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Save the date! Complicite is pleased to announce our award-winning show The Encounter will be online from: Friday 19 May 7pm BST until Thursday 25 May 7pm BST Last year, more than 67,500 people across the world watched The Encounter online when it was broadcast live from the Barbican Centre.

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Why Your Life is Not a Journey | What really matters to you in life?

Credit: Alan Watts and David Lindberg. | By UPLIFT - Facebook

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What really matters to you in life?

Credit: Alan Watts and David Lindberg.

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More Information on A Girl In School Uniform (Walks Into A Bar)

It's the future. But only slightly. It's not the apocalypse quite yet, but we're getting there. There are blackouts. No one knows what's causing them, but that doesn't stop people going missing in them. Now Steph and Bell, a schoolgirl and barmaid, have to search for their missing friends, until the outside world starts infecting the theatre that stands around them...

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A Girl In School Uniform (Walks Into A Bar) - West Yorkshire Playhouse

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It's the future. But only slightly. It's not the apocalypse quite yet, but we're getting there. There are blackouts. No one knows what's causing them, but that doesn't stop people going missing in them. Now Steph and Bell, a schoolgirl and barmaid, have to search for their missing friends, until the outside world starts infecting the theatre that stands around them...

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Death of the Universe - World Space Week Special - Wonders of the Universe w/ Brian Cox - BBC

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To celebrate World Space Week 2013 we're uploading clips from Wonders of the Universe with Professor Brian Cox. With the theory of Black Dwarf Stars, Professor Brian Cox considers the death of the universe, a time so far in the future it defies comprehension.

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“The region surrounding the visual field is not easy to describe, but what is certain is that it is neither black nor grey. There occurs here an indeterminate vision, a vision of something or other, and, to take the extreme case, what is behind my back is not without some element of visual presence' (Merleau Ponty 2002: 6)

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Experiences of the Dark: Who You Are | Tate

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Experiences of the Dark is a series of short talks, performances and workshops taking place in and around Miroslaw Balka's How It Is at Tate Modern. Chris Goode explores the ways in which we use others, real and imagined, to orient ourselves.

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Complicité is committed to protecting your personal data and being transparent about the data it holds about you. The purpose of this policy is to explain how Complicité collects, uses and protects any data we collect from you directly and from third parties. You can opt out of any or all of our communications at any point by simply contacting email@complicite.org. Using personal data allows us to develop a better understanding of everyone who engages with us and in turn to provide you with relevant and timely information about the work that we do - both on and off stage. We use your data strictly in accordance with all applicable laws concerning the protection of personal data and you can be assured that any data provided will only be used in accordance with this privacy policy. This policy explains:

Who we are

What data we may collect about you and when

How we may use your data

In what situations we may disclose your data to third parties

How we protect your data

How you can access your data

Our use of cookies to improve your use of our website

Who we are
Theatre de Complicite Education Limited (Complicité) is a charitable company limited by guarantee incorporated in England and Wales (Company Number 02625105) and a Registered Charity (number 1012507). Complicité is the data controller of your personal information. Registered office is 14 Anglers Lane, London, NW5 3DG and contact telephone number is +44 (0)20 7485 7700. If you have any questions regarding your data or its use, please contact our Data Protection Manager by email admin@complicite.org or by phone +44 (0)20 7485 7700.
What data we may collect and when
We collect personal data when you:

Subscribe to our emailing list via the website - name and email address

Join our membership scheme and/or make donation - name, telephone number, email and postal addresses, gift aid preference (unless requested to remain anonymous)

Respond to a survey - response data

Purchase merchandise via our website - name, email address, transaction and order details

Apply for a workshop - name, telephone number, email and postal address

Respond to a casting notice - name, telephone number, email and postal address

Apply for a job or intern/work experience vacancy - your name, contact details including telephone number, email and postal address, details of your qualifications and educational history

Visit our website - your IP address, geo-location, details of your behaviour and actions, cookies related to site performance and advertising. Information on how we use cookies on our website can be found in our Cookies Policy

We may also collect the following data from third parties:

Depending on your privacy settings, you may provide permission to collect data from social media and online services such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google.

When conducting fundraising research, use publicly available data about you for example, from LinkedIn, Companies House, Charity Commission and legitimate media sources.

Sensitive personal data
On occasion, and only when there is a clear reason to do so, we may collect additional data, which will be anonymised and would not be linked back to a specific individual. This could include sensitive personal data, recognised under Data Protection law as information about health, ethnicity, religious beliefs and political opinions. We may request this information to adapt the work environment for new employees or to analyse data required for funders.
How we may use your data
We only collect data that we need in order to carry out our business and to provide a service or carry out a contract with you. For example:

To fulfil merchandise, donation and membership requests

To provide the best possible customer services and to help us with internal administration

To contact you with important information relating to a purchase

To send customised online marketing (if applicable)

Legal basis
The basis under which we process any data could be one of three ways, see examples below:
Contract Basis
When you make a donation, a purchase, book a workshop or apply for a job you are entering into a contract with us. In order to perform this contract we need to process and store your data. For example we may need to contact you by email or telephone in the case of problems with a purchase or payment.
Legitimate Interest
In certain situations we collect and process your personal data for purposes that are in our legitimate organisational interests. However, we only do so if there is no overriding prejudice to you by using your personal data in this way. For example; to manage and administer our relationship with you, such as keeping our database up to date and renewing your membership; to alert you to opportunities to support Complicité, to analyse the use of our services so that we can improve your experience.
Consent
Consent is explicitly requested to send you updates via email about what's on, offers and news or about supporting us. For any other situation where the above two bases are not appropriate, we will instead ask for your explicit consent before using your personal data in that specific situation.
Third Parties
We may share your details with trusted service providers who are authorised to act on our behalf in performance of a contract we enter into with them or you, for example payment processing, database services, website hosting or email communication providers. We require all other organisations with whom we share your personal data to respect the security of your data and to treat it in accordance with the law. We do not allow our service providers to use your personal data for their own purposes. Other than as expressly set out in this Privacy Policy, we will not sell, rent, trade or distribute your personal data to third parties without your express consent or are required by law to do so. We will collect and aggregate on an anonymous basis information about you and your use of our services with information about other users of our services, such as statistical or demographic data, for analysis, reporting to stakeholders (such as Arts Council England) and to better understand our customers. For example, we may aggregate mailing list data to calculate the percentage of users accessing a specific feature on our website. However, if we combine or connect any of this type of data with your personal data so that it can directly or indirectly identify you, we treat the combined data as personal data, which will be used in accordance with this privacy notice.
How we protect your data
We are committed to protecting the personal data you entrust to us. We adopt robust and appropriate technologies and policies, so the data we have about you is protected from unauthorized access and improper use. As part of the services offered to you through our website, the personal data you provide may be transferred to countries outside the European Economic Area (EEA). By way of example, this may happen if any of the computer servers used to host the website are located in a country outside of the EEA. If we transfer your personal data outside of the EEA in this way, we will take steps to ensure that your privacy rights continue to be protected as outlined in this privacy notice. We may transfer your data to the USA to organizations such as Facebook, Google or Mailchimp. The USA has weaker data protection laws than that of the EEA and therefore we will ensure that only organisations that are part of the EU Privacy Shield Initiative will handle your personal data. More details on this certification can be found at www.privacyshield.gov. We will keep your data only for as long as is reasonably necessary for the purposes set out in this privacy notice and to fulfil our legal obligations. We will not keep more data than we need. The retention period will vary according to the purpose, for example if you have made a purchase via our website then your details are retained for 28 days until the sale is complete and no returns required, alternatively if you made a donation then we will hold your details until notified by you. Where your data is no longer required, we will ensure it is disposed of, deleted or cached in a secure manner.
Cookies
Cookies are small text files that are automatically placed onto your device by some websites that you visit. They are widely used to allow a website to function (for example keep track of your basket) as well as providing website operators with information on how the site is being used. We use cookies to keep track of your basket as well as to identify how the website is being used and what improvements we could make. You can read our cookies policy here.
How you can access your data
You may request details of the personal data we hold about you under the General Data Protection Regulation. If you would like a copy of the data held please send a description of the data you would like to see, together with proof of your identity to admin@complicite.org. The accuracy of your personal data is important to us and you can help keep our records up to date by telling us when your contact details and other personal data changes, and if you change your mind about how we contact you. If you would like to update the details we hold or change your contact preferences please email admin@complicite.org. You can opt out of email marketing at any time by clicking the unsubscribe link included at the bottom of every email.
Updates or changes to the Privacy Policy
This notice was updated on 21 May 2018. It may be updated to take into account changes at Complicité or for example to reflect changes to regulation or legislation.

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Complicité is committed to protecting your personal data and being transparent about the data it holds about you. The purpose of this policy is to explain how Complicité collects, uses and protects any data we collect from you directly and from third parties.

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Dropbox is a free service that lets you bring your photos, docs, and videos anywhere and share them easily. Never email yourself a file again!

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DJ Koze - Burn With Me | Victoria (2015) club scene / intro

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Intro from the movie "Victoria" (2015). Music: DJ Koze - Burn With Me | The actual film sequence starts at 01:08 (but better to hear the whole thing) Warning: The video contains strobe and strong flashing lights Quoting Pampa Records: "Dj Koze did it again. His homage to Audrey Horne.

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Dropbox is a free service that lets you bring your photos, docs, and videos anywhere and share them easily. Never email yourself a file again!

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Blackout production meeting minutes 20.3.17

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Browse events in our two theatre spaces, which play host to the finest international theatre, dance and performance by artists who are challenging the idea of what theatre can be.

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This is an operational test by Article19 of Vimeo's compression and playback capability. Source: www.article19.co.uk

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Akram Khan - Abide With Me (2012 London Olympics)

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Everyday Moments 5: audio drama for private performance

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This month’s podcast is by choreographer Hofesh Shechter, and is designed to be heard late at night, with headphones, in a completely dark room – with some space to move…

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DARKFIELD produces innovative immersive experiences at the forefront of technology and theatre - both location based experiences and digital work.

DARKFIELD's location based work utilises striking sets and shipping containers, binaural 360 degree sound, complete darkness and a variety of sensory effects, where each participant is situated at the centre of intense, evolving narratives.

DARKFIELD RADIO brings DARKFIELD's work and binaural audio into the audience's environment via a phone app - their home, their car, their local park become the setting for strange worlds to unfold around them, stealing them away from reality.

DARKFIELD have been featured in major film festivals such as the BFI London Film Festival, Venice International Film Festival, IDFA, Tribeca Film Festival, Raindance Film Festival, SXSW and in 2021 won Columbia's Digital Storytelling Lab's Breakthrough Award in recognition of the year's most innovative narrative.

Alongside partners around the world, DARKFIELD is touring work in the UK, Australia & New Zealand, China, US & Canada, South Korea and Mexico and have so far reached over 350,000 audience members worldwide, and counting.

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DARKFIELD produces innovative immersive experiences at the forefront of technology and theatre - both location based experiences and digital work. DARKFIELD's location based work utilises striking sets and shipping containers, binaural 360 degree sound, complete darkness and a variety of sensory effects, where each participant is situated at the centre of intense, evolving narratives.

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Winter Morning II (feat. Robert De Niro) (Original Mix) by Nils Frahm, Woodkid, Robert De Niro on Beatport

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Video by Susanne Dietz Sound by Ben and Max Ringham, Andrew Rutland www.susannedietz.com Lyn Gardner, 16th August 2000: "Reworked for the better since it was first seen in London last year, Shunt's show takes you into the skies and then drops you from a great height.

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Dystopia theme description - The audience enter into a totalitarian environment that reflects our present day, yet the rules of this society have shifted compared to our own. It may take a while for the audience to begin to learn the rules of this environment, as subtle changes draw their attention to the suppression of emotion, communication and self expression. The audience are faced with the challenge of working out if light is the way out of this dystopia, or if it could cause their world to be plunged into further darkness.

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Dickie Beau's OLDEN LOBES Speech - In Full

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Dickie Beau's acceptance speech for the Frank Byron, Jr. Award honouring his ambiguous contribution to something unexplained at the 2017 OLDEN LOBES Voice: Peter Sellars * Lip-Sync: Dickie Beau *recorded at the School of Sound symposium, London, 2015

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The Making of The Encounter part 1 | Complicite | Solitude

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The first in a series of videos about the making of Complicite's hit show The Encounter. The Encounter is currently playing on Broadway.

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Inside a little organ called hypothalamus is where the emotional responses are produced. There, in our brain, is the biggest pharmacy there is, where a particles called "peptides", little amino acid sequences which, combines, create the neurohormones or neuropeptides. They are responsible for the emotions we feel everyday.

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Blackout poduction meeting minutes 13.3.17

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There is no desire more natural than that of knowledge. We try all ways that can lead us to it; where reason is wanting, we therein employ experience,

which is a means much more weak and cheap; but truth is so great a thing that we ought not to disdain any mediation that will guide us to it. Reason has so many forms that we know not to which to take; experience has no fewer; the consequence we would draw from the comparison of events is unsure, by reason they are always unlike. There is no quality so universal in this image of things as diversity and variety. Both the Greeks and the Latins and we, for the most express example of similitude, employ that of eggs; and yet there have been men, particularly one at Delphos, who could distinguish marks of difference amongst eggs so well that he never mistook one for another, and having many hens, could tell which had laid it.

Dissimilitude intrudes itself of itself in our works; no art can arrive at perfect similitude: neither Perrozet nor any other can so carefully polish and blanch the backs of his cards that some gamesters will not distinguish them by seeing them only shuffled by another. Resemblance does not so much make one as difference makes another. Nature has obliged herself to make nothing other that was not unlike.

And yet I am not much pleased with his opinion, who thought by the multitude of laws to curb the authority of judges in cutting out for them their several parcels; he was not aware that there is as much liberty and latitude in the interpretation of laws as in their form; and they but fool themselves, who think to lessen and stop our disputes by recalling us to the express words of the Bible: forasmuch as our mind does not find the field less spacious wherein to controvert the sense of another than to deliver his own; and as if there were less animosity and tartness in commentary than in invention. We see how much he was mistaken, for we have more laws in France than all the rest of the world put together, and more than would be necessary for the government of all the worlds of Epicurus:

and yet we have left so much to the opinions and decisions of our judges that there never was so full a liberty or so full a license. What have our legislators gained by culling out a hundred thousand particular cases, and by applying to these a hundred thousand laws? This number holds no manner of proportion with the infinite diversity of human actions; the multiplication of our inventions will never arrive at the variety of examples; add to these a hundred times as many more, it will still not happen that, of events to come, there shall one be found that, in this vast number of millions of events so chosen and recorded, shall so tally with any other one, and be so exactly coupled and matched with it that there will not remain some circumstance and diversity which will require a diverse judgment. There is little relation betwixt our actions, which are in perpetual mutation, and fixed and immutable laws; the most to be desired are those that are the most rare, the most simple and general; and I am even of opinion that we had better have none at all than to have them in so prodigious a number as we have.

Nature always gives them better and happier than those we make ourselves; witness the picture of the Golden Age of the Poets and the state wherein we see nations live who have no other. Some there are, who for their only judge take the first passer-by that travels along their mountains, to determine their cause; and others who, on their market day, choose out some one amongst them upon the spot to decide their controversies. What danger would there be that the wisest amongst us should so determine ours, according to occurrences and at sight, without obligation of example and consequence? For every foot its own shoe. King Ferdinand, sending colonies to the Indies, wisely provided that they should not carry along with them any students of jurisprudence, for fear lest suits should get footing in that new world, as being a science in its own nature, breeder of altercation and division; judging with Plato, "that lawyers and physicians are bad institutions of a country."

Whence does it come to pass that our common language, so easy for all other uses, becomes obscure and unintelligible in wills and contracts? and that he who so clearly expresses himself in whatever else he speaks or writes, cannot find in these any way of declaring himself that does not fall into doubt and contradiction? if it be not that the princes of that art, applying themselves with a peculiar attention to cull out portentous words and to contrive artificial sentences, have so weighed every syllable, and so thoroughly sifted every sort of quirking connection that they are now confounded and entangled in the infinity of figures and minute divisions, and can no more fall within any rule or prescription, nor any certain intelligence:

As you see children trying to bring a mass of quicksilver to a certain number of parts, the more they press and work it and endeavour to reduce it to their own will, the more they irritate the liberty of this generous metal; it evades their endeavour and sprinkles itself into so many separate bodies as frustrate all reckoning; so is it here, for in subdividing these subtilties we teach men to increase their doubts; they put us into a way of extending and diversifying difficulties, and lengthen and disperse them. In sowing and retailing questions they make the world fructify and increase in uncertainties and disputes, as the earth is made fertile by being crumbled and dug deep.

We doubted of Ulpian, and are still now more perplexed with Bartolus and Baldus. We should efface the trace of this innumerable diversity of opinions; not adorn ourselves with it, and fill posterity with crotchets. I know not what to say to it; but experience makes it manifest, that so many interpretations dissipate truth and break it. Aristotle wrote to be understood; if he could not do this, much less will another that is not so good at it; and a third than he, who expressed his own thoughts. We open the matter, and spill it in pouring out: of one subject we make a thousand, and in multiplying and subdividing them, fall again into the infinity of atoms of Epicurus. Never did two men make the same judgment of the same thing; and 'tis impossible to find two opinions exactly alike, not only in several men, but in the same man, at diverse hours. I often find matter of doubt in things of which the commentary has disdained to take notice; I am most apt to stumble in an even country, like some horses that I have known, that make most trips in the smoothest way.

Who will not say that glosses augment doubts and ignorance, since there's no book to be found, either human or divine, which the world busies itself about, whereof the difficulties are cleared by interpretation. The hundredth commentator passes it on to the next, still more knotty and perplexed than he found it. When were we ever agreed amongst ourselves: "This book has enough; there is now no more to be said about it"? This is most apparent in the law; we give the authority of law to infinite doctors, infinite decrees, and as many interpretations; yet do we find any end of the need of interpretating? is there, for all that, any progress or advancement towards peace, or do we stand in need of any fewer advocates and judges than when this great mass of law was yet in its first infancy? On the contrary, we darken and bury intelligence; we can no longer discover it, but at the mercy of so many fences and barriers. Men do not know the natural disease of the mind; it does nothing but ferret and inquire, and is eternally wheeling, juggling, and perplexing itself like silkworms, and then suffocates itself in its work; "Mus in pice."-["A mouse in a pitch barrel."]-It thinks it discovers at a great distance, I know not what glimpses of light and imaginary truth: but whilst running to it, so many difficulties, hindrances, and new inquisitions cross it, that it loses its way, and is made drunk with the motion: not much unlike AEsop's dogs, that seeing something like a dead body floating in the sea, and not being able to approach it, set to work to drink the water and lay the passage dry, and so choked themselves. To which what one Crates' said of the writings of Heraclitus falls pat enough, "that they required a reader who could swim well," so that the depth and weight of his learning might not overwhelm and stifle him. 'Tis nothing but particular weakness that makes us content with what others or ourselves have found out in this chase after knowledge: one of better understanding will not rest so content; there is always room for one to follow, nay, even for ourselves; and another road; there is no end of our inquisitions; our end is in the other world. 'Tis a sign either that the mind has grown shortsighted when it is satisfied, or that it has got weary. No generous mind can stop in itself; it will still tend further and beyond its power; it has sallies beyond its effects; if it do not advance and press forward, and retire, and rush and wheel about, 'tis but half alive; its pursuits are without bound or method; its aliment is admiration, the chase, ambiguity, which Apollo sufficiently declared in always speaking to us in a double, obscure, and oblique sense: not feeding, but amusing and puzzling us. 'Tis an irregular and perpetual motion, without model and without aim; its inventions heat, pursue, and interproduce one another:

Estienne de la Boetie; thus translated by Cotton:

"So in a running stream one wave we see
After another roll incessantly,
And as they glide, each does successively
Pursue the other, each the other fly
By this that's evermore pushed on, and this
By that continually preceded is:
The water still does into water swill,
Still the same brook, but different water still."

