors that compel, however subtly, researchers to declare success in the face of failure. I have only picked three, and in no order of importance: 1) funding caps for NIH grants, 2) the overleveraging of university budgets and ballooning dependence on soft money, and 3) the incentivizing of intellectual property development within AMCs.Funding Caps for NIH GrantsIf you are a university or AMC, one way you hold onto your most productive scientists (e.g., grants, publications, discoveries, and status) is by paying them well. Single NIH grants today commonly amount to millions of dollars, and often tens of millions. These bring... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Prostitutes and Courtesans in the Ancient WorldMadeleine M. HenryChristopher A. Faraone and Laura K. McClure, eds. Prostitutes and Courtesans in the Ancient World. Wisconsin Studies in Classics. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006. x + 360 pp. Cloth, $65; paper, 24.95.This collection stems from a conference at the University of Wisconsin, Madison in April 2002. McClure's introduction situates the essays historically from nineteenth-century assemblages of textual references to (...) sexual practice to the present, when attention to prostitution has grown out of interest in women's history, the history of sexuality, and cultural studies. She notes important modern approaches and the vexed question of terminology and its relationship to behavior. As McClure states, "while prostitutes in the ancient world may have been socially marginal, they were symbolically and even socially central" (6). Most of the essays, organized into three categories, concentrate on written evidence; some may wish that illustrations had been included.Section A: "Prostitution and the Sacred"In "Marriage, Divorce, and the Prostitute in Ancient Mesopotamia," Martha Roth concentrates on the impact, especially on marriage, of unmarried women (harı\mtu in Babylono-Assyrian, kar.kid in Sumerian) who had sexual relations with men. She concludes that the documents assign responsibility to the unmarried woman who has sexual relations with a man and that the law codes attempted to prevent or minimize the economic repercussions of such unions on inheritance. Roth finds no evidence of "ritualized or institutionalized sexual intercourse" (23) in Old Babylonian evidence (nineteenth to seventeenth centuries B.C.E.).In "Prostitution in the Social World and Religious Rhetoric of Ancient Israel," Phyllis Bird mainly provides interpretations of references in the Hebrew Bible to prostitution (e.g., the quest for "oriental sacred prostitution") and surveys elite, male religious biases. The prostitute "type" of the Hebrew Bible resembles that of surrounding cultures (41). Bird disentangles the considerable metaphorical uses of prostitutional language from other more literal references in order to concentrate on the differences between one called a prostitute proper (zonah, one who engages in extramarital sexual relations) versus one called qedes=ah ("consecrated woman"). The verb zanah referred to all extramarital sexual relations except adultery, and Bird dissects the problems involved when no one English word can be used to cover the range of meanings that the Hebrew root ZNH carries: raped women are defined by the same word, as are women who lure men [End Page 419] into adultery. In each instance, "an unmarried woman is involved in a sexual act" (45). The city can be personified as a prostitute or bride, and prostitutes symbolize dishonor in narrative texts. ZNH and its derivatives describe illicit political activity and describe Israel herself as a fornicating woman. Bird finds no evidence that prostitution was illegal in ancient Israel; the abundant references to and metaphorical uses of terms derived from ZNH suggest strongly that prostitutes were a feature of life, without establishing that females might engage in prostitution in order to pay religious fines. Bird notes briefly that male prostitution in ancient Israel was homosexual and had its own terminology (49).In "Heavenly Bodies: Monuments to Prostitutes in Greek Sanctuaries," Catherine Keesling examines literary references to votive monuments erected by or commemorating female prostitutes in Greek sanctuaries in the archaic and classical periods. She concentrates on the degree to which Rhodopis' and Phryne's famous monuments were liminal or transgressive, but she incorporates findings about other votives. Keesling observes that Rhodopis' votive stands midway between those that Snodgrass terms "raw" (everyday objects, e.g., weapons) and "converted" (e.g., statues): Rhodopis dedicated a tithe of ox-spits ("raw") but constructed the offering so that the spits could not be removed (thus becoming "converted"). Keesling also discusses the monument, known only from literary sources, supposedly dedicated to Leaina, who was loyal to the tyrannicides. This tongueless statue, if originally dedicated to her, is the only canting-device animal statue found in a sanctuary (64–65). Phryne's portrait statue in the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi is also singular as the only portrait before the Roman period that was not part of a family group, as one of three pre-Hellenistic gilded bronze portraits, and... (shrink)

Don't tell terrible stories—everyone here has enough of their own. Everyone here has a whole bloody sack of terrible stories, and at the bottom of the sack is a hammer the narrator uses to pound you on the skull the instant you dare not believe your ears. Or to pound you when you do believe. Not long ago I saw a tomboyish girl on Khreshchatyk Street demand money of an elderly woman, threatening to bite her and infect her with syphilis. (...) Don't stroll through Volodymyr Hill Park, don't stroll around the botanical garden, and especially don't stroll on Kontraktova Square. Don't stroll anywhere. Don't go to the pavilion with the Golgotha panorama near St. Alexander's Church. Not even the twelve-meter-tall crucified Christ will save you. Don't go outside when it's dark and people turn into shadows a shade darker than dark. Also don't go where you can be seen from far away. Not to imply that people used to be like a bunch of lilies, but now they stink like a cellar of cabbage.The city, which earlier might have had some fun, is now going crazy. It's like a fish in warm water: it doesn't react to anything, swims slowly like it doesn't care if it swallows a hook or not. The excitement and exaltation pass into oppression, just as our necks have sunk into our shoulders, our shoulders into our lumbars, our lumbars into our nether regions. The holiday turns into a funeral, the parades into explosions, depression into mania. Winter passes into summer, people turn into beasts, the hours into ages, and the ages into hours. It's worth simply walking around the city to see a soldier from an unknown army taking a piss near the opera. Farther on is a row of identical old widows selling ball gowns and candelabra. Then there are the aristocrats and manufacturers who throw so much at the prostitutes that they'll soon be richer than their wives.I returned late through the Kyryliv Wood, not heeding all the warnings that I myself have given here. It really is dangerous—the place is famous for it. There's a madhouse nearby, caves where criminals and the sick can hide out. Also, once upon a time, as they say in fairy tales, the great dragon Zmei Gorynich lived here beside the Puchai River. The stench in these places drives away the most committed misanthropes and even one type of philanthrope—that is, perverts. It sounds dumb, but the stench is cleansing. I don't know where it comes from. After the operating theaters and the rooms with amputees, the stench no longer repelled or attracted me; it just was. And this was a great place to think. As I walked, I considered an incident with our patient.The patient, a respectable individual whose name carries too much weight for me to state it directly, one day began to assault people. He nearly strangled a merchant who he believed asked too much for a beaver coat. He likewise wanted to kill his business partner when he didn't say hello loudly enough. But the worst was, he lost all shame of his own nakedness. At first it was the police who took care of it. When our future patient slipped off his pants and undergarments, he was taken to Kyrylivska, which has had means for dealing with such cases dating back to the day when unhinged Cossacks and composers from Kyiv Mohyla Academy were taken there.During the examination we determined that the patient was experiencing a severe breakdown. His wife added that lately, more than once, he had allowed himself strong words in front of the children and often suffered from ennui. Furthermore, she said, the patient had been undergoing treatment for “the French disease” for some years—which was, obviously, where we needed to start.