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Alan Watts describes sex not, as scientific studies often state, as an "outlet, " but as an
"inlet." It is not a release of pressure but a holding of pleasure, where the goal is not orgasm
but sustained sensation. Giving ourselves plenty of time, preparing a place, adorning our
bodies, and creating a spiritual milieu, an arena bigger than ourselves and our "relationship,"
might pull off the veils that have shrouded sex in the shadows of biology and psychology
during the recent modern period. We can restore the mystery grasped so palpably
by our ancestors who built temples to Eros in realization of our absolute and unforgiving need for
enchantment.
-- Thomas Moore, The Soul of Sex
SHAKESPEARE
Shakespeare was not a philosopher or a scientist, but he did have curiosity: he loved the
surface of the earth and the process of life 00 which, it should be repeated, is not the same
thing as wanting to have a good time and stay alive as long as possible. Of course, it is not
because of the quality of his thought that Shakespeare has survived, and he might not even be
remembered as a dramatist if he had not also been a poet. His main hold on us is through
language.
--George Orwell
SLEEP
Babies have a different agenda when they sleep, and they behave differently in bed as a
result. Infants are in REM sleep --the so-called rapid-eye-movement sleep, which is associated
with dreaming -- twice as much as adults are. Thirty-week-old human fetuses are in REM sleep
virtually all the time, newborns about half their sleep time. Building on experiments
performed on baby rabbits and cats, which show that newborns prevented from REM sleep
develop behavioral difficulties as adults, sleep experts believe that REM sleep in infants plays
an important role in the structural development of the brain. As the psychiatrist J. Allan
Hobson has put it, babies are literally "making up their minds" when they sleep. Michel
Jouvet, an eminent French sleep scientist, thorizes in his recent book, "The Paradox of
Sleep," that human infants are born with crucial parts of their genome unfinished, and that
the "genetic programming occurs during dreaming. " We are all born essentially the same, he
argues, and babies' dreams help program unconscious reactions that are the basis of individual
personality.
--John Seabrook, "Sleeping with the Baby," The New Yorker
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