There is more ado to interpret interpretations than to interpret things, and more books upon books than upon any other subject; we do nothing but comment upon one another. Every place swarms with commentaries; of authors there is great scarcity. Is it not the principal and most reputed knowledge of our later ages to understand the learned? Is it not the common and final end of all studies? Our opinions are grafted upon one another; the first serves as a stock to the second, the second to the third, and so forth; thus step by step we climb the ladder; whence it comes to pass that he who is mounted highest has often more honour than merit, for he is got up but an inch upon the shoulders of the last, but one.

How often, and, peradventure, how foolishly, have I extended my book to make it speak of itself; foolishly, if for no other reason but this, that it should remind me of what I say of others who do the same: that the frequent amorous glances they cast upon their work witness that their hearts pant with self-love, and that even the disdainful severity wherewith they scourge them are but the dandlings and caressings of maternal love; as Aristotle, whose valuing and undervaluing himself often spring from the same air of arrogance. My own excuse is, that I ought in this to have more liberty than others, forasmuch as I write specifically of myself and of my writings, as I do of my other actions; that my theme turns upon itself; but I know not whether others will accept this excuse.

I observed in Germany that Luther has left as many divisions and disputes about the doubt of his opinions, and more, than he himself raised upon the Holy Scriptures. Our contest is verbal: I ask what nature is, what pleasure, circle, and substitution are? the question is about words, and is answered accordingly. A stone is a body; but if a man should further urge: "And what is a body?"-"Substance"; "And what is substance?" and so on, he would drive the respondent to the end of his Calepin.

[Calepin (Ambrogio da Calepio), a famous lexicographer of the fifteenth century. His Polyglot Dictionary became so famous, that Calepin became a common appellation for a lexicon]

We exchange one word for another, and often for one less understood. I better know what man is than I know what Animal is, or Mortal, or Rational. To satisfy one doubt, they give me three; 'tis the Hydra's head. Socrates asked Menon, "What virtue was." "There is," says Menon, "the virtue of a man and of a woman, of a magistrate and of a private person, of an old man and of a child." "Very fine," cried Socrates, "we were in quest of one virtue, and thou hast brought us a whole swarm." We put one question, and they return us a whole hive. As no event, no face, entirely resembles another, so do they not entirely differ: an ingenious mixture of nature. If our faces were not alike, we could not distinguish man from beast; if they were not unlike, we could not distinguish one man from another; all things hold by some similitude; every example halts, and the relation which is drawn from experience is always faulty and imperfect. Comparisons are ever-coupled at one end or other: so do the laws serve, and are fitted to every one of our affairs, by some wrested, biassed, and forced interpretation.

Since the ethic laws, that concern the particular duty of every one in himself, are so hard to be framed, as we see they are, 'tis no wonder if those which govern so many particulars are much more so. Do but consider the form of this justice that governs us; 'tis a true testimony of human weakness, so full is it of error and contradiction. What we find to be favour and severity in justice-and we find so much of them both, that I know not whether the medium is as often met with are sickly and unjust members of the very body and essence of justice. Some country people have just brought me news in great haste, that they presently left in a forest of mine a man with a hundred wounds upon him, who was yet breathing, and begged of them water for pity's sake, and help to carry him to some place of relief; they tell me they durst not go near him, but have run away, lest the officers of justice should catch them there; and as happens to those who are found near a murdered person, they should be called in question about this accident, to their utter ruin, having neither money nor friends to defend their innocence. What could I have said to these people? 'Tis certain that this office of humanity would have brought them into trouble.

How many innocent people have we known that have been punished, and this without the judge's fault; and how many that have not arrived at our knowledge? This happened in my time: certain men were condemned to die for a murder committed; their sentence, if not pronounced, at least determined and concluded on. The judges, just in the nick, are informed by the officers of an inferior court hard by, that they have some men in custody, who have directly confessed the murder, and made an indubitable discovery of all the particulars of the fact. Yet it was gravely deliberated whether or not they ought to suspend the execution of the sentence already passed upon the first accused: they considered the novelty of the example judicially, and the consequence of reversing judgments; that the sentence was passed, and the judges deprived of repentance; and in the result, these poor devils were sacrificed by the forms of justice. Philip, or some other, provided against a like inconvenience after this manner. He had condemned a man in a great fine towards another by an absolute judgment. The truth some time after being discovered, he found that he had passed an unjust sentence. On one side was the reason of the cause; on the other side, the reason of the judicial forms: he in some sort satisfied both, leaving the sentence in the state it was, and out of his own purse recompensing the condemned party. But he had to do with a reparable affair; my men were irreparably hanged. How many condemnations have I seen more criminal than the crimes themselves?

All which makes me remember the ancient opinions, "That 'tis of necessity a man must do wrong by retail who will do right in gross; and injustice in little things, who would come to do justice in great: that human justice is formed after the model of physic, according to which, all that is useful is also just and honest: and of what is held by the Stoics, that Nature herself proceeds contrary to justice in most of her works: and of what is received by the Cyrenaics, that there is nothing just of itself, but that customs and laws make justice: and what the Theodorians held that theft, sacrilege, and all sorts of uncleanness, are just in a sage, if he knows them to be profitable to him." There is no remedy: I am in the same case that Alcibiades was, that I will never, if I can help it, put myself into the hands of a man who may determine as to my head, where my life and honour shall more depend upon the skill and diligence of my attorney than on my own innocence. I would venture myself with such justice as would take notice of my good deeds, as well as my ill; where I had as much to hope as to fear: indemnity is not sufficient pay to a man who does better than not to do amiss. Our justice presents to us but one hand, and that the left hand, too; let him be who he may, he shall be sure to come off with loss.

In China, of which kingdom the government and arts, without commerce with or knowledge of ours, surpass our examples in several excellent features, and of which the history teaches me how much greater and more various the world is than either the ancients or we have been able to penetrate, the officers deputed by the prince to visit the state of his provinces, as they punish those who behave themselves ill in their charge, so do they liberally reward those who have conducted themselves better than the common sort, and beyond the necessity of their duty; these there present themselves, not only to be approved but to get; not simply to be paid, but to have a present made to them.

No judge, thank God, has ever yet spoken to me in the quality of a judge, upon any account whatever, whether my own or that of a third party, whether criminal or civil; nor no prison has ever received me, not even to walk there. Imagination renders the very outside of a jail displeasing to me; I am so enamoured of liberty, that should I be interdicted the access to some corner of the Indies, I should live a little less at my ease; and whilst I can find earth or air open elsewhere, I shall never lurk in any place where I must hide myself. My God! how ill should I endure the condition wherein I see so many people, nailed to a corner of the kingdom, deprived of the right to enter the principal cities and courts, and the liberty of the public roads, for having quarrelled with our laws. If those under which I live should shake a finger at me by way of menace, I would immediately go seek out others, let them be where they would. All my little prudence in the civil wars wherein we are now engaged is employed that they may not hinder my liberty of going and coming.

Now, the laws keep up their credit, not for being just, but because they are laws; 'tis the mystic foundation of their authority; they have no other, and it well answers their purpose. They are often made by fools, still oftener by men who, out of hatred to equality, fail in equity, but always by men, vain and irresolute authors. There is nothing so much, nor so grossly, nor so ordinarily faulty, as the laws. Whoever obeys them because they are just, does not justly obey them as he ought. Our French laws, by their irregularity and deformity, lend, in some sort, a helping hand to the disorder and corruption that all manifest in their dispensation and execution: the command is so perplexed and inconstant, that it in some sort excuses alike disobedience and defect in the interpretation, the administration and the observation of it. What fruit then soever we may extract from experience, that will little advantage our institution, which we draw from foreign examples, if we make so little profit of that we have of our own, which is more familiar to us, and, doubtless, sufficient to instruct us in that whereof we have need. I study myself more than any other subject; 'tis my metaphysic, my physic:

Quis deus hanc mundi temperet arte domum:
Qua venit exoriens, qua deficit: unde coactis
Cornibus in plenum menstrua luna redit
Unde salo superant venti, quid flamine captet
Eurus, et in nubes unde perennis aqua;
Sit ventura dies mundi quae subruat arces....

["What god may govern with skill this dwelling of the world? Whence rises the monthly moon, whither wanes she? how is it that her horns are contracted and reopen? whence do winds prevail on the main? what does the east wind court with its blasts? and whence are the clouds perpetually supplied with water? is a day to come which may undermine the world?"-Propertius, iii. 5, 26.]
Quaerite, quos agitat mundi labor.
["Ask whom the cares of the world trouble"-Lucan, i. 417.]

In this universality, I suffer myself to be ignorantly and negligently led by the general law of the world: I shall know it well enough when I feel it; my learning cannot make it alter its course; it will not change itself for me; 'tis folly to hope it, and a greater folly to concern one's self about it, seeing it is necessarily alike public and common. The goodness and capacity of the governor ought absolutely to discharge us of all care of the government: philosophical inquisitions and contemplations serve for no other use but to increase our curiosity. The philosophers; with great reason, send us back to the rules of nature; but they have nothing to do with so sublime a knowledge; they falsify them, and present us her face painted with too high and too adulterate a complexion, whence spring so many different pictures of so uniform a subject. As she has given us feet to walk with, so has she given us prudence to guide us in life: not so ingenious, robust, and pompous a prudence as that of their invention; but yet one that is easy, quiet, and salutary, and that very well performs what the other promises, in him who has the good luck to know how to employ it sincerely and regularly, that is to say, according to nature. The most simply to commit one's self to nature is to do it most wisely. Oh, what a soft, easy, and wholesome pillow is ignorance and incuriosity, whereon to repose a well-ordered head!

I had rather understand myself well in myself, than in Cicero. Of the experience I have of myself, I find enough to make me wise, if I were but a good scholar: whoever will call to mind the excess of his past anger, and to what a degree that fever transported him, will see the deformity of this passion better than in Aristotle, and conceive a more just hatred against it; whoever will remember the ills he has undergone, those that have threatened him, and the light occasions that have removed him from one state to another, will by that prepare himself for future changes, and the knowledge of his condition. The life of Caesar has no greater example for us than our own: though popular and of command, 'tis still a life subject to all human accidents. Let us but listen to it; we apply to ourselves all whereof we have principal need; whoever shall call to memory how many and many times he has been mistaken in his own judgment, is he not a great fool if he does not ever after suspect it?

When I find myself convinced, by the reason of another, of a false opinion, I do not so much learn what he has said to me that is new and the particular ignorance-that would be no great acquisition-as, in general, I learn my own debility and the treachery of my understanding, whence I extract the reformation of the whole mass. In all my other errors I do the same, and find from this rule great utility to life; I regard not the species and individual as a stone that I have stumbled at; I learn to suspect my steps throughout, and am careful to place them right. To learn that a man has said or done a foolish thing is nothing: a man must learn that he is nothing but a fool, a much more ample, and important instruction. The false steps that my memory has so often made, even then when it was most secure and confident of itself, are not idly thrown away; it vainly swears and assures me I shake my ears; the first opposition that is made to its testimony puts me into suspense, and I durst not rely upon it in anything of moment, nor warrant it in another person's concerns: and were it not that what I do for want of memory, others do more often for want of good faith, I should always, in matter of fact, rather choose to take the truth from another's mouth than from my own. If every one would pry into the effects and circumstances of the passions that sway him, as I have done into those which I am most subject to, he would see them coming, and would a little break their impetuosity and career; they do not always seize us on a sudden; there is threatening and degrees

Fluctus uti primo coepit cum albescere vento,
Paulatim sese tollit mare, et altius undas
Erigit, inde imo consurgit ad aethera fundo.

["As with the first wind the sea begins to foam, and swells, thence higher swells, and higher raises the waves, till the ocean rises from > its depths to the sky."- AEneid, vii. 528.]

Judgment holds in me a magisterial seat; at least it carefully endeavours to make it so: it leaves my appetites to take their own course, hatred and friendship, nay, even that I bear to myself, without change or corruption; if it cannot reform the other parts according to its own model, at least it suffers not itself to be corrupted by them, but plays its game apart.

The advice to every one, "to know themselves," should be of important effect, since that god of wisdom and light' caused it to be written on the front of his temple,-[At Delphi]-as comprehending all he had to advise us. Plato says also, that prudence is no other thing than the execution of this ordinance; and Socrates minutely verifies it in Xenophon.

The difficulties and obscurity are not discerned in any science but by those who are got into it; for a certain degree of intelligence is required to be able to know that a man knows not, and we must push against a door to know whether it be bolted against us or no: whence this Platonic subtlety springs, that "neither they who know are to enquire, forasmuch as they know; nor they who do not know, forasmuch as to inquire they must know what they inquire of." So in this, "of knowing a man's self," that every man is seen so resolved and satisfied with himself, that every man thinks himself sufficiently intelligent, signifies that every one knows nothing about the matter; as Socrates gives Euthydemus to understand.

I, who profess nothing else, therein find so infinite a depth and variety, that all the fruit I have reaped from my learning serves only to make me sensible how much I have to learn. To my weakness, so often confessed, I owe the propension I have to modesty, to the obedience of belief prescribed me, to a constant coldness and moderation of opinions, and a hatred of that troublesome and wrangling arrogance, wholly believing and trusting in itself, the capital enemy of discipline and truth. Do but hear them domineer; the first fopperies they utter, 'tis in the style wherewith men establish religions and laws:

Aristarchus said that anciently there were scarce seven sages to be found in the world, and in his time scarce so many fools: have not we more reason than he to say so in this age of ours? Affirmation and obstinacy are express signs of want of wit. This fellow may have knocked his nose against the ground a hundred times in a day, yet he will be at his Ergo's as resolute and sturdy as before. You would say he had had some new soul and vigour of understanding infused into him since, and that it happened to him, as to that ancient son of the earth, who took fresh courage and vigour by his fall;

does not this incorrigible coxcomb think that he assumes a new understanding by undertaking a new dispute?

'Tis by my own experience that I accuse human ignorance, which is, in my opinion, the surest part of the world's school. Such as will not conclude it in themselves, by so vain an example as mine, or their own, let them believe it from Socrates, the master of masters; for the philosopher Antisthenes said to his disciples, "Let us go and hear Socrates; there I will be a pupil with you"; and, maintaining this doctrine of the Stoic sect, "that virtue was sufficient to make a life completely happy, having no need of any other thing whatever"; except of the force of Socrates, added he.

That long attention that I employ in considering myself, also fits rile to judge tolerably enough of others; and there are few things whereof I speak better and with better excuse. I happen very often more exactly to see and distinguish the qualities of my friends than they do themselves: I have astonished some with the pertinence of my description, and have given them warning of themselves. By having from my infancy been accustomed to contemplate my own life in those of others, I have acquired a complexion studious in that particular; and when I am once interit upon it, I let few things about me, whether countenances, humours, or discourses, that serve to that purpose, escape me. I study all, both what I am to avoid and what I am to follow. Also in my friends, I discover by their productions their inward inclinations; not by arranging this infinite variety of so diverse and unconnected actions into certain species and chapters, and distinctly distributing my parcels and divisions under known heads and classes;

Sed neque quam multae species, nec nomina quae sint,
Est numerus.
["But neither can we enumerate how many kinds there what are their names."-Virgil, Georg., ii. 103.]

The wise speak and deliver their fancies more specifically, and piece by piece; I, who see no further into things than as use informs me, present mine generally without rule and experimentally: I pronounce my opinion by disjointed articles, as a thing that cannot be spoken at once and in gross; relation and conformity are not to be found in such low and common souls as ours. Wisdom is a solid and entire building, of which every piece keeps its place and bears its mark:

I leave it to artists, and I know not whether or no they will be able to bring it about, in so perplexed, minute, and fortuitous a thing, to marshal into distinct bodies this infinite diversity of faces, to settle our inconstancy, and set it in order. I do not only find it hard to piece our actions to one another, but I moreover find it hard properly to design each by itself by any principal quality, so ambiguous and variform they are with diverse lights.

That which is remarked for rare in Perseus, king of Macedon, "that his mind, fixing itself to no one condition, wandered in all sorts of living, and represented manners so wild and erratic that it was neither known to himself or any other what kind of man he was," seems almost to fit all the world; and, especially, I have seen another of his make, to whom I think this conclusion might more properly be applied; no moderate settledness, still running headlong from one extreme to another, upon occasions not to be guessed at; no line of path without traverse and wonderful contrariety: no one quality simple and unmixed; so that the best guess men can one day make will be, that he affected and studied to make himself known by being not to be known.

A man had need have sound ears to hear himself frankly criticised; and as there are few who can endure to hear it without being nettled, those who hazard the undertaking it to us manifest a singular effect of friendship; for 'tis to love sincerely indeed, to venture to wound and offend us, for our own good. I think it harsh to judge a man whose ill qualities are more than his good ones: Plato requires three things in him who will examine the soul of another: knowledge, benevolence, boldness.

I was sometimes asked, what I should have thought myself fit for, had any one designed to make use of me, while I was of suitable years:

"for nothing," said I; and I willingly excuse myself from knowing anything which enslaves me to others. But I had told the truth to my master,-[Was this Henri VI.? D.W.]-and had regulated his manners, if he had so pleased, not in gross, by scholastic lessons, which I understand not, and from which I see no true reformation spring in those that do; but by observing them by leisure, at all opportunities, and simply and naturally judging them as an eye-witness, distinctly one by one; giving him to understand upon what terms he was in the common opinion, in opposition to his flatterers.

There is none of us who would not be worse than kings, if so continually corrupted as they are with that sort of canaille. How, if Alexander, that great king and philosopher, cannot defend himself from them!

I should have had fidelity, judgment, and freedom enough for that purpose. It would be a nameless office, otherwise it would lose its grace and its effect; and 'tis a part that is not indifferently fit for all men; for truth itself has not the privilege to be spoken at all times and indiscriminately; its use, noble as it is, has its circumspections and limits. It often falls out, as the world goes, that a man lets it slip into the ear of a prince, not only to no purpose, but moreover injuriously and unjustly; and no man shall make me believe that a virtuous remonstrance may not be viciously applied, and that the interest of the substance is not often to give way to that of the form.