“Syphilis!” Skorsky spat out the matchstick he was chewing on. He was a specialist on the psychological aspects of diseases related to the venereal. “Tertiary syphilis! When poorly treated, over time ‘the French disease’ can destroy the central nervous system. Hence the patient's chicanery. Such theater!”Skorsky and I had not spoken since the incident at Bilinsky's. Meanwhile, something significant had happened to him. The most boring person on earth, Skorsky had simply caught fire. He said hello and kibitzed. I even heard the doctor got drunk alone in his office, then wandered through the forest. Could he be using narcotic substances?“Cocaine!” was the doctor's second proclamation. It was his favorite treatment for the psychological complications of syphilis. Skorsky himself never took what he called “the universal drug”—good for alcoholism and toothaches, neuroses and morphine dependency—though he had read in an article by a respectable Viennese physician, who used cocaine as a panacea, that it was not addictive. That doctor subsequently recanted, but Skorsky paid no attention. He believed the retraction was made under pressure from pharmacologists who had no incentive to cease production of the medications that cocaine might supplant. Their representatives either paid or threatened the Viennese to repent.As the patient was escorted to his room, he assaulted the orderly, Alevtyna. They tried pulling him off her, but, though he released his fingers from her neck, he buried his teeth in her leg. The poor orderly, who had not until then been attacked by a psychotic, nearly died of fear. Later, panic set in over Skorsky's diagnosis. He told her about the consequences of syphilis: grotesque patterns on one's face due to infection of the skin, mucous membranes, cartilage, and bones. He went on about the devastation to the central nervous system, which they had just observed in real life: “The face starts to look like lace some mangy dogs fought over before rolling in the mud.”Alevtyna, who had not yet regained her faculty of speech, straightened up. Ignoring the slavering male orderlies, she bared her leg to get a better look at the wound. She then ran down the hall and out into the garden, where she fell on the ground to rip up grass and small bunches of daisies. Alevtyna ate them along with the soil in their roots.“Minor hysteria. She needs fifteen milligrams of cocaine.”Skorsky took a snuff box out of his pocket and scooped up some white powder with a toothpick made from a goose feather. He gave the order to close Alevtyna's mouth and one of her nostrils, forcing her to snort the medication.We fretted over her so long that evening fell. I decided to walk down, along the ravine, behind the church.It was unlikely there were any large beasts there, but something was rustling. The pits and mounds, ravines, paths, graves of witches whose living sisters flew in the treetops from time to time, the whispers of the forest spirits, the spirits of the nutcases who died in the hospital, the spirits of the monks from the St. Cyril Monastery, Zmei Gorynich and the bogatyrs who wanted to defeat him. The city would be calmer without this forest. I saw the gaps between the trees and went off in the direction of the tram tracks.As I was coming out of the forest, there was a patch of Amanita muscaria that had been trampled into porridge. A bit farther on, the body of Professor Bilinsky lay killed in the blackberry bushes. The way he was lying it looked as though he had not struggled before death. I quickly examined his body but saw nothing out of the ordinary. There were no wounds, no dirt under the fingernails. Animals had not yet smelled the carrion, but swarms of various insects covered him. Oh, why did I have to find the putrid body?The best thing would be to take the tram to his house to inform his relatives. The doors closed, and I noticed my own calm. This death had not evoked any emotions in me other than a feeling of responsibility, the need to tell the family. But also—some alarm at the thought of who the murderer could be. I knew that it was murder.“Your nose is bleeding.” A woman as round as an onion, carrying two baskets full of strawberries, offered me an ironed and starched handkerchief.“Have I dirtied my shirt?”“No, it's as neat as a pin. It's just your nose that's dirty. Wipe it now before you spray blood on my strawberries.”“No one will see the red on red.”“Ah, but it's salty!”“You know why it's not sweet? We'd drink it like syrup.”“Those with Christ in their heart do not talk that way.”“Are your strawberries expensive?”“Why? What?”“I'm checking to see if you have God in your heart.”“Child, if you knew how I have to work for this berry! I have to weed it a hundred times. In a week, the quitch grass grows as high as a horse. And I water it with water I carry from the stream, it kills my arms... ”“How much are the berries?”“They're not for sale. Anyway, soon money won't mean a thing. Soon all money, all these papers made from the skins of sinners on their satanic presses will be annulled. What matters is how we treat each other.”“So if I try your strawberries for free, my ‘thank you’ will be enough?”“Hands off!” she said and thwacked my fingers.I heard loud laughter behind me—same laughter as from the café near the Continental. There was no one sitting near Alina. (This is what fate looks like, remember.) Without asking, I sat next to her, away from the old lady.“Excuse me, but the night before last didn't you, yes, didn't you intrude on my privacy?” She started right away.“I saw it a little differently. Who was that young man with the mustache who paid me for you?”“Are you checking to see if you can flirt?”The tram stopped. People got on and off.“Are you coming back from the hospital?” she asked. “Don't be shocked. My uncle works there. He's told me all about you.”“An uncle by the name of Skorsky?”(Remember: this is what fate looks like.)“Yes. Skorsky's been strange recently—says things that make me wonder if he hasn't lost his mind. Have you noticed anything?”“I don't know.”“You know perfectly well.”“Where are you going?” I tried to change the subject.“I have to send something to my theater friends in Odesa. By the way, they'll be putting on Oedipus Rex soon in Kyiv—in Ukrainian.”“Greek tragedy in Ukrainian! That's a first.”“Exactly. The troupe is rehearsing now in Odesa. The theater where they will perform this fall is being remodeled.”“Wait. Now I remember where I've seen you before—it was at a performance! Vynnychenko's Black Panther and White Bear, at the Bergonier on Fundukleivska.“The same director is doing the Oedipus. He's my friend.”“He's your friend in what sense?”“Again with that tired subject. By the way, I've been thinking about you.”“And I about you.”“That's good. I was thinking not about you, to be precise, but about that elevator you invited me on.”“Who was that man with you?”“Like a broken record! Even if he had been my fiancé, I'm not bought or inherited. I'm not a brooch or a hundred acres of land, and I'm not a house in Kaniv!... Who was with you when you saw Black Panther?“Ah, so.”“Answer!”“That was my mother. She looks very young. She is coming to Kyiv the day after tomorrow. I can introduce you.”“Oh, this is my stop.”I looked out the window and realized that I had long since passed the stop for Bilinsky's.“Can we see each other again?”“We can. But you have only one chance.”Alina the anarchist wrote something on a scrap of paper and handed it to me.Morning, not morning but a thick porridge (I hate porridge). Dew, thick spit, crushed fruits, urine, all on the sparkling cobblestones. The sun, just barely having made its appearance, is already scorching. The human masses scurry and grumble like poorly digested food inside a stomach.I walked diagonally across St. Sofia's Square, then along the perimeter, then one edge, then again diagonally across. I went underground. The basement café of the Continental Hotel was practically empty. I again asked the server to bring the cloth with the embroidered portrait, but I couldn't remember the musician's last name, only that it ended with -sky. The server said that -sky was currently in the southern cities of Yalta and Odesa. I added that Kurbas, the director, Alina's friend, was also in Odesa, rehearsing Oedipus Rex, and that he'd previously put on Black Panther.I was bored, so I walked along Khreshchatyk and then headed down, calling to mind all the Kyiv churches of Podil: there's Birth of Christ, St. Nicholas on the Shore, Intercession, Pyrohoshcha, Holy Presentation, St. Dymytrii Rostovsky, St. Illia's. And also the Epiphany Brotherhood Monastery, Ascension Convent, and St. Katherine's, all these whipped-cream churches on the waffles of our streets. A few of them reminded me of themselves by appearing suddenly out of nowhere.The smells on Kontraktova Plaza where commerce buzzed were like multicolored light bulbs turning on one after another. Here you could catch the aroma of Balabukha jam, which blended with the next smell, English shoe polish at the Raiskys’ shop. Then the crunchy-smelling cabbage from old women standing in a row like herons and spitting out the shells of sunflower seeds. Farther on, the stench of a good-sized rat that crawled under Mrs. Shevchuk's shop where she sells broadcloth. Oh, she can't scream: no, she'll quietly dig that rat out herself so as to not scare off her clients.I bought a paper and two pairs of underwear. I asked two laughing young chambermaids who were secretly puffing in a grape-filled yard for a smoke. I wandered around Podil until evening when I came across a sawmill near the Dnipro that surprisingly smelled pleasantly of mazut fuel oil. The weather was dry, yet in the middle of the road was an enormous puddle, a deep dark black. A forty-year-old woman in a pale pink dress stood near it. The theatricality of it all provoked me to pose her a question,“Ma'am, what should I do?”But she paid me no attention. I shouted,“What should I do?”