For such a purpose, I would have a man who is content with his own fortune:

Quod sit, esse velit, nihilque malit,
["Who is pleased with what he is and desires nothing further."-Martial, x. ii, 18.]

and of moderate station; forasmuch as, on the one hand, he would not be afraid to touch his master's heart to the quick, for fear by that means of losing his preferment: and, on the other hand, being of no high quality, he would have more easy communication with all sorts of people. I would have this office limited to only one person; for to allow the privilege of his liberty and privacy to many, would beget an inconvenient irreverence; and of that one, I would above all things require the fidelity of silence.

A king is not to be believed when he brags of his constancy in standing the shock of the enemy for his glory, if for his profit and amendment he cannot stand the liberty of a friend's advice, which has no other power but to pinch his ear, the remainder of its effect being still in his own hands. Now, there is no condition of men whatever who stand in so great need of true and free advice and warning, as they do: they sustain a public life, and have to satisfy the opinion of so many spectators, that, as those about them conceal from them whatever should divert them from their own way, they insensibly find themselves involved in the hatred and detestation of their people, often upon occasions which they might have avoided without any prejudice even of their pleasures themselves, had they been advised and set right in time. Their favourites commonly have more regard to themselves than to their master; and indeed it answers with them, forasmuch as, in truth, most offices of real friendship, when applied to the sovereign, are under a rude and dangerous hazard, so that therein there is great need, not only of very great affection and freedom, but of courage too.

In fine, all this hodge-podge which I scribble here, is nothing but a register of the essays of my own life, which, for the internal soundness, is exemplary enough to take instruction against the grain; but as to bodily health, no man can furnish out more profitable experience than I, who present it pure, and no way corrupted and changed by art or opinion. Experience is properly upon its own dunghill in the subject of physic, where reason wholly gives it place: Tiberius said that whoever had lived twenty years ought to be responsible to himself for all things that were hurtful or wholesome to him, and know how to order himself without physic;

[All that Suetonius says in his Life of Tiberius is that this emperor, after he was thirty years old, governed his health without the aid of physicians; and what Plutarch tells us, in his essay on the Rules and Precepts of Health, is that Tiberius said that the man who, having attained sixty years, held out his pulse to a physician was a fool.]

and he might have learned it of Socrates, who, advising his disciples to be solicitous of their health as a chief study, added that it was hard if a man of sense, having a care to his exercise and diet, did not better know than any physician what was good or ill for him.

And physic itself professes always to have experience for the test of its operations: so Plato had reason to say that, to be a right physician, it would be necessary that he who would become such, should first himself have passed through all the diseases he pretends to cure, and through all the accidents and circumstances whereof he is to judge. 'Tis but reason they should get the pox, if they will know how to cure it; for my part, I should put myself into such hands; the others but guide us, like him who paints seas and rocks and ports sitting at table, and there makes the model of a ship sailing in all security; but put him to the work itself, he knows not at which end to begin. They make such a description of our maladies as a town crier does of a lost horse or dog-such a color, such a height, such an ear-but bring it to him and he knows it not, for all that. If physic should one day give me some good and visible relief, then truly I will cry out in good earnest:

Tandem effcaci do manus scientiae.
["Show me and efficacious science, and I will take it by the hand." -> -Horace, xvii. I.]

The arts that promise to keep our bodies and souls in health promise a great deal; but, withal, there are none that less keep their promise. And, in our time, those who make profession of these arts amongst us, less manifest the effects than any other sort of men; one may say of them, at the most, that they sell medicinal drugs; but that they are physicians, a man cannot say.

[The edition of 1588 adds: "Judging by themselves, and those who are ruled by them."]

I have lived long enough to be able to give an account of the custom that has carried me so far; for him who has a mind to try it, as his taster, I have made the experiment. Here are some of the articles, as my memory shall supply me with them; I have no custom that has not varied according to circumstances; but I only record those that I have been best acquainted with, and that hitherto have had the greatest possession of me.

My form of life is the same in sickness as in health; the same bed, the same hours, the same meat, and even the same drink, serve me in both conditions alike; I add nothing to them but the moderation of more or less, according to my strength and appetite. My health is to maintain my wonted state without disturbance. I see that sickness puts me off it on one side, and if I will be ruled by the physicians, they will put me off on the other; so that by fortune and by art I am out of my way. I believe nothing more certainly than this, that I cannot be hurt by the use of things to which I have been so long accustomed.

'Tis for custom to give a form to a man's life, such as it pleases him; she is all in all in that: 'Tis the potion of Circe, that varies our nature as she best pleases. How many nations, and but three steps from us, think the fear of the night-dew, that so manifestly is hurtful to us, a ridiculous fancy; and our own watermen and peasants laugh at it. You make a German sick if you lay him upon a mattress, as you do an Italian if you lay him on a feather-bed, and a Frenchman, if without curtains or fire. A Spanish stomach cannot hold out to eat as we can, nor ours to drink like the Swiss.

A German made me very merry at Augsburg, by finding fault with our hearths, by the same arguments which we commonly make use of in decrying their stoves: for, to say the truth, the smothered heat, and then the smell of that heated matter of which the fire is composed, very much offend such as are not used to them; not me; and, indeed, the heat being always equal, constant, and universal, without flame, without smoke, and without the wind that comes down our chimneys, they may many ways sustain comparison with ours.

Why do we not imitate the Roman architecture? for they say that anciently fires were not made in the houses, but on the outside, and at the foot of them, whence the heat was conveyed to the whole fabric by pipes contrived in the wall, which were drawn twining about the rooms that were to be warmed: which I have seen plainly described somewhere in Seneca.

This German hearing me commend the conveniences and beauties of his city, which truly deserves it, began to compassionate me that I had to leave it; and the first inconvenience he alleged to me was, the heaviness of head that the chimneys elsewhere would bring upon me. He had heard some one make this complaint, and fixed it upon us, being by custom deprived of the means of perceiving it at home.

All heat that comes from the fire weakens and dulls me. Evenus said that fire was the best condiment of life: I rather choose any other way of making myself warm.

We are afraid to drink our wines, when toward the bottom of the cask; in Portugal those fumes are reputed delicious, and it is the beverage of princes. In short, every nation has many customs and usages that are not only unknown to other nations, but savage and miraculous in their sight. What should we do with those people who admit of no evidence that is not in print, who believe not men if they are not in a book, nor truth if it be not of competent age? we dignify our fopperies when we commit them to the press: 'Tis of a great deal more weight to say, "I have read such a thing," than if you only say, "I have heard such a thing." But I, who no more disbelieve a man's mouth than his pen, and who know that men write as indiscreetly as they speak, and who look upon this age as one that is past, as soon quote a friend as Aulus Gelliusor Macrobius; and what I have seen, as what they have written. And, as 'Tis held of virtue, that it is not greater for having continued longer, so do I hold of truth, that for being older it is none the wiser. I often say, that it is mere folly that makes us run after foreign and scholastic examples; their fertility is the same now that it was in the time of Homer and Plato. But is it not that we seek more honour from the quotation, than from the truth of the matter in hand? As if it were more to the purpose to borrow our proofs from the shops of Vascosan or Plantin, than from what is to be seen in our own village; or else, indeed, that we have not the wit to cull out and make useful what we see before us, and to judge of it clearly enough to draw it into example: for if we say that we want authority to give faith to our testimony, we speak from the purpose; forasmuch as, in my opinion, of the most ordinary, common, and known things, could we but find out their light, the greatest miracles of nature might be formed, and the most wonderful examples, especially upon the subject of human actions.

Now, upon this subject, setting aside the examples I have gathered from books, and what Aristotle says of Andron the Argian, that he travelled over the arid sands of Lybia without drinking: a gentleman, who has very well behaved himself in several employments, said, in a place where I was, that he had ridden from Madrid to Lisbon, in the heat of summer, without any drink at all. He is very healthful and vigorous for his age, and has nothing extraordinary in the use of his life, but this, to live sometimes two or three months, nay, a whole year, as he has told me, without drinking. He is sometimes thirsty, but he lets it pass over, and he holds that it is an appetite which easily goes off of itself; and he drinks more out of caprice than either for need or pleasure.

Here is another example: 'Tis not long ago that I found one of the learnedest men in France, among those of not inconsiderable fortune, studying in a corner of a hall that they had separated for him with tapestry, and about him a rabble of his servants full of licence. He told me, and Seneca almost says the same of himself, he made an advantage of this hubbub; that, beaten with this noise, he so much the more collected and retired himself into himself for contemplation, and that this tempest of voices drove back his thoughts within himself. Being a student at Padua, he had his study so long situated amid the rattle of coaches and the tumult of the square, that he not only formed himself to the contempt, but even to the use of noise, for the service of his studies. Socrates answered Alcibiades, who was astonished how he could endure the perpetual scolding of his wife, "Why," said he, "as those do who are accustomed to the ordinary noise of wheels drawing water." I am quite otherwise; I have a tender head and easily discomposed; when 'Tis bent upon anything, the least buzzing of a fly murders it.

Seneca in his youth having warmly espoused the example of Sextius, of eating nothing that had died, for a whole year dispensed with such food, and, as he said, with pleasure, and discontinued it that he might not be suspected of taking up this rule from some new religion by which it was prescribed: he adopted, in like manner, from the precepts of Attalus a custom not to lie upon any sort of bedding that gave way under his weight, and, even to his old age, made use of such as would not yield to any pressure. What the usage of his time made him account roughness, that of ours makes us look upon as effeminacy.

Do but observe the difference betwixt the way of living of my labourers and my own; the Scythians and Indians have nothing more remote both from my capacity and my form. I have picked up charity boys to serve me: who soon after have quitted both my kitchen and livery, only that they might return to their former course of life; and I found one afterwards, picking mussels out of the sewer for his dinner, whom I could neither by entreaties nor threats reclaim from the sweetness he found in indigence. Beggars have their magnificences and delights, as well as the rich, and, 'Tis said, their dignities and polities. These are the effects of custom; she can mould us, not only into what form she pleases (the sages say we ought to apply ourselves to the best, which she will soon make easy to us), but also to change and variation, which is the most noble and most useful instruction of all she teaches us. The best of my bodily conditions is that I am flexible and not very obstinate: I have inclinations more my own and ordinary, and more agreeable than others; but I am diverted from them with very little ado, and easily slip into a contrary course. A young man ought to cross his own rules, to awaken his vigour and to keep it from growing faint and rusty; and there is no course of life so weak and sottish as that which is carried on by rule and discipline;

Ad primum lapidem vectari quum placet, hora
Sumitur ex libro; si prurit frictus ocelli
Angulus, inspecta genesi, collyria quaerit;

["When he is pleased to have himself carried to the first milestone,the hour is chosen from the almanac; if he but rub the corner of his eye, his horoscope having been examined, he seeks the aid of salves."--Juvenal, vi. 576.]

he shall often throw himself even into excesses, if he will take my advice; otherwise the least debauch will destroy him, and render him troublesome and disagreeable in company. The worst quality in a well-bred man is over-fastidiousness, and an obligation to a certain particular way; and it is particular, if not pliable and supple. It is a kind of reproach, not to be able, or not to dare, to do what we see those about us do; let such as these stop at home. It is in every man unbecoming, but in a soldier vicious and intolerable: who, as Philopcemen said, ought to accustom himself to every variety and inequality of life.

Though I have been brought up, as much as was possible, to liberty and independence, yet so it is that, growing old, and having by indifference more settled upon certain forms (my age is now past instruction, and has henceforward nothing to do but to keep itself up as well as it can), custom has already, ere I was aware, so imprinted its character in me in certain things, that I look upon it as a kind of excess to leave them off; and, without a force upon myself, cannot sleep in the daytime, nor eat between meals, nor breakfast, nor go to bed, without a great interval betwixt eating and sleeping,-[Gastroesophogeal Reflux. D.W.]-as of three hours after supper; nor get children but before I sleep, nor get them standing; nor endure my own sweat; nor quench my thirst either with pure water or pure wine; nor keep my head long bare, nor cut my hair after dinner; and I should be as uneasy without my gloves as without my shirt, or without washing when I rise from table or out of my bed; and I could not lie without a canopy and curtains, as if they were essential things. I could dine without a tablecloth, but without a clean napkin, after the German fashion, very incommodiously; I foul them more than the Germans or Italians do, and make but little use either of spoon or fork. I complain that they did not keep up the fashion, begun after the example of kings, to change our napkin at every service, as they do our plate. We are told of that laborious soldier Marius that, growing old, he became nice in his drink, and never drank but out of a particular cup of his own I, in like manner, have suffered myself to fancy a certain form of glasses, and not willingly to drink in common glasses, no more than from a strange common hand: all metal offends me in comparison of a clear and transparent matter: let my eyes taste, too, according to their capacity.

I owe several other such niceties to custom. Nature has also, on the other side, helped me to some of hers: as not to be able to endure more than two full meals in one day, without overcharging my stomach, nor a total abstinence from one of those meals without filling myself with wind, drying up my mouth, and dulling my appetite; the finding great inconvenience from overmuch evening air; for of late years, in night marches, which often happen to be all night long, after five or six hours my stomach begins to be queasy, with a violent pain in my head, so that I always vomit before the day can break. When the others go to breakfast, I go to sleep; and when I rise, I am as brisk and gay as before.

I had always been told that the night dew never rises but in the beginning of the night; but for some years past, long and familiar intercourse with a lord, possessed with the opinion that the night dew is more sharp and dangerous about the declining of the sun, an hour or two before it sets, which he carefully avoids, and despises that of the night, he almost impressed upon me, not so much his reasoning as his experiences.

What, shall mere doubt and inquiry strike our imagination, so as to change us? Such as absolutely and on a sudden give way to these propensions, draw total destruction upon themselves. I am sorry for several gentlemen who, through the folly of their physicians, have in their youth and health wholly shut themselves up: it were better to endure a cough, than, by disuse, for ever to lose the commerce of common life in things of so great utility. Malignant science, to interdict us the most pleasant hours of the day! Let us keep our possession to the last; for the most part, a man hardens himself by being obstinate, and corrects his constitution, as Caesar did the falling sickness, by dint of contempt. A man should addict himself to the best rules, but not enslave himself to them, except to such, if there be any such, where obligation and servitude are of profit.

Both kings and philosophers go to stool, and ladies too; public lives are bound to ceremony; mine, that is obscure and private, enjoys all natural dispensation; soldier and Gascon are also qualities a little subject to indiscretion; wherefore I shall say of this act of relieving nature, that it is desirable to refer it to certain prescribed and nocturnal hours, and compel one's self to this by custom, as I have done; but not to subject one's self, as I have done in my declining years, to a particular convenience of place and seat for that purpose, and make it troublesome by long sitting; and yet, in the fouler offices, is it not in some measure excusable to require more care and cleanliness?

Of all the actions of nature, I am the most impatient of being interrupted in that. I have seen many soldiers troubled with the unruliness of their bellies; whereas mine and I never fail of our punctual assignation, which is at leaping out of bed, if some indispensable business or sickness does not molest us.

I think then, as I said before, that sick men cannot better place themselves anywhere in more safety, than in sitting still in that course of life wherein they have been bred and trained up; change, be it what it will, distempers and puts one out. Do you believe that chestnuts can hurt a Perigordin or a Lucchese, or milk and cheese the mountain people? We enjoin them not only a new, but a contrary, method of life; a change that the healthful cannot endure. Prescribe water to a Breton of threescore and ten; shut a seaman up in a stove; forbid a Basque footman to walk: you will deprive them of motion, and in the end of air and light:

An vivere tanti est?
Cogimur a suetis animum suspendere rebus,
Atque, ut vivamus, vivere desinimus.
Hos superesse reor, quibus et spirabilis aer
Et lux, qua regimur, redditur ipsa gravis.

["Is life worth so much? We are compelled to withhold the mind from things to which we are accustomed; and, that we may live, we cease to live . . . Do I conceive that they still live, to whom the respirable air, and the light itself, by which we are governed, is rendered oppressive?" -Pseudo-Gallus, Eclog., i. 155, 247.]

If they do no other good, they do this at least, that they prepare patients betimes for death, by little and little undermining and cutting off the use of life.

Both well and sick, I have ever willingly suffered myself to obey the appetites that pressed upon me. I give great rein to my desires and propensities; I do not love to cure one disease by another; I hate remedies that are more troublesome than the disease itself. To be subject to the colic and subject to abstain from eating oysters are two evils instead of one; the disease torments us on the one side, and the remedy on the other. Since we are ever in danger of mistaking, let us rather run the hazard of a mistake, after we have had the pleasure. The world proceeds quite the other way, and thinks nothing profitable that is not painful; it has great suspicion of facility.

My appetite, in various things, has of its own accord happily enough accommodated itself to the health of my stomach. Relish and pungency in sauces were pleasant to me when young; my stomach disliking them since, my taste incontinently followed. Wine is hurtful to sick people, and 'Tis the first thing that my mouth then finds distasteful, and with an invincible dislike. Whatever I take against my liking does me harm; and nothing hurts me that I eat with appetite and delight. I never received harm by any action that was very pleasant to me; and accordingly have made all medicinal conclusions largely give way to my pleasure; and I have, when I was young,

given myself the rein as licentiously and inconsiderately to the desire that was predominant in me, as any other whomsoever:

yet more in continuation and holding out, than in sally:

'Tis certainly a misfortune and a miracle at once to confess at what a tender age I first came under the subjection of love: it was, indeed, by chance; for it was long before the years of choice or knowledge; I do not remember myself so far back; and my fortune may well be coupled with that of Quartilla, who could not remember when she was a maid:

Physicians modify their rules according to the violent longings that happen to sick persons, ordinarily with good success; this great desire cannot be imagined so strange and vicious, but that nature must have a hand in it. And then how easy a thing is it to satisfy the fancy? In my opinion; this part wholly carries it, at least, above all the rest. The most grievous and ordinary evils are those that fancy loads us with; this Spanish saying pleases me in several aspects:

Defenda me Dios de me.
["God defend me from myself."]

I am sorry when I am sick, that I have not some longing that might give me the pleasure of satisfying it; all the rules of physic would hardly be able to divert me from it. I do the same when I am well; I can see very little more to be hoped or wished for. 'Twere pity a man should be so weak and languishing, as not to have even wishing left to him.

The art of physic is not so fixed, that we need be without authority for whatever we do; it changes according to climates and moons, according to Fernel and to Scaliger.-[Physicians to Henry II.]-If your physician does not think it good for you to sleep, to drink wine, or to eat such and such meats, never trouble yourself; I will find you another that shall not be of his opinion; the diversity of medical arguments and opinions embraces all sorts and forms. I saw a miserable sick person panting and burning for thirst, that he might be cured, who was afterwards laughed at for his pains by another physician, who condemned that advice as prejudicial to him: had he not tormented himself to good purpose? There lately died of the stone a man of that profession, who had made use of extreme abstinence to contend with his disease: his fellow-physicians say that, on the contrary, this abstinence had dried him up and baked the gravel in his kidneys.

I have observed, that both in wounds and sicknesses, speaking discomposes and hurts me, as much as any irregularity I can commit. My voice pains and tires me, for 'Tis loud and forced; so that when I have gone to a whisper some great persons about affairs of consequence, they have often desired me to moderate my voice.

This story is worth a diversion. Some one in a certain Greek school speaking loud as I do, the master of the ceremonies sent to him to speak softly: "Tell him, then, he must send me," replied the other, "the tone he would have me speak in." To which the other replied, "That he should take the tone from the ears of him to whom he spake." It was well said, if it is to be understood: "Speak according to the affair you are speaking about to your auditor," for if it mean, "'Tis sufficient that he hear you, or govern yourself by him," I do not find it to be reason.

The tone and motion of my voice carries with it a great deal of the expression and signification of my meaning, and 'Tis I who am to govern it, to make myself understood: there is a voice to instruct, a voice to flatter, and a voice to reprehend. I will not only that my voice reach him, but, peradventure, that it strike and pierce him. When I rate my valet with sharp and bitter language, it would be very pretty for him to say; "Pray, master, speak lower; I hear you very well":

Speaking is half his who speaks, and half his who hears; the latter ought to prepare himself to receive it, according to its bias; as with tennis-players, he who receives the ball, shifts and prepares, according as he sees him move who strikes the stroke, and according to the stroke itself.

Experience has, moreover, taught me this, that we ruin ourselves by impatience. Evils have their life and limits, their diseases and their recovery.

The constitution of maladies is formed by the pattern of the constitution of animals; they have their fortune and their days limited from their birth; he who attempts imperiously to cut them short by force in the middle of their course, lengthens and multiplies them, and incenses instead of appeasing them. I am of Crantor's opinion, that we are neither obstinately and deafly to oppose evils, nor succumb to them from want of courage; but that we are naturally to give way to them, according to their condition and our own. We ought to grant free passage to diseases; I find they stay less with me, who let them alone; and I have lost some, reputed the most tenacious and obstinate, by their own decay, without help and without art, and contrary to its rules. Let us a little permit Nature to take her own way; she better understands her own affairs than we. But such an one died of it; and so shall you: if not of that disease, of another. And how many have not escaped dying, who have had three physicians at their tails? Example is a vague and universal mirror, and of various reflections. If it be a delicious medicine, take it: 'Tis always so much present good. I will never stick at the name nor the colour, if it be pleasant and grateful to the palate: pleasure is one of the chiefest kinds of profit.

I have suffered colds, gouty defluxions, relaxations, palpitations of the heart, megrims, and other accidents, to grow old and die in time a natural death. I have so lost them when I was half fit to keep them: they are sooner prevailed upon by courtesy than huffing. We must patiently suffer the laws of our condition; we are born to grow old, to grow weak, and to be sick, in despite of all medicine.

'Tis the first lesson the Mexicans teach their children; so soon as ever they are born they thus salute them: "Thou art come into the world, child, to endure: endure, suffer, and say nothing." 'Tis injustice to lament that which has befallen any one which may befall every one:

See an old man who begs of God that he will maintain his health vigorous and entire; that is to say, that he restore him to youth:

is it not folly? his condition is not capable of it. The gout, the stone, and indigestion are symptoms of long years; as heat, rains, and winds are of long journeys. Plato does not believe that AEsculapius troubled himself to provide by regimen to prolong life in a weak and wasted body, useless to his country and to his profession, or to beget healthful and robust children; and does not think this care suitable to the Divine justice and prudence, which is to direct all things to utility. My good friend, your business is done; nobody can restore you; they can, at the most, but patch you up, and prop you a little, and by that means prolong your misery an hour or two:

Non secus instantem cupiens fulcire ruinam,
Diversis contra nititur obiicibus;
Donec certa dies, omni compage soluta,
Ipsum cum rebus subruat auxilium.

["Like one who, desiring to stay an impending ruin, places various props against it, till, in a short time, the house, the props, and all, giving way, fall together."-Pseudo-Gallus, i. 171.]

We must learn to suffer what we cannot evade; our life, like the harmony of the world, is composed of contrary things-of diverse tones, sweet and harsh, sharp and flat, sprightly and solemn: the musician who should only affect some of these, what would he be able to do? he must know how to make use of them all, and to mix them; and so we should mingle the goods and evils which are consubstantial with our life; our being cannot subsist without this mixture, and the one part is no less necessary to it than the other. To attempt to combat natural necessity, is to represent the folly of Ctesiphon, who undertook to kick with his mule.-[Plutarch, How to restrain Anger, c. 8.]

I consult little about the alterations I feel: for these doctors take advantage; when they have you at their mercy, they surfeit your ears with their prognostics; and formerly surprising me, weakened with sickness, injuriously handled me with their dogmas and magisterial fopperies-one while menacing me with great pains, and another with approaching death. Hereby I was indeed moved and shaken, but not subdued nor jostled from my place; and though my judgment was neither altered nor distracted, yet it was at least disturbed: 'Tis always agitation and combat.

Now, I use my imagination as gently as I can, and would discharge it, if I could, of all trouble and contest; a man must assist, flatter, and deceive it, if he can; my mind is fit for that office; it needs no appearances throughout: could it persuade as it preaches, it would successfully relieve me.

Will you have an example? It tells me: "that 'Tis for my good to have the stone: that the structure of my age must naturally suffer some decay, and it is now time it should begin to disjoin and to confess a breach; 'Tis a common necessity, and there is nothing in it either miraculous or new; I therein pay what is due to old age, and I cannot expect a better bargain; that society ought to comfort me, being fallen into the most common infirmity of my age; I see everywhere men tormented with the same disease, and am honoured by the fellowship, forasmuch as men of the best quality are most frequently afflicted with it: 'Tis a noble and dignified disease: that of such as are struck with it, few have it to a less degree of pain; that these are put to the trouble of a strict diet and the daily taking of nauseous potions, whereas I owe my better state purely to my good fortune; for some ordinary broths of eringo or burst-wort that I have twice or thrice taken to oblige the ladies, who, with greater kindness than my pain was sharp, would needs present me half of theirs, seemed to me equally easy to take and fruitless in operation, the others have to pay a thousand vows to AEsculapius, and as many crowns to their physicians, for the voiding a little gravel, which I often do by the aid of nature: even the decorum of my countenance is not disturbed in company; and I can hold my water ten hours, and as long as any man in health.

The fear of this disease," says my mind, "formerly affrighted thee, when it was unknown to thee; the cries and despairing groans of those who make it worse by their impatience, begot a horror in thee. 'Tis an infirmity that punishes the members by which thou hast most offended. Thou art a conscientious fellow;"

"consider this chastisement: 'Tis very easy in comparison of others, and inflicted with a paternal tenderness: do but observe how late it comes; it only seizes on and incommodes that part of thy life which is, one way and another, sterile and lost; having, as it were by composition, given time for the licence and pleasures of thy youth.

The fear and the compassion that the people have of this disease serve thee for matter of glory; a quality whereof if thou bast thy judgment purified, and that thy reason has somewhat cured it, thy friends notwithstanding, discern some tincture in thy complexion. 'Tis a pleasure to hear it said of oneself what strength of mind, what patience! Thou art seen to sweat with pain, to turn pale and red, to tremble, to vomit blood, to suffer strange contractions and convulsions, at times to let great tears drop from thine eyes, to urine thick, black, and dreadful water, or to have it suppressed by some sharp and craggy stone, that cruelly pricks and tears the neck of the bladder, whilst all the while thou entertainest the company with an ordinary countenance; droning by fits with thy people; making one in a continuous discourse, now and then making excuse for thy pain, and representing thy suffering less than it is.

Dost thou call to mind the men of past times, who so greedily sought diseases to keep their virtue in breath and exercise? Put the case that nature sets thee on and impels thee to this glorious school, into which thou wouldst never have entered of thy own free will. If thou tellest me that it is a dangerous and mortal disease, what others are not so? for 'Tis a physical cheat to expect any that they say do not go direct to death: what matters if they go thither by accident, or if they easily slide and slip into the path that leads us to it?

But thou dost not die because thou art sick; thou diest because thou art living: death kills thee without the help of sickness: and sickness has deferred death in some, who have lived longer by reason that they thought themselves always dying; to which may be added, that as in wounds, so in diseases, some are medicinal and wholesome.

The stone is often no less long-lived than you; we see men with whom it has continued from their infancy even to their extreme old age; and if they had not broken company, it would have been with them longer still; you more often kill it than it kills you. And though it should present to you the image of approaching death, were it not a good office to a man of such an age, to put him in mind of his end?

And, which is worse, thou hast no longer anything that should make thee desire to be cured. Whether or no, common necessity will soon call thee away. Do but consider how skilfully and gently she puts thee out of concern with life, and weans thee from the world; not forcing thee with a tyrannical subjection, like so many other infirmities which thou seest old men afflicted withal, that hold them in continual torment, and keep them in perpetual and unintermitted weakness and pains, but by warnings and instructions at intervals, intermixing long pauses of repose, as it were to give thee opportunity to meditate and ruminate upon thy lesson, at thy own ease and leisure. To give thee means to judge aright, and to assume the resolution of a man of courage, it presents to thee the state of thy entire condition, both in good and evil; and one while a very cheerful and another an insupportable life, in one and the same day. If thou embracest not death, at least thou shakest hands with it once a month; whence thou hast more cause to hope that it will one day surprise thee without menace; and that being so often conducted to the water-side, but still thinking thyself to be upon the accustomed terms, thou and thy confidence will at one time or another be unexpectedly wafted over. A man cannot reasonably complain of diseases that fairly divide the time with health."

I am obliged to Fortune for having so often assaulted me with the same sort of weapons: she forms and fashions me by use, hardens and habituates me, so that I can know within a little for how much I shall be quit.

For want of natural memory, I make one of paper; and as any new symptom happens in my disease, I set it down, whence it falls out that, having now almost passed through all sorts of examples, if anything striking threatens me, turning over these little loose notes, as the Sybilline leaves, I never fail of finding matter of consolation from some favourable prognostic in my past experience.

Custom also makes me hope better for the time to come; for, the conduct of this clearing out having so long continued, 'Tis to be believed that nature will not alter her course, and that no other worse accident will happen than what I already feel. And besides, the condition of this disease is not unsuitable to my prompt and sudden complexion: when it assaults me gently, I am afraid, for 'Tis then for a great while; but it has, naturally, brisk and vigorous excesses; it claws me to purpose for a day or two.

My kidneys held out an age without alteration; and I have almost now lived another, since they changed their state; evils have their periods, as well as benefits: peradventure, the infirmity draws towards an end. Age weakens the heat of my stomach, and, its digestion being less perfect, sends this crude matter to my kidneys; why, at a certain revolution, may not the heat of my kidneys be also abated, so that they can no more petrify my phlegm, and nature find out some other way of purgation. Years have evidently helped me to drain certain rheums; and why not these excrements which furnish matter for gravel?

But is there anything delightful in comparison of this sudden change, when from an excessive pain, I come, by the voiding of a stone, to recover, as by a flash of lightning, the beautiful light of health, so free and full, as it happens in our sudden and sharpest colics? Is there anything in the pain suffered, that one can counterpoise to the pleasure of so sudden an amendment? Oh, how much does health seem the more pleasant to me, after a sickness so near and so contiguous, that I can distinguish them in the presence of one another, in their greatest show; when they appear in emulation, as if to make head against and dispute it with one another! As the Stoics say that vices are profitably introduced to give value to and to set off virtue, we can, with better reason and less temerity of conjecture, say that nature has given us pain for the honour and service of pleasure and indolence. When Socrates, after his fetters were knocked off, felt the pleasure of that itching which the weight of them had caused in his legs, he rejoiced to consider the strict alliance betwixt pain and pleasure; how they are linked together by a necessary connection, so that by turns they follow and mutually beget one another; and cried out to good Aesop, that he ought out of this consideration to have taken matter for a fine fable.

The worst that I see in other diseases is, that they are not so grievous in their effect as they are in their issue: a man is a whole year in recovering, and all the while full of weakness and fear. There is so much hazard, and so many steps to arrive at safety, that there is no end on't before they have unmuffled you of a kerchief, and then of a cap, before they allow you to walk abroad and take the air, to drink wine, to lie with your wife, to eat melons, 'Tis odds you relapse into some new distemper. The stone has this privilege, that it carries itself clean off: whereas the other maladies always leave behind them some impression and alteration that render the body subject to a new disease, and lend a hand to one another. Those are excusable that content themselves with possessing us, without extending farther and introducing their followers; but courteous and kind are those whose passage brings us any profitable issue. Since I have been troubled with the stone, I find myself freed from all other accidents, much more, methinks, than I was before, and have never had any fever since; I argue that the extreme and frequent vomitings that I am subject to purge me: and, on the other hand, my distastes for this and that, and the strange fasts I am forced to keep, digest my peccant humours, and nature, with those stones, voids whatever there is in me superfluous and hurtful.

Let them never tell me that it is a medicine too dear bought: for what avail so many stinking draughts, so many caustics, incisions, sweats, setons, diets, and so many other methods of cure, which often, by reason we are not able to undergo their violence and importunity, bring us to our graves? So that when I have the stone, I look upon it as physic; when free from it, as an absolute deliverance.

And here is another particular benefit of my disease; which is, that it almost plays its game by itself, and lets 'me play mine, if I have only courage to do it; for, in its greatest fury, I have endured it ten hours together on horseback. Do but endure only; you need no other regimen play, run, dine, do this and t'other, if you can; your debauch will do you more good than harm; say as much to one that has the pox, the gout, or hernia! The other diseases have more universal obligations; rack our actions after another kind of manner, disturb our whole order, and to their consideration engage the whole state of life: this only pinches the skin; it leaves the understanding and the will wholly at our own disposal, and the tongue, the hands, and the feet; it rather awakens than stupefies you. The soul is struck with the ardour of a fever, overwhelmed with an epilepsy, and displaced by a sharp megrim, and, in short, astounded by all the diseases that hurt the whole mass and the most noble parts; this never meddles with the soul; if anything goes amiss with her, 'Tis her own fault; she betrays, dismounts, and abandons herself.

There are none but fools who suffer themselves to be persuaded that this hard and massive body which is baked in our kidneys is to be dissolved by drinks; wherefore, when it is once stirred, there is nothing to be done but to give it passage; and, for that matter, it will itself make one.

I moreover observe this particular convenience in it, that it is a disease wherein we have little to guess at: we are dispensed from the trouble into which other diseases throw us by the uncertainty of their causes, conditions, and progress; a trouble that is infinitely painful: we have no need of consultations and doctoral interpretations; the senses well enough inform us both what it is and where it is.

By suchlike arguments, weak and strong, as Cicero with the disease of his old age, I try to rock asleep and amuse my imagination, and to dress its wounds. If I find them worse tomorrow, I will provide new stratagems.

That this is true: I am come to that pass of late, that the least motion forces pure blood out of my kidneys: what of that? I move about, nevertheless, as before, and ride after my hounds with a juvenile and insolent ardour; and hold that I have very good satisfaction for an accident of that importance, when it costs me no more but a dull heaviness and uneasiness in that part; 'Tis some great stone that wastes and consumes the substance of my kidneys and my life, which I by little and little evacuate, not without some natural pleasure, as an excrement henceforward superfluous and troublesome. Now if I feel anything stirring, do not fancy that I trouble myself to consult my pulse or my urine, thereby to put myself upon some annoying prevention; I shall soon enough feel the pain, without making it more and longer by the disease of fear.

He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears. To which may be added that the doubts and ignorance of those who take upon them to expound the designs of nature and her internal progressions, and the many false prognostics of their art, ought to give us to understand that her ways are inscrutable and utterly unknown; there is great uncertainty, variety, and obscurity in what she either promises or threatens. Old age excepted, which is an indubitable sign of the approach of death, in all other accidents I see few signs of the future, whereon we may ground our divination.

I only judge of myself by actual sensation, not by reasoning: to what end, since I am resolved to bring nothing to it but expectation and patience? Will you know how much I get by this? observe those who do otherwise, and who rely upon so many diverse persuasions and counsels; how often the imagination presses upon them without any bodily pain. I have many times amused myself, being well and in safety, and quite free from these dangerous attacks in communicating them to the physicians as then beginning to discover themselves in me; I underwent the decree of their dreadful conclusions, being all the while quite at my ease, and so much the more obliged to the favour of God and better satisfied of the vanity of this art.

There is nothing that ought so much to be recommended to youth as activity and vigilance our life is nothing but movement. I bestir myself with great difficulty, and am slow in everything, whether in rising, going to bed, or eating: seven of the clock in the morning is early for me, and where I rule, I never dine before eleven, nor sup till after six. I formerly attributed the cause of the fevers and other diseases I fell into to the heaviness that long sleeping had brought upon me, and have ever repented going to sleep again in the morning. Plato is more angry at excess of sleeping than at excess of drinking.

I love to lie hard and alone, even without my wife, as kings do; pretty well covered with clothes. They never warm my bed, but since I have grown old they give me at need cloths to lay to my feet and stomach. They found fault with the great Scipio that he was a great sleeper; not, in my opinion, for any other reason than that men were displeased that he alone should have nothing in him to be found fault with. If I am anything fastidious in my way of living 'Tis rather in my lying than anything else; but generally I give way and accommodate myself as well as any one to necessity. Sleeping has taken up a great part of my life, and I yet continue, at the age I now am, to sleep eight or nine hours at one breath. I wean myself with utility from this proneness to sloth, and am evidently the better for so doing. I find the change a little hard indeed, but in three days 'Tis over; and I see but few who live with less sleep, when need requires, and who more constantly exercise themselves, or to whom long journeys are less troublesome.

My body is capable of a firm, but not of a violent or sudden agitation. I escape of late from violent exercises, and such as make me sweat: my limbs grow weary before they are warm. I can stand a whole day together, and am never weary of walking; but from my youth I have ever preferred to ride upon paved roads; on foot, I get up to the haunches in dirt, and little fellows as I am are subject in the streets to be elbowed and jostled for want of presence; I have ever loved to repose myself, whether sitting or lying, with my heels as high or higher than my seat.

There is no profession as pleasant as the military, a profession both noble in its execution (for valour is the stoutest, proudest, and most generous of all virtues), and noble in its cause: there is no utility either more universal or more just than the protection of the peace and greatness of one's country. The company of so many noble, young, and active men delights you; the ordinary sight of so many tragic spectacles; the freedom of the conversation, without art; a masculine and unceremonious way of living, please you; the variety of a thousand several actions; the encouraging harmony of martial music that ravishes and inflames both your ears and souls; the honour of this occupation, nay, even its hardships and difficulties, which Plato holds so light that in his Republic he makes women and children share in them, are delightful to you. You put yourself voluntarily upon particular exploits and hazards, according as you judge of their lustre and importance; and, a volunteer, find even life itself excusably employed:

To fear common dangers that concern so great a multitude of men; not to dare to do what so many sorts of souls, what a whole people dare, is for a heart that is poor and mean beyond all measure: company encourages even children. If others excel you in knowledge, in gracefulness, in strength, or fortune, you have alternative resources at your disposal; but to give place to them in stability of mind, you can blame no one for that but yourself. Death is more abject, more languishing and troublesome, in bed than in a fight: fevers and catarrhs as painful and mortal as a musket-shot. Whoever has fortified himself valiantly to bear the accidents of common life need not raise his courage to be a soldier:

I do not remember that I ever had the itch, and yet scratching is one of nature's sweetest gratifications, and so much at hand; but repentance follows too near. I use it most in my ears, which are at intervals apt to itch.