“What to do, what to do?” she said in Polish. “Jump in the water and swim so far away that you cannot return.”I quickly crossed a section of the forest. The wind brought a mixture of unpleasant air, like a stinky handkerchief held under one's nose. Passing the trees, I saw light in the spaces between them and exited at the hospital.Outside the windows, two orderlies lay in chairs with their heads thrown back. Two others—fools—ran around the yard in different directions, peering out at... something. The lights on the first floor of the hospital were on, and the staff milled about.“You're just in time!” said Ivan, a tall, young orderly.“For what?”“Your patient ran away! We went into his room and he wasn't there.”“What patient?”“The one who bit Alevtyna,” said Danylo, the other orderly, short and middle-aged.“That's Skorsky's patient, not mine.”I had no intention of helping them. This was all history—like my family, Kyiv, and my previous life. I had no intention of thinking about it. I wanted to go to my office, pack up my field surgery kit, and get out. So what? Their psychotic syphilitic ran away—it happened.Of course, that patient could have something to do with Bilinsky's murder. But that was no longer my problem.“What a strange coincidence!” the doctor on duty said. “Comrade doctor, the other one responsible for this patient was just here.”“And where is he now?”“He took off toward the church to look for the patient.”“Didn't the patient escape earlier?”“Don't know.”“How do you not know? You had better call the police, moron, before he kills someone. And get those sleeping orderlies to look for him.”“They can't... ”“Why not? Should I go wake them?”“They're on morphine.”“And you, I can see, have lost your mind. Go, catch your psycho! If it turns out that he killed Bilinsky—and on your watch—you can't imagine what's in store for you.”I adjusted my homburg and set off in the direction of St. Cyril's, that unwelcoming monolithic cube. I glanced around—what if our escaped syphilitic were to jump out of the bushes and bite or strangle me. I looked around because I wasn't sure of my actions, wasn't sure of my choices. Tripping over a clump of clover, I reached the open doors of the church. I couldn't stop myself from going in.The walls and ceiling were covered with frescoes. There was what used to be an angel rolling up the sky on the southern column of the narthex. But also graffiti: people scratched their names on it so as not to be forgotten—their idea of eternity. Prince Volodymyr the Great compared this activity to the desecration of graves. The vandals paid a fine and were beaten with canes. During the raids of Batu Khan, the church was deserted and cracks appeared all over it. Wild martens and feral dogs sought shelter here; insects swarmed under the ceiling with its red mosaics. Birches grew in its midst. Water seeped in the cracks, the water became ice, the ice widened the cracks, more water seeped in the cracks, becoming more ice that further widened the cracks, the wall split and nearly fell over, and then the wall fell over. Yet the angel is still rolling up the sky... When I reached the exit, I heard a rustling behind me. I turned after I stepped outside: in the depths of the church, like a stick in a pot of tar, stood a man with a large bag thrown over his shoulder and a revolver pointed right at me.“Is that you, Doctor?“Don't move!”“What's... Skorsky, what's with you?”“Don't move, I say!”“What are you doing here?”And finally I understood... Skorsky was himself the psycho! (Really, I had known for a while.)“You are the murderer! I knew it! But—why?”“Shut up.”“It was you. You! The stolen cigarettes, the strange behavior, Bilinsky. If I shout, everybody will come running. They've already called the police!”There was heavy breathing behind me. And then a gun rang out.The city is overgrown with new buildings. They encircle everything that was once on the periphery. Kyiv has become an old lady that can no longer restrain herself in the face of pastries. The city climbs farther. It steps over the swamps, turns the old rivers into a series of lakes; the other bodies of water it drives into canals. The grain that falls from the wild wheat is black. When the sun heats it, the grain melts and trickles into the earth. St. Cyril's stands indestructible. No one spackles the small cracks in its walls with either expensive putty or glues, nor with cheap cement and whitewash. One day a small fox appears in the doorway. It runs inside and along the floor of simple gray tiles. The gods watch from the walls, watch and fall into ruin. The fox runs to the iconostasis. Before it is a time-darkened Virgin Mother and Child in oil on sheets of zinc. The fox runs the metal steps that wind up to the second floor. The fox runs past all the vaults, naves, all the frescoes. A buckthorn seed flies in through a broken window. It will be the first. Soon the buckthorn will grow everywhere. A dumb hare will make its nest in the buckthorn bushes and nightingales will settle in the upper branches to sing until the end of the world. The fox runs between the thick rays that penetrate the windows. It catches one of the rays, squints its eyes, and warms itself in the sun.The shot rang out, but I did not fall. I looked around—and on the church threshold was our syphilis patient bearing a rod. His head lay on the rocks by the doorway.“If only he'd been at the stage of nose deformity! Just imagine: a hole instead of a nose plus a hole from the bullet—like an extra pair of eyes!” Skorsky laughed at the corpse.“We need to call the orderlies.”“They heard the shot. They'll run here on their own. You see, Professor Bilinsky believed it would take two or three years to wrap up this patient's case,” Skorsky told me. “But I took care of it much faster!”“Excuse me, but I'm going crazy in this city. I thought that you were Bilinsky's murderer.”“Just so. Why not? I am Bilinsky's murderer.”“Don't tease. You've changed a lot recently, so... ”“Yes, I've started killing people. You might term such a change significant.”“You have the right to irony.”“I am not being ironic.”“Let's call it sarcasm.”“It's the honest-to-God truth.”“And yes, you have the right to mock me.”“Well then, let's be done. To the horses!”“What horses?”“Alina's waiting!”Alina, her uncle Skorsky, a few others I didn't know, and I rode like the wind that ripped off my homburg and carried it back to Kyiv.“There's a fresco in the choir loft at St. Cyril's where Vrubel painted himself and patients from the hospital as the apostles. When I came across it by accident, I really believed they were saints,” Alina said.“I've never been up there. I've only seen the church from below.”“Remember the way back so you can see it sometime.”“The Puchai River used to flow here. You shouldn't trust the landscape,” Skorsky said, reaching for something, perhaps his bag, just when we left the darkness of the trees and saw the endless steppe ahead of us.We rode all night without stopping. Though no one was chasing us. Though we had nowhere to be. We rode like beasts released from a cage. The promises of the horizon turned what we'd left behind into a cage fit for those from whom freedom had been severed, like an anomaly, at birth.The pre-morning sky looked at first like a sack of turnips—filled with something heavy. But with each verst, the sky became lighter. When it was finally light enough to see clearly, we arrived at a knoll at the foot of a stone wall that from a distance had appeared to be a gigantic piece of halva. The exterior ruins of the castle gave no hint of how it was when all was fine here, when people defended themselves successfully from the nomads’ raids. From far off, the wreckage looked like a natural agglomeration of stones—a rocky elevation, no more: a cluster of cliffs. It would rain a few hundred more times, a few hundred more winds from a few hundred directions would blow on this heap, and it would collapse as though nothing had ever been here.A few stalks of wheat grew from one of the rocks. Someone had probably cast a handful of grain here for some birds that forgot to eat it.“Who could this castle belong to?” I asked Skorsky.