I came into the world with all my senses entire, even to perfection. My stomach is commodiously good, as also is my head and my breath; and, for the most part, uphold themselves so in the height of fevers. I have passed the age to which some nations, not without reason, have prescribed so just a term of life that they would not suffer men to exceed it; and yet I have some intermissions, though short and inconstant, so clean and sound as to be little inferior to the health and pleasantness of my youth. I do not speak of vigour and sprightliness; 'Tis not reason they should follow me beyond their limits:

My face and eyes presently discover my condition; all my alterations begin there, and appear somewhat worse than they really are; my friends often pity me before I feel the cause in myself. My looking-glass does not frighten me; for even in my youth it has befallen me more than once to have a scurvy complexion and of ill augury, without any great consequence, so that the physicians, not finding any cause within answerable to that outward alteration, attributed it to the mind and to some secret passion that tormented me within; but they were deceived. If my body would govern itself as well, according to my rule, as my mind does, we should move a little more at our ease. My mind was then not only free from trouble, but, moreover, full of joy and satisfaction, as it commonly is, half by its complexion, half by its design:

I am of the opinion that this temperature of my soul has often raised my body from its lapses; this is often depressed; if the other be not brisk and gay, 'Tis at least tranquil and at rest. I had a quartan ague four or five months, that made me look miserably ill; my mind was always, if not calm, yet pleasant. If the pain be without me, the weakness and languor do not much afflict me; I see various corporal faintings, that beget a horror in me but to name, which yet I should less fear than a thousand passions and agitations of the mind that I see about me. I make up my mind no more to run; 'Tis enough that I can crawl along; nor do I more complain of the natural decadence that I feel in myself:

Quis tumidum guttur miratur in Alpibus?
["Who is surprised to see a swollen goitre in the Alps?" -Juvenal, xiii. 162.]

than I regret that my duration shall not be as long and entire as that of an oak. I have no reason to complain of my imagination; I have had few thoughts in my life that have so much as broken my sleep, except those of desire, which have awakened without afflicting me. I dream but seldom, and then of chimaeras and fantastic things, commonly produced from pleasant thoughts, and rather ridiculous than sad; and I believe it to be true that dreams are faithful interpreters of our inclinations; but there is art required to sort and understand them

Plato, moreover, says, that 'Tis the office of prudence to draw instructions of divination of future things from dreams: I don't know about this, but there are wonderful instances of it that Socrates, Xenophon, and Aristotle, men of irreproachable authority, relate. Historians say that the Atlantes never dream; who also never eat any animal food, which I add, forasmuch as it is, peradventure, the reason why they never dream, for Pythagoras ordered a certain preparation of diet to beget appropriate dreams. Mine are very gentle, without any agitation of body or expression of voice. I have seen several of my time wonderfully disturbed by them. Theon the philosopher walked in his sleep, and so did Pericles servant, and that upon the tiles and top of the house.

I hardly ever choose my dish at table, but take the next at hand, and unwillingly change it for another. A confusion of meats and a clatter of dishes displease me as much as any other confusion: I am easily satisfied with few dishes: and am an enemy to the opinion of Favorinus, that in a feast they should snatch from you the meat you like, and set a plate of another sort before you; and that 'Tis a pitiful supper, if you do not sate your guests with the rumps of various fowls, the beccafico only deserving to be all eaten.

I usually eat salt meats, yet I prefer bread that has no salt in it; and my baker never sends up other to my table, contrary to the custom of the country. In my infancy, what they had most to correct in me was the refusal of things that children commonly best love, as sugar, sweetmeats, and march-panes. My tutor contended with this aversion to delicate things, as a kind of over-nicety; and indeed 'Tis nothing else but a difficulty of taste, in anything it applies itself to. Whoever cures a child of an obstinate liking for brown bread, bacon, or garlic, cures him also of pampering his palate. There are some who affect temperance and plainness by wishing for beef and ham amongst the partridges; 'Tis all very fine; this is the delicacy of the delicate; 'Tis the taste of an effeminate fortune that disrelishes ordinary and accustomed things.

Not to make good cheer with what another is enjoying, and to be curious in what a man eats, is the essence of this vice:

There is indeed this difference, that 'Tis better to oblige one's appetite to things that are most easy to be had; but 'Tis always vice to oblige one's self. I formerly said a kinsman of mine was overnice, who, by being in our galleys, had unlearned the use of beds and to undress when he went to sleep.

If I had any sons, I should willingly wish them my fortune. The good father that God gave me (who has nothing of me but the acknowledgment of his goodness, but truly 'Tis a very hearty one) sent me from my cradle to be brought up in a poor village of his, and there continued me all the while I was at nurse, and still longer, bringing me up to the meanest and most common way of living:

Never take upon yourselves, and much less give up to your wives, the care of their nurture; leave the formation to fortune, under popular and natural laws; leave it to custom to train them up to frugality and hardship, that they may rather descend from rigour than mount up to it. This humour of his yet aimed at another end, to make me familiar with the people and the condition of men who most need our assistance; considering that I should rather regard them who extend their arms to me, than those who turn their backs upon me; and for this reason it was that he provided to hold me at the font persons of the meanest fortune, to oblige and attach me to them.

Nor has his design succeeded altogether ill; for, whether upon the account of the more honour in such a condescension, or out of a natural compassion that has a very great power over me, I have an inclination towards the meaner sort of people. The faction which I should condemn in our wars, I should more sharply condemn, flourishing and successful; it will somewhat reconcile me to it, when I shall see it miserable and overwhelmed. How willingly do I admire the fine humour of Cheilonis, daughter and wife to kings of Sparta. Whilst her husband Cleombrotus, in the commotion of her city, had the advantage over Leonidas her father, she, like a good daughter, stuck close to her father in all his misery and exile, in opposition to the conqueror.

But so soon as the chance of war turned, she changed her will with the change of fortune, and bravely turned to her husband's side, whom she accompanied throughout, where his ruin carried him: admitting, as it appears to me, no other choice than to cleave to the side that stood most in need of her, and where she could best manifest her compassion. I am naturally more apt to follow the example of Flaminius, who rather gave his assistance to those who had most need of him than to those who had power to do him good, than I do to that of Pyrrhus, who was of an humour to truckle under the great and to domineer over the poor.

Long sittings at table both trouble me and do me harm; for, be it that I was so accustomed when a child, I eat all the while I sit. Therefore it is that at my own house, though the meals there are of the shortest, I usually sit down a little while after the rest, after the manner of Augustus, but I do not imitate him in rising also before the rest; on the contrary, I love to sit still a long time after, and to hear them talk, provided I am none of the talkers: for I tire and hurt myself with speaking upon a full stomach, as much as I find it very wholesome and pleasant to argue and to strain my voice before dinner.

The ancient Greeks and Romans had more reason than we in setting apart for eating, which is a principal action of life, if they were not prevented by other extraordinary business, many hours and the greatest part of the night; eating and drinking more deliberately than we do, who perform all our actions post-haste; and in extending this natural pleasure to more leisure and better use, intermixing with profitable conversation.

They whose concern it is to have a care of me, may very easily hinder me from eating anything they think will do me harm; for in such matters I never covet nor miss anything I do not see; but withal, if it once comes in my sight, 'Tis in vain to persuade me to forbear; so that when I design to fast I must be kept apart from the suppers, and must have only so much given me as is required for a prescribed collation; for if to table, I forget my resolution. When I order my cook to alter the manner of dressing any dish, all my family know what it means, that my stomach is out of order, and that I shall not touch it.

I love to have all meats, that will endure it, very little boiled or roasted, and prefer them very high, and even, as to several, quite gone. Nothing but hardness generally offends me (of any other quality I am as patient and indifferent as any man I have known); so that, contrary to the common humour, even in fish it often happens that I find them both too fresh and too firm; not for want of teeth, which I ever had good, even to excellence, and which age does not now begin to threaten; I have always been used every morning to rub them with a napkin, and before and after dinner.

God is favourable to those whom He makes to die by degrees; 'Tis the only benefit of old age; the last death will be so much the less painful; it will kill but a half or a quarter of a man. There is one tooth lately fallen out without drawing and without pain; it was the natural term of its duration; in that part of my being and several others, are already dead, others half dead, of those that were most active and in the first rank during my vigorous years; 'Tis so I melt and steal away from myself. What a folly it would be in my understanding to apprehend the height of this fall, already so much advanced, as if it were from the very top! I hope I shall not.

I, in truth, receive a principal consolation in meditating my death, that it will be just and natural, and that henceforward I cannot herein either require or hope from Destiny any other but unlawful favour. Men make themselves believe that we formerly had longer lives as well as greater stature. But they deceive themselves; and Solon, who was of those elder times, limits the duration of life to threescore and ten years. I, who have so much and so universally adored that "The mean is best," of the passed time, and who have concluded the most moderate measures to be the most perfect, shall I pretend to an immeasurable and prodigious old age? Whatever happens contrary to the course of nature may be troublesome; but what comes according to her should always be pleasant:

And so, says Plato, the death which is occasioned by wounds and diseases is violent; but that which comes upon us, old age conducting us to it, is of all others the most easy, and in some sort delicious:

Death mixes and confounds itself throughout with life; decay anticipates its hour, and shoulders itself even into the course of our advance. I have portraits of myself taken at five-and-twenty and five-and-thirty years of age. I compare them with that lately drawn: how many times is it no longer me; how much more is my present image unlike the former, than unlike my dying one? It is too much to abuse nature, to make her trot so far that she must be forced to leave us, and abandon our conduct, our eyes, teeth, legs, and all the rest to the mercy of a foreign and haggard countenance, and to resign us into the hands of art, being weary of following us herself.

I am not excessively fond either of salads or fruits, except melons. My father hated all sorts of sauces; I love them all. Eating too much hurts me; but, as to the quality of what I eat, I do not yet certainly know that any sort of meat disagrees with me; neither have I observed that either full moon or decrease, autumn or spring, have any influence upon me. We have in us motions that are inconstant and unknown; for example, I found radishes first grateful to my stomach, since that nauseous, and now again grateful. In several other things, I find my stomach and appetite vary after the same manner; I have changed again and again from white wine to claret, from claret to white wine.

I am a great lover of fish, and consequently make my fasts feasts and feasts fasts; and I believe what some people say, that it is more easy of digestion than flesh. As I make a conscience of eating flesh upon fish-days, so does my taste make a conscience of mixing fish and flesh; the difference betwixt them seems to me too remote.

From my youth, I have sometimes kept out of the way at meals; either to sharpen my appetite against the next morning (for, as Epicurus fasted and made lean meals to accustom his pleasure to make shift without abundance, I, on the contrary, do it to prepare my pleasure to make better and more cheerful use of abundance); or else I fasted to preserve my vigour for the service of some action of body or mind: for both the one and the other of these is cruelly dulled in me by repletion; and, above all things, I hate that foolish coupling of so healthful and sprightly a goddess with that little belching god, bloated with the fumes of his liquor-[ Montaigne did not approve of coupling Bacchus with Venus.]- or to cure my sick stomach, or for want of fit company; for I say, as the same Epicurus did, that one is not so much to regard what he eats, as with whom; and I commend Chilo, that he would not engage himself to be at Periander's feast till he was first informed who were to be the other guests; no dish is so acceptable to me, nor no sauce so appetising, as that which is extracted from society.

I think it more wholesome to eat more leisurely and less, and to eat oftener; but I would have appetite and hunger attended to; I should take no pleasure to be fed with three or four pitiful and stinted repasts a day, after a medicinal manner: who will assure me that, if I have a good appetite in the morning, I shall have the same at supper? But we old fellows especially, let us take the first opportune time of eating, and leave to almanac-makers hopes and prognostics. The utmost fruit of my health is pleasure; let us take hold of the present and known. I avoid the invariable in these laws of fasting; he who would have one form serve him, let him avoid the continuing it; we harden ourselves in it; our strength is there stupefied and laid asleep; six months after, you shall find your stomach so inured to it, that all you have got is the loss of your liberty of doing otherwise but to your prejudice.

I never keep my legs and thighs warmer in winter than in summer; one simple pair of silk stockings is all. I have suffered myself, for the relief of my colds, to keep my head warmer, and my belly upon the account of my colic: my diseases in a few days habituate themselves thereto, and disdained my ordinary provisions: we soon get from a coif to a kerchief over it, from a simple cap to a quilted hat; the trimmings of the doublet must not merely serve for ornament: there must be added a hare's skin or a vulture's skin, and a cap under the hat: follow this gradation, and you will go a very fine way to work. I will do nothing of the sort, and would willingly leave off what I have begun. If you fall into any new inconvenience, all this is labour lost; you are accustomed to it; seek out some other. Thus do they destroy themselves who submit to be pestered with these enforced and superstitious rules; they must add something more, and something more after that; there is no end on't.

For what concerns our affairs and pleasures, it is much more commodious, as the ancients did, to lose one's dinner, and defer making good cheer till the hour of retirement and repose, without breaking up a day; and so was I formerly used to do. As to health, I since by experience find, on the contrary, that it is better to dine, and that the digestion is better while awake.

I am not very used to be thirsty, either well or sick; my mouth is, indeed, apt to be dry, but without thirst; and commonly I never drink but with thirst that is created by eating, and far on in the meal; I drink pretty well for a man of my pitch: in summer, and at a relishing meal, I do not only exceed the limits of Augustus, who drank but thrice precisely; but not to offend Democritus rule, who forbade that men should stop at four times as an unlucky number, I proceed at need to the fifth glass, about three half-pints; for the little glasses are my favourites, and I like to drink them off, which other people avoid as an unbecoming thing. I mix my wine sometimes with half, sometimes with the third part water; and when I am at home, by an ancient custom that my father's physician prescribed both to him and himself, they mix that which is designed for me in the buttery, two or three hours before 'Tis brought in. 'Tis said that Cranabs, king of Attica, was the inventor of this custom of diluting wine; whether useful or no, I have heard disputed. I think it more decent and wholesome for children to drink no wine till after sixteen or eighteen years of age. The most usual and common method of living is the most becoming; all particularity, in my opinion, is to be avoided; and I should as much hate a German who mixed water with his wine, as I should a Frenchman who drank it pure. Public usage gives the law in these things.

I fear a mist, and fly from smoke as from the plague: the first repairs I fell upon in my own house were the chimneys and houses of office, the common and insupportable defects of all old buildings; and amongst the difficulties of war I reckon the choking dust they made us ride in a whole day together. I have a free and easy respiration, and my colds for the most part go off without offence to the lungs and without a cough.

The heat of summer is more an enemy to me than the cold of winter; for, besides the incommodity of heat, less remediable than cold, and besides the force of the sunbeams that strike upon the head, all glittering light offends my eyes, so that I could not now sit at dinner over against a flaming fire.

To dull the whiteness of paper, in those times when I was more wont to read, I laid a piece of glass upon my book, and found my eyes much relieved by it. I am to this hour-to the age of fifty-four-Ignorant of the use of spectacles; and I can see as far as ever I did, or any other. 'Tis true that in the evening I begin to find a little disturbance and weakness in my sight if I read, an exercise I have always found troublesome, especially by night. Here is one step back, and a very manifest one; I shall retire another: from the second to the third, and so to the fourth, so gently, that I shall be stark blind before I shall be sensible of the age and decay of my sight: so artificially do the Fatal Sisters untwist our lives. And so I doubt whether my hearing begins to grow thick; and you will see I shall have half lost it, when I shall still lay the fault on the voices of those who speak to me. A man must screw up his soul to a high pitch to make it sensible how it ebbs away.

My walking is quick and firm; and I know not which of the two, my mind or my body, I have most to do to keep in the same state. That preacher is very much my friend who can fix my attention a whole sermon through: in places of ceremony, where every one's countenance is so starched, where I have seen the ladies keep even their eyes so fixed, I could never order it so, that some part or other of me did not lash out; so that though I was seated, I was never settled; and as to gesticulation, I am never without a switch in my hand, walking or riding. As the philosopher Chrysippus' maid said of her master, that he was only drunk in his legs, for it was his custom to be always kicking them about in what place soever he sat; and she said it when, the wine having made all his companions drunk, he found no alteration in himself at all; it may have been said of me from my infancy, that I had either folly or quicksilver in my feet, so much stirring and unsettledness there is in them, wherever they are placed.

'Tis indecent, besides the hurt it does to one's health, and even to the pleasure of eating, to eat greedily as I do; I often bite my tongue, and sometimes my fingers, in my haste. Diogenes, meeting a boy eating after that manner, gave his tutor a box on the ear! There were men at Rome that taught people to chew, as well as to walk, with a good grace. I lose thereby the leisure of speaking, which gives great relish to the table, provided the discourse be suitable, that is, pleasant and short.

There is jealousy and envy amongst our pleasures; they cross and hinder one another. Alcibiades, a man who well understood how to make good cheer, banished even music from the table, that it might not disturb the entertainment of discourse, for the reason, as Plato tells us, "that it is the custom of ordinary people to call fiddlers and singing men to feasts, for want of good discourse and pleasant talk, with which men of understanding know how to entertain one another." Varro requires all this in entertainments: "Persons of graceful presence and agreeable conversation, who are neither silent nor garrulous; neatness and delicacy, both of meat and place; and fair weather." The art of dining well is no slight art, the pleasure not a slight pleasure; neither the greatest captains nor the greatest philosophers have disdained the use or science of eating well. My imagination has delivered three repasts to the custody of my memory, which fortune rendered sovereignly sweet to me, upon several occasions in my more flourishing age; my present state excludes me; for every one, according to the good temper of body and mind wherein he then finds himself, furnishes for his own share a particular grace and savour.

I, who but crawl upon the earth, hate this inhuman wisdom, that will have us despise and hate all culture of the body; I look upon it as an equal injustice to loath natural pleasures as to be too much in love with them. Xerxes was a blockhead, who, environed with all human delights, proposed a reward to him who could find out others; but he is not much less so who cuts off any of those pleasures that nature has provided for him. A man should neither pursue nor avoid them, but receive them. I receive them, I confess, a little too warmly and kindly, and easily suffer myself to follow my natural propensions. We have no need to exaggerate their inanity; they themselves will make us sufficiently sensible of it, thanks to our sick wet-blanket mind, that puts us out of taste with them as with itself; it treats both itself and all it receives, one while better, and another worse, according to its insatiable, vagabond, and versatile essence:

I, who boast that I so curiously and particularly embrace the conveniences of life, find them, when I most nearly consider them, very little more than wind. But what? We are all wind throughout; and, moreover, the wind itself, more discreet than we, loves to bluster and shift from corner to corner, and contents itself with its proper offices without desiring stability and solidity-qualities not its own.