“I reckon the Swan Princess,” the doctor rejoined, hoping to sound knowledgeable.From behind one of the piles of gray sandstone emerged a young man in a black reptilian coat and a white papakha as lush, bright, and out of place as a dahlia. His name was Artem. The heat was melting our brains, but he was dressed like that, in rooster fashion, which was popular among the otamans. Artem helped Alina dismount her horse and tried to kiss her on the lips, but she offered him a cheek instead.Had she been racing to see this clown?We entered the yard—the ruins had fashioned an internal space that was more or less protected, at least from strangers’ eyes. It turned out that there were even places where it was possible to hide from the rain, and from there the ruins didn't look half bad.In the center of the court was a table, and on it a wooden bucket with pink gladiolas. How romantic! It all looked like it came from outer space. Where on earth, in the middle of the steppe, far from any village or town, did this table, this simple table, come from? And the gladiolas? The steppe hadn't been plowed in so long that any cultivars would have gone wild, degenerated, dried up completely.A campfire crackled nearby—a little preview of what we would soon do to the houses, villages, and cities. Artem the otaman brought over a cezve from the fire and poured the first portion into a small, copper cup for Alina. He also got out a porcelain cup with images of rosy cherubim—but how...?“Who else would like coffee?”Only Skorsky and I responded. The question excited me, even distracted me from the thought of the kiss I had recently witnessed and the Kyiv I had recently left.“It's obvious who the professors here are; cultured people drink coffee. Are you both doctors?”“Uh-huh.”“For wolves of the steppe, like us, doctors are gold, even more precious than gold. Actually, a Hippocrates like you should eat more, because those in your profession will soon be worth your weight in gold. Work on your figures, both of you.”“Who will take pity on the horses that have to carry us?”“We'll find the horses. And very large doctors can be transported on machine-gun carts. We'll need to seat the otamans near you. Only a fool would shoot at a doctor.”“I think we'll find quite enough fools here.”“With your beard, Doctor, you look like Tsar Nicholas II. But even so you won't be shot. You might even be canonized!”“We've only just arrived and you're going on about executions,” Skorsky grumbled and checked to make sure that he still had his bag.“Apologies, apologies, pardonnez-moi. But you are not merely a doctor. A venereologist! Skorsky, you're a specialist! A venereologist is the most important person in wartime. The most valuable! You are the botanists of war. You can't imagine what varieties of flowers grow here, and these beds have long awaited a proper gardener. Or even just a man with a scythe!”“Bite your tongue,” Alina said. “I don't need to listen to this.”“Yes, yes, of course. Excuse me, my r—. ” He almost said “rose.”We rested all day. We went down to a surprisingly close river overgrown with lilies. We rowed the boats left by fishermen. I talked to Skorsky. He took his bag everywhere, refusing even to swim so he wouldn't have to part with it. I asked him what he had in it, but he said it wasn't my damned business.Alina rowed with the otaman to the middle of the river. They were having a loud discussion. She was waving her hands. The current carried their boat downstream slowly and smoothly. What a nuisance, that current!I tried to meet with Alina one-on-one, but she was avoiding me. In the morning I was confused, by lunch I was sad, and after lunch I got angry.In the evening, I lay on the hot grass and drank another cup (I have no idea where they got such good coffee), which had no effect at all on my sleep. I watched the Perseids. Every year, the Earth passes through the tail of Comet Swift-Tuttle. People can see the meteor shower and make a wish. I wished. I counted forty-seven falling stars. All forty-seven of my wishes were for the same thing.Around the campfire, they were sitting, talking. I saw how he tickled her face with a piece of grass and she brushed him off in annoyance. Then they were screaming at each other. Later they again spoke kindly, after which they again quarreled. My joy grew after each tiny mistake that Artem made. I wanted him to show the worst he was capable of.They were screaming at each other, but all I could hear was beautiful opera singing. The stars fell to the sound of their screaming. The stars blessed my joy.Then this happened: Alina kicked the fire, scattered burnt kindling, and burned some of the grass. Artem grabbed her by the arm, but she broke away from him and ran off to the horses.“Go then! I guarantee you'll get to Katerynoslav and return with your tail between your legs.”“I'm going to Huliai-Pole! To Father Makhno!”I jumped up and ran after her.“Where do you think you're going?” Artem shouted.Really—where was I going? I was going after her: to Huliai-Pole, to Katerynoslav, to Rome, to Washington, to Istanbul, to Montevideo... “Go to sleep,” he said. “Come morning, this coquette will be here, right as rain. We've already been through this show. Tomorrow she'll be right here next to my boot!”... No, she won't.In some sort of shape we entered some town. There were some buildings that were some colors, some trees, some streets, some roads, and some signs. Posts, flustered birds’ nests, echoes, colors, shapes—each of some kind. A wedding procession was coming toward us. If you want to make orange, you need to add yellow to red, and then bam—it's black. If you want to salt the soup, shake in a little, and then bam—two handfuls. You want to say a kind word, and then bam—a punch in the face. I was rocked around like a watermelon on a boat and threw up my breakfast straight into the horse's fluffy mane. Sanko found this hilarious, but I said I'd pulverize him. So Sanko sped ahead.No one knew anything about Alina. The daytime sky was like a poorly washed bowl. The sun was a squashed, rotten apricot. The night sky looked like the sole of a boot to me. The moon was a dirty cheap copper coin that had gotten stuck to the sole. Everything seemed spoiled to me, irrelevant, unnecessary. Without her, this journey was a waste of time.“You'd better stay away from everyone,” Artem said. “You'll infect us with your pining, and pining is worse than the clap.”The wedding procession was before us. The young couple, still utter children, walked so calmly it was as if they didn't see us. As if we were made of a light breeze—our bodies, clothes, our horses and their iron shoes—of the lightest gasses. As if we were visible only to ourselves and the coal-black dog that barked, panting and gasping.The wedding was headed straight for us. We were in the middle of the road, and so were they. We approached each other slowly, a wave going toward a wave. Some ten meters before their indifferent faces, I noticed the color of the bride's eyes. And the coral-colored tulips that fell on the road before her. Round goose eggs on meaty stems, the flowers were falling and falling before her. The bride's eyes were almond shaped.“Hey there,” Artem shouted at me. “Wake up!”I came to and saw the whole village, everyone there, not realizing my group had turned left onto a side street away from the procession. The tulips disappeared—where'd they get tulips in the fall? I was sitting alone on my horse in the middle of the road, and the entire wedding procession came to a stop. I moved to the side, and the throng marched on, cutting off our escape route. We rode a few more meters and came across the synagogue.“You know what, you're right,” said the otaman.“Who is?”“Oleksii is the only one here who's right.”“About what?”Artem turned his horse and raced back. Everyone stood still while he ran his horse into the crowd and began firing his revolver. People scattered in all directions. Artem trotted, cackling like an imbecile. The horse kicked an old guy in the mouth. The man fell, spitting out his gold teeth. We rode up to the commotion and formed ranks, but none of us wanted to join the otaman.The bride stopped in the middle of the street. On both sides were buildings and trees, as well as dust, sky, and sun. She stood still, beautiful, as if nothing had happened. Then she adjusted her garland and walked calmly on.“Well, should we get some sugar now?” Artem laughed, looking at the bride, and off he went toward the sugar factory.It was then I noticed that all of the houses had shutters—fuchsia, blue, ocher—and that all the shutters were closed.We flew toward the dirty building, whistling and shouting. If there had been aesthetes among the otamans, they would certainly have razed the abomination in this field after seizing it. They would have spread soil on top and sown buckwheat. Long live buckwheat!, that wonderful crop. Like hunting dogs hot on the trail, we raced to our defenseless victim, with the baying of hundreds of hounds behind us. The field shook beneath us. We became an artist's canvas, evolving from Realism to Romanticism, Romanticism to Expressionism, Expressionism to Suprematism. If we had been painted in black and white, we would have been splotches (until the ink ran, annihilating all remaining patches of white).Two men stood near the gate—unarmed and undressed, in nothing but their undershirts and boots. Our fervor, our kinship with the elements, our entirety, were all for naught.“Jesus Christ! What bores!” Artem exclaimed. “How boring you are!”“Maybe boring for us, but fireworks for them,” Sanko said, dismounting his horse.“The fear of death engenders creativity,” our otaman—a distinguished philosopher of the early twentieth century, that demonic breed—prophesied.He went on, “Excuse me, but with all due respect, we are not going to search you. Just show us right away where the money is. Why are there so few of you? Don't say there's not much money. I want piles and piles of money! If you don't show it to us, we'll print our own on your skin. Believe me, we will.”We entered the factory grounds. There were no workers, only an enormous mountain of sugar beets that looked like a pile of coal from a distance and a pile of dead rats from up close.“So, did you have a good year?” Artem asked a man in an undershirt.“Not really—too dry.”“Nah, that's fine. You wouldn't have been able to gather most of the harvest this year anyway. There's a fire burning across all of Ukraine, all of Russia. The whole world!”While Artem tossed thoughts like well-chewed sunflower seeds into the crowd, the two men quietly stepped aside and then ran fast ahead to the factory's main hall. The gigantic door slammed shut. The gate was locked behind us! The windows were smashed! The factory roared from inside like a cumbersome machine starting up. Bullets whirred through every window.“Bastards! It's a trap! Quick, after me!”Still on horseback, Artem bounded over to a vast window, low to the ground, and smashed it mercilessly. He broke the frame and jumped inside on his horse. I and a few others followed. We broke into their lair, threw open the doors, and let the other warriors inside.Iron vats of hot sugar were steaming, pipes were clattering; machinery groaned.“Parasites!” Artem gritted his teeth. “I'll get you. I'll get you red sons of bitches. Painted whores!”At the word “painted,” his horse fell to the ground. Lying prone, Artem continued fighting, but the red soldiers wouldn't let him stand. Fighting nearby, I rode over to assist but did not know where to aim. Artem got up, ran forward, and brought his sword down on the head of the closest soldier, all the way to the middle of his skull, to the bridge of his nose. It was like butchering a pig. Artem thrust the sword into the buttock of another who was fleeing and cut off his leg at the bend in the knee.“I'll cut off every last one of your asses! Cut off your asses!” Artem bellowed.A half hour later, the dead were lying, the captured sitting, and the victors doing anything they pleased.“Skorsky, are there a lot of casualties?” I asked the doctor, whose hour it was. I hoped not, because I was too tired to help him.“Just a few. The dead are already dead, and the wounded are not ours.”Though Skorsky rarely asked my help, and though I'd become an ordinary soldier, the doctor in me was still present in the most unpleasant attribute—knowledge. Others saw an eviscerated man, pieces of dusty flesh smeared with clay, soil, sand, and straw. I saw a perfectly formed kidney hanging perfectly from the rest of its body like a child's mitten from its coat. You could try this death on for size. Wear it like a sanbenito of the Inquisition.Artem counted the money and then lay on the floor alongside the gigantic sugar mountain in the middle of the room. From time to time, the crystals rustled as they fell.“I didn't think you'd be such a fighter!” the otaman said without turning toward me. “I thought you'd be healing us. You'd keep to the rear and we'd hide you like a girl. But here you are, in the vanguard, like a lion!”“I got excited,” I told him, choosing not to react to the “girl” part.“’Cause Alina said there was no sense counting on you to fight.”“Really?”“Does that sting?”“Why would it? I'm a doctor—not everyone is. It requires a brain. Unlike waving a sword.”“Yeah, yeah. I gave her gladiolas. We were lying in the boat near that castle, doing all manner of things, and she told me all about you. How you met.”“You were lying in that boat talking about me?”“It was the day before you left Kyiv. You agreed to go with the anarchists so quickly!”“Were you surprised? Doctors make fast decisions.”“But you probably had great prospects. Your parents are rich, right?”“And who are your parents?”“Probably all your relatives fled abroad—bourgeois. Why did you stay?”“What the hell's your point?”“Alina, by the way, died a while ago. Probably.”“Don't jinx her.”“Listen here,” he said, staring at the ceiling. “And listen good. If you have designs on her—dead or alive—it's best you castrate yourself now.”“After you.”“If I want to kill somebody, you know, I just do it.”At last he looked at me. I was lying on the floor nearby and looking in his direction, sweaty and relaxed, my appearance complemented by my disdain for his opinion, his authority, his stupid hat. His everything.Artem raised his arm above his head, stuck a finger in the sugar mountain, and licked it. We both got up. Had I anticipated this turn of events, I would have readied a gift for him. Artem held his revolver. Under my hand I found a knife the workers used for gathering beets: it was a deliberately sharpened arc they sank into the swollen brassicas. I jumped up and quickly stepped around the sugar mountain.Artem's bullet hit a pane and broke the glass.“Not man enough for hand-to-hand?”The otaman shot again.“You should've challenged me to a duel, you romantic!”Encrusted with white crystals, I charged Artem from the sugar mountain. We fell in, and the sugar stuck in our hair, mustaches, nostrils, armpits.The gang ran in to get us apart, then backed off because it had nothing to do with them. By now the sugar mountain had burst its banks. Of the once perfect pyramid, a deformed mound remained.Wounded, Artem fell on the sugar mound, turning the white red.I stood before the gang sugar-coated and holding a bloody hook. The old otaman was drawing his last breath. Blood trickled from the corner of Artem's mouth and streamed from the left side of his breast.“What's the commotion?” Old Roman had just come in.“Be quiet,” the boys told him. And a good thing they did.“You killed him? You killed the otaman!”“Shut your mouth,” the boys told him.“You... ”I slugged Roman's stinky herring mouth. How did that son of a bitch find pickled herring in a sugar factory? My fist was now bigger and stronger than ever before, a steel anvil that could split nails and shatter memorial plaques. The unfortunate man's jaw twisted like an upper millstone that had gone off track from the lower.“Let's get out of here and go to Makhno's camp,” I gave my first order.We galloped so fast the grass burned beneath us. The birds and bugs had no time to fly out of the way; hooves trampled the burrows of rodents who didn't dare crawl out of their holes for a long time after. We raced like no one had ever raced before.The steppe, that sly fox, pretended to be an innocent fool. The steppe said, “I'm like Adam: I don't even know my own name.” But its grass harbored the tracks of thousands of armies and the heels of Herodotus, the crunch of Trypillia vessels, and the smell of Scythian hemp, Roman coins, clay figures of wolf people, the chevrons of Denikin's army, glass from the Chekists’ ruby stars, traces of uranium from flying saucers. I threatened it: “Steppe, show me your layers, or I will burn you, plow you under, flood you.” But it just replied: “I'm like Adam: I don't yet know my name.”I lost geography as if it were a silver coin. It fell out of my pocket and rolled through the feather grass that blanketed the steppe in white foam. The open space ahead was so endless that the whole world might as well have been steppe. If people ended up here from somewhere else, they would conclude they were on another planet. The coin fell and became an argentum, became one with the ring on the hand of the princess who had one green eye and one blue, with the twisted candlestick at the monastery on the other side of the steppe, with melted ingots. It broke down into simpler elements, simpler and simpler yet. The horse carried me spreading the seeds of northern plants to the south, just as southern riders had once brought flowers and weeds to the north. And then I turned back. Just as I had no geography, I had no time. Every night I fell asleep with the thought that the next day I would again race. Through all spacelessness, all timelessness. I exchanged one horse for another, got on a train, on a boat, traversed forty versts on foot—in rain that brought the river up to the road, in heat that overturned cattle. The earth I walked on became mine. Mine was the water in the lakes and springs, clean water, dirty water, enlightened water, contaminated with oil, stinking of algae, of fish that died in wells, stinking of the memory of atrocities, water as clean as broken bread. The water did not become Alina.I was doing this for her: I got the basturma out from under my saddle, sodden with the horse's sweat, sliced the throat of a rich man whose daughter I had danced with at a ball, climbed into a vat of beet juice and took a sugar bath, carried out the expropriation of the savings banks, wiped the sweat from my face with my shirt—and the cloth turned red; I didn't know from what. If it was someone else's