The pure pleasures, as well as the pure displeasures, of the imagination, say some, are the greatest, as was expressed by the balance of Critolaiis. 'Tis no wonder; it makes them to its own liking, and cuts them out of the whole cloth; of this I every day see notable examples, and, peradventure, to be desired. But I, who am of a mixed and heavy condition, cannot snap so soon at this one simple object, but that I negligently suffer myself to be carried away with the present pleasures of the, general human law, intellectually sensible, and sensibly intellectual. The Cyrenaic philosophers will have it that as corporal pains, so corporal pleasures are more powerful, both as double and as more just.

There are some, as Aristotle says, who out of a savage kind of stupidity dislike them; and I know others who out of ambition do the same. Why do they not, moreover, forswear breathing? why do they not live of their own? why not refuse light, because it is gratuitous, and costs them neither invention nor exertion? Let Mars, Pallas, or Mercury afford them their light by which to see, instead of Venus, Ceres, and Bacchus. These boastful humours may counterfeit some content, for what will not fancy do? But as to wisdom, there is no touch of it. Will they not seek the quadrature of the circle, even when on their wives? I hate that we should be enjoined to have our minds in the clouds, when our bodies are at table; I would not have the mind nailed there, nor wallow there; I would have it take place there and sit, but not lie down.

Aristippus maintained nothing but the body, as if we had no soul; Zeno comprehended only the soul, as if we had no body: both of them faultily. Pythagoras, they say, followed a philosophy that was all contemplation, Socrates one that was all conduct and action; Plato found a mean betwixt the two; but they only say this for the sake of talking. The true temperament is found in Socrates; and, Plato is much more Socratic than Pythagoric, and it becomes him better.

When I dance, I dance; when I sleep, I sleep. Nay, when I walk alone in a beautiful orchard, if my thoughts are some part of the time taken up with external occurrences, I some part of the time call them back again to my walk, to the orchard, to the sweetness of that solitude, and to myself. Nature has mother-like observed this, that the actions she has enjoined us for our necessity should be also pleasurable to us; and she invites us to them, not only by reason, but also by appetite, and 'Tis injustice to infringe her laws.

When I see alike Caesar and Alexander, in the midst of his greatest business, so fully enjoy human and corporal pleasures, I do not say that he relaxed his mind: I say that he strengthened it, by vigour of courage subjecting those violent employments and laborious thoughts to the ordinary usage of life: wise, had he believed the last was his ordinary, the first his extraordinary, vocation.

We are great fools. "He has passed his life in idleness," say we: "I have done nothing to-day." What? have you not lived? that is not only the fundamental, but the most illustrious, of your occupations. "Had I been put to the management of great affairs, I should have made it seen what I could do." "Have you known how to meditate and manage your life? you have performed the greatest work of all." In order to shew and develop herself, nature needs only fortune; she equally manifests herself in all stages, and behind a curtain as well as without one. Have you known how to regulate your conduct, you have done a great deal more than he who has composed books. Have you known how to take repose, you have done more than he who has taken empires and cities.

The glorious masterpiece of man is to live to purpose; all other things: to reign, to lay up treasure, to build, are but little appendices and props. I take pleasure in seeing a general of an army, at the foot of a breach he is presently to assault, give himself up entire and free at dinner, to talk and be merry with his friends. And Brutus, when heaven and earth were conspired against him and the Roman liberty, stealing some hour of the night from his rounds to read and scan Polybius in all security. 'Tis for little souls, buried under the weight of affairs, not from them to know how clearly to disengage themselves, not to know how to lay them aside and take them up again:

O fortes, pejoraque passi
Mecum saepe viri! nunc vino pellite curas
Cras ingens iterabimus aequor.

["O brave spirits, who have often suffered sorrow with me, drink cares away; tomorrow we will embark once more on the vast sea." -Horace, Od., i. 7, 30.]

Whether it be in jest or earnest, that the theological and Sorbonnical wine, and their feasts, are turned into a proverb, I find it reasonable they should dine so much more commodiously and pleasantly, as they have profitably and seriously employed the morning in the exercise of their schools. The conscience of having well spent the other hours, is the just and savoury sauce of the dinner-table. The sages lived after that manner; and that inimitable emulation to virtue, which astonishes us both in the one and the other Cato, that humour of theirs, so severe as even to be importunate, gently submits itself and yields to the laws of the human condition, of Venus and Bacchus; according to the precepts of their sect, that require the perfect sage to be as expert and intelligent in the use of natural pleasures as in all other duties of life:

Cui cor sapiat, ei et sapiat palatus.

Relaxation and facility, methinks, wonderfully honour and best become a strong and generous soul. Epaminondas did not think that to take part, and that heartily, in songs and sports and dances with the young men of his city, were things that in any way derogated from the honour of his glorious victories and the perfect purity of manners that was in him. And amongst so many admirable actions of Scipio the grandfather, a person worthy to be reputed of a heavenly extraction, there is nothing that gives him a greater grace than to see him carelessly and childishly trifling at gathering and selecting cockle shells, and playing at quoits,

[This game, as the "Dictionnaire de Trevoux" describes it, is one wherein two persons contend which of them shall soonest pick up some object.]

amusing and tickling himself in representing by writing in comedies the meanest and most popular actions of men. And his head full of that wonderful enterprise of Hannibal and Africa, visiting the schools in Sicily, and attending philosophical lectures, to the extent of arming the blind envy of his enemies at Rome. Nor is there anything more remarkable in Socrates than that, old as he was, he found time to make himself taught dancing and playing upon instruments, and thought it time well spent.

This same man was seen in an ecstasy, standing upon his feet a whole day and a night together, in the presence of all the Grecian army, surprised and absorbed by some profound thought. He was the first, amongst so many valiant men of the army, to run to the relief of Alcibiades, oppressed with the enemy, to shield him with his own body, and disengage him from the crowd by absolute force of arms. It was he who, in the Delian battle, raised and saved Xenophon when fallen from his horse; and who, amongst all the people of Athens, enraged as he was at so unworthy a spectacle, first presented himself to rescue Theramenes, whom the thirty tyrants were leading to execution by their satellites, and desisted not from his bold enterprise but at the remonstrance of Theramenes himself, though he was only followed by two more in all.

He was seen, when courted by a beauty with whom he was in love, to maintain at need a severe abstinence. He was seen ever to go to the wars, and walk upon ice, with bare feet; to wear the same robe, winter and summer; to surpass all his companions in patience of bearing hardships, and to eat no more at a feast than at his own private dinner. He was seen, for seven-and-twenty years together, to endure hunger, poverty, the indocility of his children, and the nails of his wife, with the same countenance. And, in the end, calumny, tyranny, imprisonment, fetters, and poison. But was this man obliged to drink full bumpers by any rule of civility? he was also the man of the whole army with whom the advantage in drinking, remained. And he never refused to play at noisettes, nor to ride the hobby-horse with children, and it became him well; for all actions, says philosophy, equally become and equally honour a wise man. We have enough wherewithal to do it, and we ought never to be weary of presenting the image of this great man in all the patterns and forms of perfection. There are very few examples of life, full and pure; and we wrong our teaching every day, to propose to ourselves those that are weak and imperfect, scarce good for any one service, and rather pull us back; corrupters rather than correctors of manners.

The people deceive themselves; a man goes much more easily indeed by the ends, where the extremity serves for a bound, a stop, and guide, than by the middle way, large and open; and according to art, more than according to nature: but withal much less nobly and commendably. Greatness of soul consists not so much in mounting and in pressing forward, as in knowing how to govern and circumscribe itself; it takes everything for great, that is enough, and demonstrates itself in preferring moderate to eminent things. There is nothing so fine and legitimate as well and duly to play the man; nor science so arduous as well and naturally to know how to live this life; and of all the infirmities we have, 'Tis the most barbarous to despise our being.

Whoever has a mind to isolate his spirit, when the body is ill at ease, to preserve it from the contagion, let him by all means do it if he can: but otherwise let him on the contrary favour and assist it, and not refuse to participate of its natural pleasures with a conjugal complacency, bringing to it, if it be the wiser, moderation, lest by indiscretion they should get confounded with displeasure. Intemperance is the pest of pleasure; and temperance is not its scourge, but rather its seasoning. Euxodus, who therein established the sovereign good, and his companions, who set so high a value upon it, tasted it in its most charming sweetness, by the means of temperance, which in them was singular and exemplary.

I enjoin my soul to look upon pain and pleasure with an eye equally regulated:

and equally firm; but the one gaily and the other severely, and so far as it is able, to be careful to extinguish the one as to extend the other. The judging rightly of good brings along with it the judging soundly of evil: pain has something of the inevitable in its tender beginnings, and pleasure something of the evitable in its excessive end. Plato couples them together, and wills that it should be equally the office of fortitude to fight against pain, and against the immoderate and charming blandishments of pleasure: they are two fountains, from which whoever draws, when and as much as he needs, whether city, man, or beast, is very fortunate. The first is to be taken medicinally and upon necessity, and more scantily; the other for thirst, but not to, drunkenness. Pain, pleasure, love and hatred are the first things that a child is sensible of: if, when reason comes, they apply it to themselves, that is virtue.

I have a special vocabulary of my own; I "pass away time," when it is ill and uneasy, but when 'Tis good I do not pass it away: "I taste it over again and adhere to it"; one must run over the ill and settle upon the good. This ordinary phrase of pastime, and passing away the time, represents the usage of those wise sort of people who think they cannot do better with their lives than to let them run out and slide away, pass them over, and baulk them, and, as much as they can, ignore them and shun them as a thing of troublesome and contemptible quality: but I know it to be another kind of thing, and find it both valuable and commodious, even in its latest decay, wherein I now enjoy it; and nature has delivered it into our hands in such and so favourable circumstances that we have only ourselves to blame if it be troublesome to us, or escapes us unprofitably:

Nevertheless I compose myself to lose mine without regret; but withal as a thing that is perishable by its condition, not that it molests or annoys me. Nor does it properly well become any not to be displeased when they die, excepting such as are pleased to live. There is good husbandry in enjoying it: I enjoy it double to what others do; for the measure of its fruition depends upon our more or less application to it. Chiefly that I perceive mine to be so short in time, I desire to extend it in weight; I will stop the promptitude of its flight by the promptitude of my grasp; and by the vigour of using it compensate the speed of its running away. In proportion as the possession of life is more short, I must make it so much deeper and fuller.

Others feel the pleasure of content and prosperity; I feel it too, as well as they, but not as it passes and slips by; one should study, taste, and ruminate upon it to render condign thanks to Him who grants it to us. They enjoy the other pleasures as they do that of sleep, without knowing it. To the end that even sleep itself should not so stupidly escape from me, I have formerly caused myself to be disturbed in my sleep, so that I might the better and more sensibly relish and taste it. I ponder with myself of content; I do not skim over, but sound it; and I bend my reason, now grown perverse and peevish, to entertain it. Do I find myself in any calm composedness? is there any pleasure that tickles me? I do not suffer it to dally with my senses only; I associate my soul to it too: not there to engage itself, but therein to take delight; not there to lose itself, but to be present there; and I employ it, on its part, to view itself in this prosperous state, to weigh and appreciate its happiness and to amplify it. It reckons how much it stands indebted to God that its conscience and the intestine passions are in repose; that it has the body in its natural disposition, orderly and competently enjoying the soft and soothing functions by which He, of His grace is pleased to compensate the sufferings wherewith His justice at His good pleasure chastises us. It reflects how great a benefit it is to be so protected, that which way soever it turns its eye the heavens are calm around it. No desire, no fear, no doubt, troubles the air; no difficulty, past, present, or to, come, that its imagination may not pass over without offence.

This consideration takes great lustre from the comparison of different conditions. So it is that I present to my thought, in a thousand aspects, those whom fortune or their own error carries away and torments. And, again, those who, more like to me, so negligently and incuriously receive their good fortune. Those are folks who spend their time indeed; they pass over the present and that which they possess, to wait on hope, and for shadows and vain images which fancy puts before them:

which hasten and prolong their flight, according as they are pursued. The fruit and end of their pursuit is to pursue; as Alexander said, that the end of his labour was to labour:

Nil actum credens, cum quid superesset agendum.
["Thinking nothing done, if anything remained to be done. -"Lucan, ii. 657.]

For my part then, I love life and cultivate it, such as it has pleased God to bestow it upon us. I do not desire it should be without the necessity of eating and drinking; and I should think it a not less excusable failing to wish it had been twice as long;

nor that we should support ourselves by putting only a little of that drug into our mouths, by which Epimenides took away his appetite and kept himself alive; nor that we should stupidly beget children with our fingers or heels, but rather; with reverence be it spoken, that we might voluptuously beget them with our fingers and heels; nor that the body should be without desire and without titillation. These are ungrateful and wicked complaints. I accept kindly, and with gratitude, what nature has done for me; am well pleased with it, and proud of it. A man does wrong to that great and omnipotent giver to refuse, annul, or disfigure his gift: all goodness himself, he has made everything good:

Of philosophical opinions, I preferably embrace those that are most solid, that is to say, the most human and most our own: my discourse is, suitable to my manners, low and humble: philosophy plays the child, to my thinking, when it puts itself upon its Ergos to preach to us that 'Tis a barbarous alliance to marry the divine with the earthly, the reasonable with the unreasonable, the severe with the indulgent, the honest with the dishonest. That pleasure is a brutish quality, unworthy to be tasted by a wise man; that the sole pleasure he extracts from the enjoyment of a fair young wife is a pleasure of his conscience to perform an action according to order, as to put on his boots for a profitable journey. Oh, that its followers had no more right, nor nerves, nor vigour in getting their wives' maidenheads than in its lesson.

This is not what Socrates says, who is its master and ours: he values, as he ought, bodily pleasure; but he prefers that of the mind as having more force, constancy, facility, variety, and dignity. This, according to him, goes by no means alone-he is not so fantastic-but only it goes first; temperance with him is the moderatrix, not the adversary of pleasure. Nature is a gentle guide, but not more sweet and gentle than prudent and just.

I hunt after her foot throughout: we have confounded it with artificial traces; and that academic and peripatetic good, which is "to live according to it," becomes on this account hard to limit and explain; and that of the Stoics, neighbour to it, which is "to consent to nature." Is it not an error to esteem any actions less worthy, because they are necessary? And yet they will not take it out of my head, that it is not a very convenient marriage of pleasure with necessity, with which, says an ancient, the gods always conspire. To what end do we dismember by divorce a building united by so close and brotherly a correspondence? Let us, on the contrary, confirm it by mutual offices; let the mind rouse and quicken the heaviness of the body, and the body stay and fix the levity of the soul:

In this present that God has made us, there is nothing unworthy our care; we stand accountable for it even to a hair; and is it not a commission to man, to conduct man according to his condition; 'Tis express, plain, and the very principal one, and the Creator has seriously and strictly prescribed it to us. Authority has power only to work in regard to matters of common judgment, and is of more weight in a foreign language; therefore let us again charge at it in this place:

To make this apparent, ask any one, some day, to tell you what whimsies and imaginations he put into his pate, upon the account of which he diverted his thoughts from a good meal, and regrets the time he spends in eating; you will find there is nothing so insipid in all the dishes at your table as this wise meditation of his (for the most part we had better sleep than wake to the purpose we wake); and that his discourses and notions are not worth the worst mess there. Though they were the ecstasies of Archimedes himself, what then? I do not here speak of, nor mix with the rabble of us ordinary men, and the vanity of the thoughts and desires that divert us, those venerable souls, elevated by the ardour of devotion and religion, to a constant and conscientious meditation of divine things, who, by the energy of vivid and vehement hope, prepossessing the use of the eternal nourishment, the final aim and last step of Christian desires, the sole constant, and incorruptible pleasure, disdain to apply themselves to our necessitous, fluid, and ambiguous conveniences, and easily resign to the body the care and use of sensual and temporal pasture; 'Tis a privileged study. Between ourselves, I have ever observed supercelestial opinions and subterranean manners to be of singular accord.

Aesop, that great man, saw his master piss as he walked: "What then," said he, "must we drop as we run?" Let us manage our time; there yet remains a great deal idle and ill employed. The mind has not willingly other hours enough wherein to do its business, without disassociating itself from the body, in that little space it must have for its necessity.

They would put themselves out of themselves, and escape from being men. It is folly; instead of transforming themselves into angels, they transform themselves into beasts; instead of elevating, they lay themselves lower. These transcendental humours affright me, like high and inaccessible places; and nothing is hard for me to digest in the life of Socrates but his ecstasies and communication with demons; nothing so human in Plato as that for which they say he was called divine; and of our sciences, those seem to be the most terrestrial and low that are highest mounted; and I find nothing so humble and mortal in the life of Alexander as his fancies about his immortalisation. Philotas pleasantly quipped him in his answer; he congratulated him by letter concerning the oracle of Jupiter Ammon, which had placed him amongst the gods: "Upon thy account I am glad of it, but the men are to be pitied who are to live with a man, and to obey him, who exceeds and is not contented with the measure of a man:"

The pretty inscription wherewith the Athenians honoured the entry of Pompey into their city is conformable to my sense: "By so much thou art a god, as thou confessest thee a man." 'Tis an absolute and, as it were, a divine perfection, for a man to know how loyally to enjoy his being. We seek other conditions, by reason we do not understand the use of our own; and go out of ourselves, because we know not how there to reside. 'Tis to much purpose to go upon stilts, for, when upon stilts, we must yet walk with our legs; and when seated upon the most elevated throne in the world, we are but seated upon our breech.

The fairest lives, in my opinion, are those which regularly accommodate themselves to the common and human model without miracle, without extravagance. Old age stands a little in need of a more gentle treatment. Let us recommend that to God, the protector of health and wisdom, but let it be gay and sociable:

Frui paratis et valido mihi
Latoe, dones, et precor, integra
Cum mente; nec turpem senectam
Degere, nec Cithara carentem.

["Grant it to me, Apollo, that I may enjoy my possessions in good health; let me be sound in mind; let me not lead a dishonourable old age, nor want the cittern."-Horace, Od., i. 31, 17.]

Or:

["Grant it to me, Apollo, that I may enjoy what I have in good health; let me be sound in body and mind; let me live in honour when old, nor let music be wanting."]

Montaigne, Michel de. "Of experience." Trans. Charles Cotton. 1588. Quotidiana. Ed. Patrick Madden. 13 Sep 2006. 04 Jul 2023 <http://essays.quotidiana.org/montaigne/experience/>.

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There is no desire more natural than that of knowledge. We try all ways that can lead us to it; where reason is wanting, we therein employ experience, which is a means much more weak and cheap; but truth is so great a thing that we ought not to disdain any mediation that will guide us to it.

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Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future is a book by philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, first published in 1886.

It draws on and expands the ideas of his previous work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, but with a more critical and polemical approach.