blood, I didn't care; if it was my own, even less.We mostly came across Reds. We scraped them up like old red paint on a door in order to repaint the boards black. Black looked better. Red is tasteless, but black has style. Healthy men died before us of myocardial rupture like bunnies found in the nest. The ones whose hearts were sewn of steel wire envied the deceased. Seizing estates, banks, distilleries, and prisons reminded us of gathering in the harvest. If you're too lazy to pick an apple, you can shake the tree; some of the fruit gets bruised when it falls. We seized buildings like we were shaking apple trees. No one picked the fruits, we just shook: shook under the beds, under the tables, behind the curtains. No, there was no picking. We just shook until the red juice spurted from the apples.Near the Khorol River with Father Makhno and me in charge, we captured sixteen machine guns and four cannons, as well as five hundred prisoners who immediately came over to our side. The villagers voluntarily gave us bread and cheese, chickens and kvas. People joined us. The front of the machine-gun cart said “You can't run,” and “You won't catch us” at the back. We took factory after factory. Millions of karbovantsi, thousands of poods of sugar, weapons. We smashed the telephone exchanges and captured the telegraphs. We made alliances with some and then with others. Lenin, Wrangel, Frunze, the Germans, Chinese, Australians, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Cleopatra, Maria Theresa Walburga Amalia Christina. We ran the steppe. There were a hundred thousand of us. There were three hundred thousand of them. There were three hundred thousand of us. There were a million of them. There were two million of them. We were all of humanity. We were so many that we were none.The nobles’ estates were long ago forsaken. In the people's deepest trunks lay silks and guipure laces that were once perhaps used only to cover a table. Five steps from the barn in the direction of the pear tree, some silver candlesticks are buried; there's a plaster figure of an angel in the chicken coop, covered with shit and feathers.I was reluctant to be going to my home, but I didn't see any way out. Fate intended me to be a different being from the one I was before.Here my grandfathers and great-grandfathers were born. Here the ones who caused my grandfathers and great-grandfathers to flee had stopped. When we were still far off I noticed that someone was in the house. It was our men—Skorsky had brought them here, about twenty in all. I asked Sanko, whom I had walked with side by side more than once, where the doctor was now. All the men answered that he was around somewhere, but I didn't see him that evening.In 1918, the spirit of my great-grandfather Stepan, along with my mother and uncle, had gotten into a britzka and scrambled off to Paris, to Napoleon, against whom my great-grandfather had fought with the Cossacks, to whom the Russians promised to return self-rule. Following him in the cart went the soul of Grandpa Oleh, who lost a finger when he cut down the old linden near the house; his second finger was blown off by a cannonball near Balaklava, and later his entire hand was cut off by some Turk. Next went the spirit of my father, also Stepan, who did not take part in any war but died of measles at the age of forty. They all got the hell out of here. First, they went to Kyiv, led by my mother, Tamara Makarivna, in order to collect Uncle's family and me, their son. And their son, it turns out, has now come back to rob his own home (I didn't drive my war buddies away, did I?). It's a shame that I didn't know where the bathtub was, or whatever they bathed me in when I was small. It would have been good to walk through the ranks of anarchists with that basin and tell them all to spit into it.Remembering every room, I carried Alina upstairs to my mother's bedchamber. There was no longer furniture or pictures, only bare walls. The bed and mattress remained, but that was enough. Mother hated noise, so she set up her room far away from the running in the halls and the creaks on the stairs. I adjusted the mattress; in a gap, looking like a stalk of wheat, there lay a gold bracelet that she lost in the haste and that the thieves could not find in the mayhem. I tucked it into my pocket.The place could still be saved. It was strong, built under the leadership of my grandfather, who knew how to do it right. He built a sawmill, a gristmill, a dress factory (today it's probably been ransacked, maybe even by our own men).Alina had a complete, displaced break in her right fibula. We needed water first. I went downstairs—the guys were dragging out the piano like an old cow to the slaughter.“What are you doing with that?”“Taking it out.”“Why?”“What's it to you? We want to have fun.”“Can you play?”“We're not your bourgeois lily-handed bitches.”They couldn't play, but they were famous at destruction. “Noise is the music of the new time,” one of the smarter among them might have said. “But noise is the opposite of music. Just as a rose is the opposite of your ugly mugs,” I'd have responded if there was anyone to say it to. I could also have said that this was a Bosendorfer grand piano, that it was very valuable—but do the guys not deserve such a luxury?“Why are you so boring? We're relaxing.”“Then let me play a little first.”“Go ahead, but fast. One-two.”So I played. As before. My fingers ran up and down the black and white keys, which weren't simply keys of these, the simplest, colors. These were the keys that remembered my fingers specifically—achieved by that slovenly German Katerina, our governess. She knew a bundle of languages, could play the piano, and was interested in the latest scientific discoveries. But she had not an ounce of sympathy for anyone who couldn't master anything on the first try. More than once she hit my pinkie against the black key that remembered every one of its four thousand touches. She would pound it on the key and shout, “Si bémol! Si bémol,” and later bang my fingers and translate, “B flach! B flach!”I played. I could not expose myself, so the only thing I could do was believe in miracles. What if these coarse men saw value in this bit of furniture so unintelligible to them? And what if they didn't destroy it, this emblem of my childhood, my land, my air, which I could protect in no other way? My air. My water.“Shchedryk, shchedryk, shchedrivochka,” one of them who recognized the tune began to sing along.“Look at you.” They did not expect music from me, who had until recently been drinking blood like water.They said, “Again, again!”A group of curious men gathered around me. They were ordinary farmers, thieves, and recidivists, peasants and workers, everyone except for Skorsky. They needed this music as they needed baths. The music cleansed them from the inside, perhaps. They had not heard anything besides the whistle of a bullet, the neighing of a horse, or the knocking of a chisel and the whirring of a saw, amputating limbs, for a long time.But it could not go on long. I did not close the piano lid, just stood and went to fetch water for Alina, leaving the unfinished song for later. The well was to the north—that is, at the “Head.” My father once promised to give me a compass if I could learn to identify the ends of the earth by means of the sun. And to make it easier to remember, I gave each one of them a name: the east where the day begins was “Right” (my right hand), the west “Left,” the north “Head,” and the south “Feet.” Back when I could still do whatever I wanted all day long, I would wake in the morning and say: I'm going to the Feet. The mound was at the Feet, Left had the river, Right had the forest. It was only to the Head that I rarely went, because a village was located there. When the villagers saw me, they would speak in whispers and avoid the master's son.... I wiped her brow and her burning, sunken cheeks. I lay down next to her to feel the heat of her skin.When the fire in Alina calmed slightly, I went out into our orchard. My father had once been given a gift from Japan—a tulip tree that blossomed with yellow-green flowers. It had to have grown in the time that I was away. It would have been fatal had it been cut down. I again took the stairs down into the drawing room and came across nobody—they had all disappeared in search of food or were hidden away in their burrows. In the middle of the hall, like an opened rib cage, was the piano, irreparably shattered.B Flach! B Flach!Translation © Ali Kinsella 2022. (shrink)

It is hardly necessary to rent I Spit on Your Grave or Tool Box Murders for your VCR in order to find images of sexuality contaminated by depersonalization or violence. As far back as Rabelais’ Gargantua, for example, Panurge proposes to build a wall around Paris out of the pleasure-twats of women [which] are much cheaper than stones”: “the largest … in front” would be followed by “the medium-sized, and last of all, the least and smallest,” all interlaced with (...) “many horney joy-dinguses” so that fortification would be impregnable, except for the “ordure and excretions” of the flies it would doubtlessly attract.1 Two centuries later, one of Rabelais’ compatriots, the Marquis de Lade, described the rage of a sexually initiated daughter against a woman who refuses to consider her “pleasure-twat” “cheaper than stones.” The Sadeian heroine first sodomizes her puritanical mother with an artificial penis, then has her infected with syphilis, and finally performs infibulations to prevent the infected semen from leaking out: “Quickly, quickly, fetch me needle and threat! … Spread your thighs, Mama, so I can stitch you together.”2One century later in England, the author of My Secret Life explained that, when in a state of sexual excitement, “he is ready to fuck anything,” from his sister to his grandmother, from a ten-year-old, to a woman of sixty, for a standing prick has no conscience.” To this credo, he adds the admonition, “Woe be to the female whom he gets a chance at, if she does not want him, for he will have her if he can.”3 The sexually aroused man in the contemporary American film Looking for Mr. Goodbar curses the woman who does not want him as much as she wants a room of her own and the freedom to choose a succession of male lovers. After he resentfully determines to have her when he gets the chance , he rapes her and finally knifes her to death, exclaiming “That’s what you want, bitch, right? That’s what you want.”However these individual works are labeled, such passages remind us of the long history of pornography, a gender-specific genre produced primarily by and for men but focused obsessively on the female figure. In their depictions of female sexuality, narratives from Gargantua to La Philosophie dans le boudoir, My Secret Life, and Looking for Mr. Goodbar explain why definitions of the pornographic have recently moved away from “obscenity,” a term that generally refers to the sexually stimulating effects of a picture, a novel, or a film on the male reader/observer, and toward “dehumanization,” a word that is used to evoke the objectification of women. As Irene Diamond has demonstrated, during the past decade the generally held assumption that pornography is about male sexuality has been qualified by those who argue that “the ‘what’ of pornography is not sex but power and violence, and the ‘who’ of concern are no longer male consumers and artists but women.”4 1. François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. Jacques Le Clercq , bk. 2, chap. 15. I have used this translation because it is employed in Helene Iswolsky’s translation of Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World . With no analysis of gender, Bakhtin’s exclusive focus on the grotesque wipes out the significance of Rabelais’ sexual imagery.2. Marquis de Sade, quoted in a brilliant reading of this text by Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography , p. 127; all further references to this work , abbreviated SW, will be included in the text.3. My Secret Life , p. 361.4. Irene Diamond, “Pornography and Repression: A Reconsideration,” in Women: Sex and Sexuality, ed. Catharine Stimpson and Ethel Spector Person , p. 132. Susan Gubar is professor of English and women’s studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. Together with Sandra M. Gilbert, she has coauthored The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination and co-edited both Shakespeare’s Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Poets and the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Tradition in English. This fall they will publish the first volume of a three-volume work, No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century. Her previous contribution to Critical Inquiry is “ ‘The Blank Page’ and the Issues of Female Creativity”. (shrink)

This article, which is an adaptation of a lecture delivered at Villanova University in the Fall of 2015, proposes a reading of Augustine’s Confessions with the assistance of the notions of absorption and theatricality. The very use of those notions is meant to counterbalance the readings generated by our overfamiliarity with Augustinian interiority. By replacing interiority with a concept that, heretofore, is alien to the Augustinian vocabulary, it becomes possible to block facile access to mystical interpretations of conf. on the (...) one hand, and to embark upon the task of reassessing the nature of “confessing” on the other. This new reading demonstrates the difficulties involved in approaching the confessor fully involved in his act of sustained confessing. A comparison is also made with the notion of absorption in the visual arts. Just as spectatordom becomes problematic vis-à-vis a painting whose personae look inward rather than outward, so too the position of the reader vis-à-vis a text whose confessing creator uninterruptedly addresses his Confessee demands a redefinition of the reader’s role and place in the process. (shrink)

Religions; Islam; relations; Christianity; Judaism; Christianity and other religions; Other (Philosophy); religious aspects; Islam.

Polybius II. 39. 9: ο μν λλá γε καί πεр тŵν μφσβηтοтμΈνων πÉрεψαν θηβαîοι καί λακεδαιμόνιοι μόνοις рŵν Έλλήνων Χαιοας, ο πρòς рήν δùναμν ἀποβλÉψανрες, σΧÉδον γαρ λαΧασрην рòрε γεрων έλλήνωνεîΧον рó δÉ πλεαον, εας νήν πασрν καα λην καλοκαγαθααν Strabo VIII.

The authors investigate MacCormick and Weinberger's claim that the Institutional Theory of Law provides a conceptual framework for the study of legal phenomena from a socio-legal point of view. They evaluate this claim by confronting both the Institutional Theory of Law and Weinberger's theory of action with two approaches in socio-legal theory, i.e. the instrumentalist and the constitutive approach. The conclusion is that the Institutional Theory of Law lends itself to empirical research from an instrumentalist perspective, for both place the (...) concept `institution' in the context of law. Weinberger's theory of action may provide a basis for empirical research from a constitutive perspective. The authors make some suggestions for refinement of Weinberger's theory of action in order that the relation between institutions and action can be labeled dynamic. (shrink)

The opposition in which many phenomenologists of religion stand to the above remarks is clear. Religious consciousness of the world, in being tied to the language of a particular faith, requires conceptual mastery for its emergence. Linguistic and non-linguistic skills in the use of concepts must be developed through fledgling attempts and repeated practice. In noticing this, attention has been called to the fact that such consciousness is far from being man's natural inheritance. It is acquired through instruction and learning, (...) and the concepts which generate Christian consciousness of the world make demands upon a person which go straight against his grain. Using the Christian concepts as tools in handling the various situations along life's way requires strenuous and repeatedly renewed effort. There remains a certain Christian distance from ordinary ways of doing commerce with the world. The way, after all, is said to be narrow. So to become conscious of the world in a Christian manner is to submit oneself to the rigors of the concepts. It is to permit one's life to be guided and ruled thereby in his regard for the world.In making these observations, it becomes clear, too, that the Christian life and consciousness is one in which a man chooses to be enmeshed. It is a matter of human decision. In so choosing, a man makes his life determinate; he gives it shape. The specificity or concreteness demanded in and with the language of faith should be contrasted with the rather diffuse and indeterminate character of the religious awareness thought to be so deep and abiding by phenomenologists. Because of its lack of particularity in contour, this notion of religious consciousness is virtually inconsequential. That which is increasingly common to all men begins to wane in significance within the life of the single individual. Comparatively speaking, the choice to reduplicate Christian avenues of thinking and acting is replete with ramifications and differences which are clearly discernible. By virtue of the specificity required, however, it is also the case that one must renew that decision daily, seek to nurture it, train and discipline himself in it. Making the faith one's own, abiding in it day and night--these lead down different pathways. But the distinctive patterns of living and thinking add up after a while with a cumulative effect. Through the acquisition and practice in exercising'Christian concepts, one earns a consciousness of the world which is Christian in scope and nature. (shrink)

Of articles which are submitted for publication in Philosophy, a surprisingly large proportion are about the views of Richard Rorty. Some, indeed, we have published. They, along with pretty well all the articles we receive on Professor Rorty, are highly critical. On the perverse assumption that there must be something to be said for anyone who attracts widespread hostility, it is only right to see what can be said in favour of Rorty's latest collection of papers, entitled, Truth and Progress,.