In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche accuses past philosophers of lacking critical sense and blindly accepting dogmatic premises in their consideration of morality. Specifically, he accuses them of founding grand metaphysical systems upon the faith that the good man is the opposite of the evil man, rather than just a different expression of the same basic impulses that find more direct expression in the evil man. The work moves into the realm "beyond good and evil" in the sense of leaving behind the traditional morality which Nietzsche subjects to a destructive critique in favour of what he regards as an affirmative approach that fearlessly confronts the perspectival nature of knowledge and the perilous condition of the modern individual.

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Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future is a book by philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, first published in 1886. It draws on and expands the ideas of his previous work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, but with a more critical and polemical approach. In Beyond Good a...

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It is not without good reason said "that he who has not a good memory should never take upon him the trade of lying." I know very well that the grammarians-[Nigidius, Aulus Gellius, xi. ii; Nonius, v.

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Minimalist Magic -- The Work of Set Designer Katrin Brack | Arts.21

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Katrin Brack's unusual set designs are both pared down and extravagant at the same time. Theatergoers can find themselves confronted by walls of fog, showers of confetti or flurries of snow.She is one of the most sought-after designers of her kind.

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Welton, M. ‘Feeling your way in the dark‘, Feeling Theatre 

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Welton, M. ‘Feeling your way in the dark‘, Feeling Theatre 

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http://lib.leeds.ac.uk/record=b3214106~S5
Section about the clock only going by 20 minutes changing the illusion of time.

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15/02/2017 First look at Stage @ Leeds in Blackout

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15/02/2017 First look at Stage @ Leeds in Blackout

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During this session we went over to the stage space and tried to black it out as much as possible and turn off as many lights as we could to create minimal sound. We discussed with the tech team about creating light boxes for both the sound and light desks and the fire exit signs to enable us to achieve a full blackout of the space.

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This was my first production meeting. During it points were raised about acquiring a four speaker system which would could store within the rehearsal room allowing us to have a short period for set up on Friday sessions that we could experiment with making 360 sounds around the room with.

We were set the task to create some base ideas/designs for the broader space we would be using.
We decided to not narrow the space down by goingahead with the boxes idea we had discussed, it was too close to projects that have already been done, the waiting room and narrows down the largeness of the space, which we felt would be better to use all of this and make more of an illusion of a smaller space than a physical representation.

We arranged plans to enter the space and check its capabilities for being blacked out, these were set to take place on Wednesday 15th Feb.
We discussed the possibility for sharp lights to create spaces within the space and the possibility of handheld lights for the audience.

We discovered the sound desk cannot be moved by the lighting desk can be and we discussed the possibility of this being put in the control room with cameras so the technicians can see within the space.

We discussed the possibility to have fairy lights wrapped around us, this was agreed upon but only if they are battery operated.

When we are in the room we are able to black it out but we cannot leave the space like that constantly because of health and safety regulations, that room is a fire exit out of the building.

Audio and sound training for recordings etc is available, we can book time with Jess to do this.

We were told to get in contact with the Backstage Society to contact someone about lights, sound and general technician opportunities.

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Using four Super-8mm cameras, a man in a white room replicates himself. He and his clones have until the cartridges in the cameras run out (3 minutes) before they disappear. http://www.naren.co.uk/

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Tim Thomas (Will Smith), while carelessly sending a text message while driving, veers across the center line into oncoming traffic and causes a multi-car crash in which seven people die: six strangers and his fiancée, Sarah Jenson (Robinne Lee).

Two years later, in a conscious bid for atonement, unable to live with what he did, Tim sets out to save the lives of seven good people by donating his own vital organs, a process that will be completed after his planned suicide. A year after the crash, having quit his job as an aeronautical engineer, Tim donates a lung lobe to his brother Ben (Michael Ealy), an IRS field agent. He steals his brother's federal IRS identification badge and credentials, puts his picture over Ben's, identifies himself by his brother's name, and uses Ben's privileges to check out the financial backgrounds of further potential candidates for his donations. In each case he "interviews" them first to determine if they are "good" people.

In one case, the director of a hospice nursing home facility seeks a six-month extension on his back taxes. Tim is unsure of the man's ethics, because he drives a BMW yet claims to be insolvent. To resolve the issue, Tim passionately asks a resident patient, an elderly bedridden woman, to tell him whether he is a "good man," only to discover that the man is punishing the woman for not eating by not allowing the nurses to bathe her.

Six months later, Tim donates part of his liver to a Child Protective Services social worker named Holly (Judyann Elder). He then finds George (Bill Smitrovich), a junior hockey coach and donates a kidney to him. He then donates bone marrow to a young boy named Nicholas (Quintin Kelley), opting to have no anesthesia during the procedure, an evident consequence of his desire for atonement. In each case he does not tell the people why he's doing what he's doing, despite being repeatedly asked.

Two weeks before he dies, he contacts Holly and asks if she knows anyone "in the system" who needs and deserves help but is too proud to ask for it. Holly suggests Connie Tepos (Elpidia Carrillo), who lives with her two kids and an abusive boyfriend, but can't afford to leave. When "Ben" arrives to "interview" her under the guise of dealing with the IRS, Connie is embarrassed and humiliated that he knows what's been going on. She defends her boyfriend, is offended by Tim's suggestion that she should leave with her kids, and kicks him out of her house. In the meantime, Tim moves out of his house and into a local motel, taking with him his pet box jellyfishdecidedly the most venomous creature on earth, with its sting causing death in three to five minutes. That night, after being beaten by her boyfriend again, Connie contacts Tim. He meets her, tells her not to be weak, and gives her the keys and directions to his beach house. She takes her two children and they move into the house. Then she reads a letter from Tim which includes the deed to the house, again giving no explanation, and asking for her to (1) respect his wishes, (2) not try to contact him, (3) not tell anyone how she got the house, and (4) "live life abundantly."

Tim's sixth candidate is Ezra Turner (Woody Harrelson), a blind telemarketer for a meat company, who plays the piano. Tim had called Ezra and harassed him at work weeks earlier, to see if he was quick to anger or was a "good" person. Ezra remains calm, humble, and teary-eyed, and later after observing him in a restaurant, Tim decides he is worthy.

Tim then contacts Emily Posa (Rosario Dawson), a self-employed and attractive wedding announcement/greeting card printer who has a congenital heart condition and rare blood type that has left her with only weeks to live. Tim "interviews" her at her home, again under the guise of an IRS investigation, and more or less stalks her at the hospital. But then he starts to spend time with her, walking her Great Dane called Duke, weeding her garden, and fixing her rare Heidelberg Windmill press. He visibly fights his affections for her, again seeking atonement for the death of his fiancée, but he slowly falls in love with her.

Ben finally tracks Tim down at Emily's house, demanding that he will return his IRS credentials. After a passionate sexual interlude with Emily, and with Ben waiting outside her house, Tim disappears out the back door, leaving her sleeping. He returns on foot to the motel, first stopping by the hospital to ask the doctor if there is any chance that Emily will improve. Discovering that her condition has worsened and that she will likely die before a donated organ becomes available, he decides "it's time."

Tim then fills the motel bathtub with ice water to preserve his vital organs, calls 9-1-1 emergency and reports his own suicide, climbs into the tub, and releases his box jellyfish into the water with him. The jellyfish wraps its tentacles around his arm, causing a quick but excruciatingly painful death.

At the hospital, his best childhood friend Dan (Barry Pepper), though distraught over promising to see Tim's final wishes through, acts as executor of Tim's living will to ensure that his organs are donated to Emily and Ezra. Ezra receives Tim's corneas, which correct his blindness, and Emily receives his heart.

Afterward, Ben finds letters from Tim that he is to give to each person explaining why he did what he did. This leaves Emily heartbroken. Emily finds Ezra (now a school teacher) at his kid's choir concert at a park and stops him as he passes by. Having never met before, Emily is fixated on Ezra's eyes, knowing they belonged to Tim. Emily begins to break down, which clues Ezra in to who she is. When he says, "You must be Emily," she breaks into tears and they share a heartfelt embrace out of mutual love and respect for Tim.

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Tim Thomas (Will Smith), while carelessly sending a text message while driving, veers across the center line into oncoming traffic and causes a multi-car crash in which seven people die: six strangers and his fiancée, Sarah Jenson (Robinne Lee).

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We have a hand in everything but also focus more on our individual elements

Jonny: Lighting designer (in contact with tech team stage@ Leeds)

Emily: Costume designer (in contact with Alanna)

Daisy: Sound designer (in contact with Jess)

Terri: Sourcing/Liaising (in contact with Sophie for money, set storage, delivery)

Luke: Scenographer (physically designing and creating) in contact with the tech team at stage @ Leeds

1. To work with the dramaturge in order to apply research into design elements of the production

2. To be responsible for physically, liaising, building, designing and placing the aesthetics of the piece

3. To aid the risk assessment in terms of the design elements

4. Learn the ins and outs of the space we are performing in

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We chose our roles, created the manifesto, separated into pairs and decided what our individual performances will be about then arranged rehearsal schedules for each of the days (Monday, Wednesday, Friday)

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During this session we began with a 5 minute meditation, we each either laid down flat or sat up and had Rebecka read out a meditation workshop she had pre-written

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Lamps, Lights and Lighting History: "Out of the Dark" 1954 EB Films 14min

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more at http://scitech.quickfound.net/tech/technology_news.html "Traces the history of illumination by artificial means from the stone lamp to incandescent lights." Public domain film from the Library of Congress Prelinger Archive, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and mild video noise reduction applied.

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Perhaps you're standing naked among a crowd of people who are all dressed and staring at you in derision or shock. Maybe you're on stage in a play whose plot is totally unknown to you. The other actors on stage are waiting, and the audience is beginning to murmur, and you have no idea at all what your next line is supposed to be. Another common scenario has you running down miles-long school building hallways, late for a crucial exam you must take, one for which you have never attended class or even opened the required text.

Although my theatrical experiences are very limited, I still have had the "What play is this I am in?" dream a few times, and, even several decades out of school, I occasionally still have the test panic dream of not being able to find the exam room or staring blankly at the blue book with no knowledge of the subject matter.

Having worked as an artist's model when I was in college many years ago inured me to the naked among a group of clothed people dream. I have really been there. It wasn't horrible. On the contrary, having all those eyes upon me while they made art was very flattering.

My own recurring, frightening dreamscape is New York City, where I have not lived for more than 50 years. I awaken distressed and upset, having spent what feels like hours walking the streets of the city, unable to remember the phone number or address of a relative I need to contact, being late for a critical appointment, or without my purse and no way to get wherever I am going.

Whenever I have a typical anxiety dream, I wake up and lie abed, assessing my real-time emotional landscape. What is going on in my life that is causing me distress? Usually, nothing of the magnitude of the dreamscape's anxiety, but the feeling must come from somewhere. If I seek it, I usually find something specific on which I can pin my feelings.

If your typical anxiety dream is the naked in public one, it is usually a reflection of feeling somehow exposed or ashamed in your real life. The unprepared stage actor scenario or the exam for which you're late and haven't studied often reflect a feeling of not being prepared for some actual, real-life event.

Trying to identify the feeling state is often a good way to interpret your dreams. Is the specific anxiety-feeling naked, trapped, exposed, unprepared-reflected in any way that is familiar to you? Are you dealing with it effectively? Reassuring yourself that you are taking steps to prepare yourself or manage a challenge at hand can allow you to start the day without that anxious dream hangover that often plagues those of us who don't quite remember our dreams, but must suffer an emotional fallout with no clear idea of what caused it.

Reciting your dream to a patient intimate while it's still fresh or perhaps writing it in a dream journal may help you figure out what's going on when you look at it later. Free-floating anxiety somehow feels worse, less handlable, than when you have attached it to a situation you can assure yourself you can handle.

Do you remember a song often sung around a campfire? It goes something like this: "I've told you my dream. You tell me yours."

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Perhaps you're standing naked among a crowd of people who are all dressed and staring at you in derision or shock. Maybe you're on stage in a play whose plot is totally unknown to you. The other actors on stage are waiting, and the audience is beginning to murmur, and you have no idea at all what your next line is supposed to be.

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False awakenings are a curious phenomenon for lucid dreamers and non-lucid dreamers alike.

They are essentially ultra vivid dreams in which you are convinced you have woken up in physical reality.

They are most likely to happen when you are excited about a big day ahead (or if you're a lucid dreamer).

Self-awareness determines how consciously "in tune" you are with your current reality. Lucid dreamers aim to be highly self-aware while awake - and while dreaming. But the modern world is so distracting, most people are not very self-aware at all.

And this comes into play in the paradox of a false awakening.

The dream of awakening is highly vivid, suggesting a high level of self-awareness. Yet many false awakenings go unrecognized. Assumed to be waking reality, there is absolutely no awareness that it's all a dream.

A false awakening may involve getting up, having breakfast, getting dressed, heading out for work... all the things you do every day on autopilot. It can all appear all too real and solid to warrant questioning its authenticity. Indeed, you will only appreciate how real a false awakening is when it happens to you - it reveals the remarkable capacity of the human brain to emulate reality.

Waking Up from False Awakenings

Eventually, you will start doing a more complex task in your dream that draws on part of the conscious brain that is still asleep. Maybe you look in the bathroom mirror, or attempt to read a signpost on your way to work. This exposes the illusory nature of the dream and BAM! You wake up.

Or perhaps not.

Some people report having multiple false awakenings in succession.

Doing the same things over and over, never knowing when they have truly woken up. They keep unconsciously rebooting the waking dream scenario... As uncanny as it sounds, if you have just had one false waking experience, you are much more likely to have another. The conditions are already ripe.

My Experiences

I've never had multiple false awakenings (as far as I can remember). So when they do occur, I rather enjoy them. Sometimes my false awakenings drag on for several minutes then I abruptly wake up. Other times I realize I'm dreaming and become lucid.

In one false awakening, I had the fortune of doing a reality check early on and tried to push my hand through the glass window of my bedroom. Yet my reality was so vivid, my brain refused to accept the possibility of it passing through. Instead, my hand bounced off the glass realistically!

I was dumbstruck. Being unable to rationalize what was happening, I clumsily explored my house, knowing that something was wrong but unable to define it. I was stuck in a limbo-like dream world.

Eventually I went into the kitchen and found my partner cooking a roast dinner at 7am.

Logic bomb!

I instantly became lucid and flew away.

How to Turn False Awakenings into Lucid Dreams

1. Reality Check on Waking - Perform a reality check when you wake up every day. This is will be your best chance of recognizing a false awakening as soon as it begins.

2. Use Your Alarm Clock - Whenever you look at the time, ask yourself "Am I dreaming?" Numbers and letters are notoriously hard to read in dreams because the language centers of the brain are largely shut down. So numbers or words are prone to changing or turning into unreadable symbols after a few seconds. Your alarm clock will expose this.

3. Look At Your Reflection - Since the first thing people do in the morning is go to the bathroom, this is an ideal reality check. Allow yourself a few seconds to examine your face, check that the reflection of the room is normal, and see if you can push your hand into the mirror itself.

4. Leave Notes For Yourself - Written reminders placed around the house (like door handles, light switches and banisters) will prompt you to do a reality check and reveal if you are dreaming. Be sure to acknowledge them every morning - don't ignore them.

5. Check During Breakfast - False awakenings can involve eating breakfast so the moment you taste food or drink in the morning, do a reality check. If you are dreaming, you will suddenly be able to taste the food you are eating with more intensity, which is a wonderful wake-up call!

Final Thoughts

If you learn the art of dream control , false awakenings cease to be something scary and start to seem like an awesome opportunity to have amazing lucid dreams!

And while false awakenings can be hard to spot, with practice you will become better at recognizing that curious feeling that something is not right with the world...

About the author

Rebecca Casale is a writer in Auckland, New Zealand. She founded World of Lucid Dreaming in 2008 to share her passion for conscious dreaming. Today, she runs the illustrated blog Science Me while working as a freelance science editor.

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False awakenings are a curious phenomenon for lucid dreamers and non-lucid dreamers alike. They are essentially ultra vivid dreams in which you are convinced you have woken up in physical reality. They are most likely to happen when you are excited about a big day ahead (or if you're a lucid dreamer).

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Sleep paralysis is a feeling of being conscious but unable to move. It occurs when a person passes between stages of wakefulness and sleep. During these transitions, you may be unable to move or speak for a few seconds up to a few minutes. Some people may also feel pressure or a sense of choking. Sleep paralysis may accompany other sleep disorders such as narcolepsy Narcolepsy is an overpowering need to sleep caused by a problem with the brain's ability to regulate sleep.

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The looming shadow of creativity is made up of madness, an abyss of depression, and anxiety. Many artists, especially painters, have been touched by this darkness, suffering mental and emotional disorders throughout their careers.

They lived in an unending nightmare, where the torment, confusion, and disorders were immortalized in the paintings. These inner demons became the protagonists of not only their art, but also their lives. While not everyone suffered hallucinations, bipolar disorders, schizophrenia or anxiety attacks, most of these artists in particular expressed in each brushstroke what their minds couldn't contain any longer.

In fact, some of these artists saw their illnesses as part of the source of inspiration that transformed their paintings into unmatched works of art. Edvard Munch shared this same belief, "My fear of life is necessary to me, as is my illness. Without anxiety and illness, I am a ship without a rudder. My art is grounded in reflections over being different from others. My sufferings are part of my self and my art. They are indistinguishable from me, and their destruction would destroy my art. I want to keep those sufferings." Healing these disquieted and unbalanced minds would mean the extinction of their success as artists.

The life of this genius was filled with contradictions and paradoxes. Rothko was an artist whose depression grew together with his fame, to the point that it led to his suicide. Despite his tragic death, Rothko was known from the start of his career as an expressionist and abstract artist without equal. Many pinpoint the start of his depression with his divorce and his second marriage instead of lifting him from this slump drove him deeper into depression.

The small group of untitled works known as Multiforms that he painted during 1947-1949 preceded the mature works for which he is highly lauded. Through color manipulation on a large scale, he would play with vibrant colors and high-keyed pigments, and as his career took off and rose higher and higher, his later works gravitate to a bottomless darkness. In his vast abstract works he began to detach from the art world and from life itself.

It would appear that this expressionist sought to silence, perhaps forever, the consequences of his psychological pathologies that at that moment had reached an important level. There was no turning back for Rothko and his paintings express every tragedy, exultation, ecstasy, and fatality. It was in the mid nineteen fifties that his paintings began to turn darker, and the presence of grey, blue, black, and brown were present in almost every single work. In this profound darkness, the works of this painter turned monochromatic, a final farewell from Rothko before taking his life.

Miró was known for suffering constant depression, which dragged him into a life of psychopathy, mood swings, and periods of successful productivity and irrevocable inactivity. The works of this painter are symbolic of his depression. He had a keen perception that allowed him to fragment reality and capture it within a painting. From early on in his career, he suffered crippling doubts and anxiety, and this was driven by his explosive temper. From a young age he experienced difficult situations that led to his extreme sadness and despair; for instance, his father forced him to abandon art and work in a drugstore.