This book discusses feature films that enrich our understanding of doctor-patient dilemmas. The book comprises general clinical ethics themes and principles and is written in accessible language. Each theme is discussed and illuminated in chapters devoted to a particular film. Chapters start with a discussion of the film itself, which shares details behind the making of the film; critical reception; casting and other facts about production. The chapter situates the film in a history of medicine and medical sociology context, analyzes (...) ethical issues raised in the film from a clinical ethics lens, and explains to readers how to use each film as a teaching aid for clinical ethics. Readers will understand how each film in this collection served to bring particular clinical ethics issues to the public’s attention, or reflected medico-legal issues that were part of the public discourse. The book is a perfect instructor's guide for anyone teaching bioethics, healthcare ethics, medical sociology, medical history, healthcare systems narrative medicine, or nursing ethics. (shrink)

2024 International Conference on Language Research and Communication (ICLRC 2024) held September 20-22, 2024 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. It is a tremendous honor for the CambridgeInnovation Center (Singapore) to serve as the collaborative institution to enhance collaboration and mutually develop for being an international platform. ICLRC 2024 focuses on high quality presentations and papers that address contemporary issues on fundamental research leading to new methods, or adaptation of existing methods for new applications related to the topics of language studies and (...) cultural communication. It aims to deliveran outstanding global forum for academics, researchers, scientists, engineers, students in the worldto link up, exchange information and discussion. The conference has 6 keynote speeches and 9 invited speeches in total, and it has drawn about 120 delegates from 9 countries (China, India, Canada, United Kingdom, United States, Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, Philippines). The conference comprised a diverse spectrum of highly technical presentations by keynote and invited speaker sessions and authors of submitted papers. We are pleased to present the SHS Web of Conferences of the ICLRC 2024 and we sincerely hope that all participants and interested readers would be benefited from this proceedings. We want toexpress our heartfelt appreciation to our contributors, sponsors, colleagues and associations thahelped make this conference successful. We’d also want to thank everyone on the committees and editorial board for the assistance and feedback. We expect this conference would encourage future language studies and cultural communication research, We look forward to seeing all of you at the next ICLRC. (shrink)

All surviving manuscripts of the Dialexeis of Maximus of Tyre descend from the oldest, Parisinus Graecus 1962 . Where they diverge, they do so as a result either of error or of attempts at correction. The history of the conjectural emendation of the Dialexeis thus begins with the second oldest manuscript, Vaticanus Graecus 1390 , which dates from the third quarter of the thirteenth century. Since that time, the most significant contributions have come from two scholars, one of the fifteenth (...) century and one of the eighteenth: Zanobi Acciaiuoli, librarian at the monastery of San Marco in Florence, many of whose corrections found their way anonymously into the editio princeps of 1557 via the manuscript used by Stephanus; and Jeremiah Markland, whose ideas are recorded as an appendix to the second, posthumous edition of John Davies's Maximus, published in 1740. J. J. Reiske's edition of 1774–5 and Friedrich Duebner's of 1840 also contain valuable material. But the field is by no means yet picked clean: witness most recently the useful articles of Professors Koniaris and Renehan. I offer the following gleanings of my own. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:M. C. Dillon LOVE IN WOMEN IN LOVE: A PHENOMENOLOGICAL ANALYSIS Despite his sexism, his turgid prose, and his antiquated social conscience, Lawrence is on every bookshelf. This is not merely because of the vicarious erotic entertainment to be found in the saga of John Thomas and Lady Jane, but because Lawrence remains a major guru of romance. We take him seriously, look to him for guidance, measure ourselves (...) against Ursula and Birkin. If he is on our shelves—and his thoughts not far from our pillows—then his ideas starid in need of scrutiny. Women in Love is as much a treatise as a novel: we witness more talking about than making of love. The agon of ideas engulfs the agon of flesh. Hence, the book suits the present purpose. It cannot be taken as Lawrence's definitive statement on love—later works, notably Lady Chatterly's Lover, move in different directions—but it is his most philosophical treatment and, I think, most clearly expresses his conceptual framework, the parameters which define and limit his thinking. What he says about love in Women in Love may therefore illumine his depictions of the behavior of lovers in other works. Lawrence is a romantic. In the popular sense of the word he is one who makes of romance or erotic adventure a dominant life value. Lawrence is also a romantic in another sense insofar as he takes the transcendence or unattainability of the other as essential to the project of loving. These two senses are conceptually compatible but existentially in conflict. That is, if one's major undertaking in life is to seek erotic satisfaction, and if one desires only so long as the object is beyond reach, then one has established the groundwork for continual frustration. This, I will try to show, is what Lawrence has done. I Many writers have tried to bring the ideas implicitly present in and constitutive of romantic love to the level of explicit reflective awareness. 190 M.C.Dillon191 The most successful treatment I know is given by a writer who did not know—or at least did not say—that he was writing about romantic love. Sartre purports to reveal the inner structures of love itself—the unqualified, unrestricted essence of love. As I have tried to show elsewhere,1 he fails at this. But he succeeds admirably in unveiling the inner contradictions of romantic love. Our project here is to draw upon Sartre's insights: first, to develop a conception of romantic love, and then to discern the model of Eros which informs Women in Love. The key idea in romantic love is transcendence. Something is transcendent when it is beyond me, when I cannot adequately prehend it conceptually or master it with my will. The role of transcendence in romantic love is demonstrated clearly in Denis de Rougemont's book on Love in the Western World.2 There he shows that Tristan's passion for Iseult is directly proportional to her distance from him: he is increasingly attracted as she becomes further removed. On the other hand, when through various deeds of gallantry and subterfuge, he succeeds in winning her to his side, he loses interest and must create circumstances which put her again beyond his reach. The culmination of romantic love, according to de Rougemont, is death—it sets the other absolutely beyond reach. It also arrests and preserves at their apices the youth and beauty of the lovers and the intensity of the erotic relationship. It is, I believe, this complex of ideas that led Kierkegaard to this cynical reflection on the nature of romantic love: "When two beings fall in love with one another and begin to suspect that they were made for each other, it is time to have the courage to break it off; for by going on they have everything to lose and nothing to gain."3 The same idea, qualified by increased optimism, underlies Stendhal's notion of crystallization in his book On Love.* Love is predicated on the attribution of perfection to the beloved. Just as a plain bough emerges from the salt-saturated waters of the Salzburg mines encrusted with beautiful crystals... (shrink)

The music ensemble has often been used as an analogy of organisation processes in general. Many versions of this analogy presuppose a specific organisation structure in the ensemble with clearly defined leader-follower relationships from which we can learn important points about successful leadership. This paper wishes to draw attention to the wide variety of organisation processes that may occur in a music ensemble, some of which are not dependent on leadership. Through the outlines of a logical analysis of a coordination (...) problem, it is argued that the music performance is in fact exemplary of a situation in which individual dedication to a goal promotes coordination in the entire group. (shrink)