The artistic stages of Miró are well defined. We can trace the moments where his creativity was bountiful, when he was able to paint up to 130 paintings in less than two years, and periods where we has left paralyzed by depression. It is impressive to see how Miró's work transmits his emotions, his paintings in many instances are imbued by an abyss of anguish.

Jackson Pollock made chaos an art form. An inveterate alcoholic and extraordinary artist, he died in a tragic car crash a few meters away from his home. He was a wonderful painter who used a technique no one had experimented with before until the mid nineteen forties. He turned the art world upside down by painting anti-traditional works that reflected his convoluted frame of mind. In every drip and slosh of paint he demonstrated the madness hidden within us all. The strange dripping technique Pollock employed transformed his paintings into strong statements. For him, the only way he could concentrate on his work was allowing the unconscious mind to take control of the body and paint on his behalf. Maybe this is why his style is strong and unpredictable, identical to the sort of life he led.

He had a story of anguish, depression, alcoholism, and uncontrollable urge to always act in a spontaneous way. Just as we never know where the last drop of paint will fall, his life was as equally unpredictable.

The experiments with color and different elements enabled this Postimpressionist to achieve fame. While on the surface he led a tranquil life with his wife and five children, also suffered extreme bouts of depression that led him to commit several attempts against his life. Rumors circulate around his disappointment on the Impressionist movement, and as a result, he sought new shapes and symbols that would give new meaning to his art. Fed up with the misery and lack of acknowledgement he received from the world, he decided to travel to Tahiti. There, besides painting, he was involved in a series of problem that led to his imprisonment. In 1903 he passed away due to syphilis, and his life was marked by alcohol, loneliness, and a drowning disappointment.

Few artists can showcase that many contradictions in their work like Degas. Highly dependent on his mother since his youth, her death affected him immensely. From an early age he decided to dedicate his life to art and was heavily influenced by other artists like Gustave Moreau.

This impressionist was also influenced to a greater extent by dance, a theme we see time and time again in his early works. As years passed, his work became more complex and influenced by a series of personal issues that haunted the artist, such as his family's economic turmoil, the death of his father, and the poor reputation he had garnered up till that moment.

Nothing was as traumatic for the artist as the progressive loss of sight that stopped him from completing many of his works. His paintings reflect an inner world and a distorted sense of reality. Some believe he suffered from schizophrenia, while others maintain he was subsumed in deep depression.

The main reason why Goya's work underwent so many changes is due to the mental disorder he suffered. While no official diagnosis was ever made, it is known that he suffered bouts of depression that were exteriorized in the mutations of his paintings.

Catastrophic events, black colors, dark ochres and reds, symbols of violence, unruly perspective, and deformed human figures are some of the elements that characterize Goya's work. He was a prisoner of depression, and as a result, he painted world renowned works, and he is lauded for his enigmatic figure.

showed the different stages of his madness through his segmented artistic styles. He began with complicated paintings filled with light, and the shapes in his paintings denote a childlike vision of the artist. Little by little, under the chokehold of depression, his paintings adopted monstrous figures that unleashed a psychological crisis the artist was never able to escape.

It is speculated that this expressionist artist suffered from schizophrenia, but in fact it was a depression fed by his introverted nature, alcoholism, and brush with death, as Edvard Munch witnessed the passing of his mother and sisters.
The most celebrated work of this Norwegian artist isThe Scream, from which we can extract the different feelings that plagued the mind of this artist. An uncontrollable melancholy, an unbearable weariness, and a despair fed by fear. Every pitfall was forever immortalized in his works and just as depression cast a grey shadow in his work, it would be a protagonist in his work.

This Dutch artist is one of the most highly coveted painters in the world, and his personal life was highly controversial, which positioned him as one of the most problematic painters. was manic-depressive, and his days were dominated by hallucinations, visions, and epileptic episodes. The latter would confuse him to such an extent he suffered from amnesia and a psychosis that impacted his creative capacity. The charm of this artist resided in the paintings he created while in the acute stages of his illness while he was staying in the mental health institute of Saint-Rémy.

The personal struggle of each of these artists continue to echo to this day through their artistic legacy. These paintings that today hang in the most celebrated art galleries and museums of the world, perpetuate the belief that artists are more susceptible to mental disorders. Madness it would seem, lives side by side with creativity.

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Can A Big Red Square Move Us Enough To Call It Art?

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Paintings That Unveil What Depression Feels Like - Cultura Colectiva

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The looming shadow of creativity is made up of madness, an abyss of depression, and anxiety. Many artists, especially painters, have been touched by this

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Anxiety is not a joke. But what if a light-hearted laugh could make things a little bit brighter? British illustrator Gemma Correll draws comics inspired by her own anxieties and depression. She thinks that the best way to deal with this condition is to try to "find humour in it."

"I honestly think that humour can be a saviour at times of distress or, if you just live with a constant level of anxiety and depression like I do," said Correll. "I do think that people should speak more freely about anxiety," she added. "I know that I would have felt a little better as an anxiety-ridden teenager if I knew that I wasn't completely alone in my fears."

More info: gemmacorrell.com | Facebook | Twitter | Tumblr (h/t: mashable)

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Artist Shows How It Feels To Live With Anxiety And Depression

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Anxiety is not a joke. But what if a light-hearted laugh could make things a little bit brighter? British illustrator Gemma Correll draws comics inspired by her own anxieties and depression. She thinks that the best way to deal with this condition is to try to find humour in it.

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The link between mental illnesses and city life has been seen for quite some time now, and if you are a city dweller, there's double a chance to develop psychosis, depression and a number of other anxiety disorders. Typically, the causes are social, such as inequality and isolation, but also physical - pollution and noise.

If you have a mental illness or know somebody who does, you might just understand, how difficult it's sometimes is to talk about it. Not only you can feel vulnerable when disclosing such sensitive information about yourself, but also you can be left misunderstood. It takes quite a lot of empathy for another person, to get into your shoes and understand how it feels so that they can help you.

Illustrator Toby Allen, decided to deal with explaining and conquering such mental illness types as depression, borderline personality, and anxiety disorder, decided to re-create them as cute monsters. Giving such intangible illnesses some substance, makes them appear more manageable as physical entities.

"The project originated from imagining my own anxieties as inner demons and finding it to be a cathartic and healing process to draw them," Allen told The Huffington Post. "It made them feel weaker, and I was able to look at my own anxiety comically with the help of these monster drawings."

More info: zestydoesthings.storenvy.com

"The project originated from imagining my own anxieties as monsters"

"It made them feel weaker and I was able to look at my own anxiety in a comical way"

"I hope it helps [people] see their illness in a different light, make it appear more manageable"

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Artist Suffering From Anxiety Illustrates Mental Illnesses As Real Monsters

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From anxiety to depression to body dismorphic disorder, Toby Allen intended by this artwork particularly to give these intangible mental illnesses some substance and make them appear more manageable as physical entities.

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It's 1954, and up-and-coming U.S. marshal Teddy Daniels is assigned to investigate the disappearance of a patient from Boston's Shutter Island Ashecliffe Hospital. He's been pushing for an assignment on the island for personal reasons, but before long he wonders whether he hasn't been brought there as part of a twisted plot by hospital doctors whose radical treatments range from unethical to illegal to downright sinister. Teddy's shrewd investigating skills soon provide a promising lead, but the hospital refuses him access to records he suspects would break the case wide open. As a hurricane cuts off communication with the mainland, more dangerous criminals "escape" in the confusion, and the puzzling, improbable clues multiply, Teddy begins to doubt everything - his memory, his partner, even his own sanity.

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Alcohol Research & Health. 2003;27(2): 186-96.

Aaron M. White, Ph.D.

Aaron M. White, Ph.D., is an assistant research professor in the Department of Psychiatry, Duke University Medical Center, Durham, North Carolina.

This work was supported by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism grant AA-12478 and the Institute for Medical Research at the VA Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina.

Alcohol primarily interferes with the ability to form new long-term memories, leaving intact previously established long-term memories and the ability to keep new information active in memory for brief periods. As the amount of alcohol consumed increases, so does the magnitude of the memory impairments. Large amounts of alcohol, particularly if consumed rapidly, can produce partial (i.e., fragmentary) or complete (i.e., en bloc) blackouts, which are periods of memory loss for events that transpired while a person was drinking. Blackouts are much more common among social drinkers-including college drinkers-than was previously assumed, and have been found to encompass events ranging from conversations to intercourse. Mechanisms underlying alcohol-induced memory impairments include disruption of activity in the hippocampus, a brain region that plays a central role in the formation of new auotbiographical memories. Key words: alcoholic blackout; memory interference; AOD (alcohol and other drug) intoxication; AODE (alcohol and other drug effects); AODR (alcohol and other drug related) mental disorder; long-term memory; short-term memory; state-dependent memory; BAC level; social AOD use; drug interaction; disease susceptibility; hippocampus; frontal cortex; neuroimaging; long-term potentiation
If recreational drugs were tools, alcohol would be a sledgehammer. Few cognitive functions or behaviors escape the impact of alcohol, a fact that has long been recognized in the literature. As Fleming stated nearly 70 years ago, "the striking and inescapable impression one gets from a review of acute alcoholic intoxication is of the almost infinite diversity of symptoms that may ensue from the action of this single toxic agent" (1935) (pp. 94-95). In addition to impairing balance, motor coordination, decisionmaking, and a litany of other functions, alcohol produces detectable memory impairments beginning after just one or two drinks. As the dose increases, so does the magnitude of the memory impairments. Under certain circumstances, alcohol can disrupt or completely block the ability to form memories for events that transpire while a person is intoxicated, a type of impairment known as a blackout. This article reviews what is currently known regarding the specific features of acute alcohol-induced memory dysfunction, particularly alcohol-induced blackouts, and the pharmacological mechanisms underlying them.

EFFECTS OF ALCOHOL ON MEMORY

To evaluate the effects of alcohol, or any other drug, on memory, one must first identify a model of memory formation and storage to use as a reference. One classic, often-cited model, initially proposed by Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968), posits that memory formation and storage take place in several stages, proceeding from sensory memory (which lasts up to a few seconds) to short-term memory (which lasts from seconds to minutes depending upon whether the information is rehearsed) to long-term storage. This model often is referred to as the modal model of memory, as it captures key elements of several other major models. Indeed, elements of this model still can be seen in virtually all models of memory formation.

In the modal model of memory, when one attends to sensory information, it is transferred from a sensory memory store to short-term memory. The likelihood that information will be transferred from short-term to long-term storage, or be encoded into long-term memory, was once thought to depend primarily on how long the person keeps the information active in short-term memory via rehearsal. Although rehearsal clearly influences the transfer of information into long-term storage, it is important to note that other factors, such as the depth of processing (i.e., the level of true understanding and manipulation of the information), attention, motivation, and arousal also play important roles (Craik and Lockhart 1972; Otten et al. 2001; Eichenbaum 2002). ¹ ( ¹ It is well beyond the scope of this review to assess the impact of alcohol on memory utilizing multiple perspectives on information processing and storage. For simplicity, this review will characterize the effects of alcohol on memory using a three-stage process of memory formation akin to the modal model. The interpretation of the effects of alcohol on memory likely would vary somewhat depending on the memory model one uses.)

Variability in the use of terms, particularly in operational definitions of short-term memory, makes it difficult to formulate a simple synopsis of the literature on alcohol-induced memory impairments. As Mello (1973) stated three decades ago with regard to the memory literature in general, "The inconsistent use of descriptive terms has been a recurrent source of confusion in the 'short-term' memory literature and 'short-term' memory has been variously defined as 5 seconds, 5 minutes, and 30 minutes" (p. 333). In spite of this inconsistency, several conclusions can be drawn from research on alcohol-induced memory impairments. One conclusion is that the impact of alcohol on the formation of new long-term "explicit" memories-that is, memories of facts (e.g., names and phone numbers) and events-is far greater than the drug's impact on the ability to recall previously established memories or to hold new information in short-term memory (Lister et al. 1991). (See figure 1 for a diagram depicting the stages of memory and where alcohol interferes with memory.) Intoxicated subjects are typically able to repeat new information immediately after its presentation and often can keep it active in short-term storage for up to a few minutes if they are not distracted (for an early review, see Ryback 1971), though this is not always the case (Nordby et al. 1999). Similarly, subjects normally are capable of retrieving information placed in long-term storage prior to acute intoxication. In contrast, alcohol impairs the ability to store information across delays longer than a few seconds if subjects are distracted between the time they are given the new information and the time they are tested. In a classic study, Parker and colleagues (1976) reported that when intoxicated subjects were presented with "paired associates"-for example, the letter "B" paired with the month "January"-they were impaired when asked to recall the items after delays of a minute or more. However, subjects could recall paired associates that they had learned before becoming intoxicated. More recently, Acheson and colleagues (1998) observed that intoxicated subjects could recall items on word lists immediately after the lists were presented but were impaired when asked to recall the items 20 minutes later.

Figure 1 A general model of memory formation, storage, and retrieval based on the modal model of memory originally proposed by Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968). Alcohol seems to influence most stages of the process to some degree, but its primary effect appears to be on the transfer of information from short-term to long-term storage. Intoxicated subjects are typically able to recall information immediately after it is presented and even keep it active in short-term memory for 1 minute or more if they are not distracted. Subjects also are normally able to recall long-term memories formed before they became intoxicated; however, beginning with just one or two drinks, subjects begin to show impairments in the ability to transfer information into long-term storage. Under some circumstances, alcohol can impact this process so severely that, once sober again, subjects are unable to recall critical elements of events, or even entire events, that occurred while they were intoxicated. These impairments are known as blackouts.

Ryback (1971) characterized the impact of alcohol on memory formation as a dose-related continuum, with minor impairments at one end and large impairments at the other, all impairments representing the same fundamental deficit in the ability to transfer new information from short-term to long-term storage. When doses of alcohol are small to moderate (producing blood alcohol concentrations [BACs] below 0.15 percent), memory impairments tend to be small to moderate as well. At these levels, alcohol produces what Ryback (1971) referred to as cocktail party memory deficits, lapses in memory that people might experience after having a few drinks at a cocktail party, often manifested as problems remembering what another person said or where they were in conversation. Several studies have revealed that alcohol at such levels causes difficulty forming memories for items on word lists or learning to recognize new faces (Westrick et al. 1988; Mintzer and Griffiths 2002). As the dose increases, the resulting memory impairments can become much more profound, sometimes culminating in blackouts-periods for which a person is unable to remember critical elements of events, or even entire events, that occurred while he or she was intoxicated.

Blackouts represent episodes of amnesia, during which subjects are capable of participating even in salient, emotionally charged events-as well as more mundane events-that they later cannot remember (Goodwin 1995). Like milder alcohol-induced memory impairments, these periods of amnesia are primarily "anterograde," meaning that alcohol impairs the ability to form new memories while the person is intoxicated, but does not typically erase memories formed before intoxication. Formal research into the nature of alcohol-induced blackouts began in the 1940s with the work of E.M. Jellinek (1946). Jellinek's initial characterization of blackouts was based on data collected from a survey of Alcoholics Anonymous members. Noting that recovering alcoholics frequently reported having experienced alcohol-induced amnesia while they were drinking, Jellinek concluded that the occurrence of blackouts is a powerful indicator of alcoholism.

In 1969, Goodwin and colleagues published two of the most influential studies in the literature on blackouts (Goodwin et al. 1969 a,b). Based on interviews with 100 hospitalized alcoholics, 64 of whom had a history of blackouts, the authors posited the existence of two qualitatively different types of blackouts: en bloc and fragmentary blackouts. People experiencing en bloc blackouts are unable to recall any details whatsoever from events that occurred while they were intoxicated, despite all efforts by the drinkers or others to cue recall. Referring back to our general model of memory formation, it is as if the process of transferring information from short-term to long-term storage has been completely blocked. En bloc memory impairments tend to have a distinct onset. It is usually less clear when these blackouts end because people typically fall asleep before they are over. Interestingly, people appear able to keep information active in short-term memory for at least a few seconds. As a result, they can often carry on conversations, drive automobiles, and engage in other complicated behaviors. Information pertaining to these events is simply not transferred into long-term storage. Ryback (1970) wrote that intoxicated subjects in one of his studies "could carry on conversations during the amnesic state, but could not remember what they said or did 5 minutes earlier. Their immediate and remote memory were intact" (p. 1003). Similarly, in their study of memory impairments in intoxicated alcoholics, Goodwin and colleagues (1970) reported that subjects who experienced blackouts for testing sessions showed intact memory for up to 2 minutes while the sessions were taking place.

Unlike en bloc blackouts, fragmentary blackouts involve partial blocking of memory formation for events that occurred while the person was intoxicated. Goodwin and colleagues (1969 a) reported that subjects experiencing fragmentary blackouts often become aware that they are missing pieces of events only after being reminded that the events occurred. Interestingly, these reminders trigger at least some recall of the initially missing information. Research suggests that fragmentary blackouts are far more common than those of the en bloc variety (White et al. 2004; Hartzler and Fromme 2003 b; Goodwin et al. 1969 b).

Blackouts: State-Dependent Memory Formation?

Blood Alcohol Concentrations and Blackouts

Drinking large quantities of alcohol often precedes blackouts, but several other factors also appear to play important roles in causing such episodes of memory loss. As Goodwin and colleagues (1969 a) stated with regard to subjects in one of their studies, "Although blackouts almost always were associated with heavy drinking, this alone seemed insufficient to produce one. On many other occasions, subjects said they had drunk as much or more without memory loss" (p. 195). Among the factors that preceded blackouts were gulping drinks and drinking on an empty stomach, each of which leads to a rapid rise in BAC.

Subsequent research provided additional evidence suggesting a link between blackouts and rapidly rising BACs. Goodwin and colleagues (1970) examined the impact of acute alcohol exposure on memory formation in a laboratory setting. The author recruited 10 male subjects for the project, all but one through the unemployment office in St. Louis, Missouri. Most subjects met diagnostic criteria for alcoholism and half had a history of frequent blackouts. The men were asked to consume roughly 16 to 18 ounces of 86-proof bourbon in approximately 4 hours. Beginning 1 hour after subjects began drinking, memory was tested by presenting subjects with several different stimuli, including a series of children's toys and scenes from erotic films. Subjects were asked to recall details regarding these stimuli 2 minutes, 30 minutes, and 24 hours after the stimuli were shown. Half of the subjects reported no recall for the stimuli or their presentation 30 minutes and 24 hours after the events, though most seemed to recall the stimuli 2 minutes after presentation. Lack of recall for the events 24 hours later, while sober, represents clear experimental evidence for the occurrence of blackouts. The fact that subjects could remember aspects of the events 2 minutes after they occurred but not 30 minutes or 24 hours afterward provides compelling evidence that the blackouts stemmed from an inability to transfer information from short-term to long-term storage. For all but one subject in the blackout group, memory impairments began during the first few hours of drinking, when BAC levels were still rising. The average peak BAC in this group, which was roughly 0.28 percent, occurred approximately 2.5 hours after the onset of drinking.

In a similar study, Ryback (1970) examined the impact of alcohol on memory in seven hospitalized alcoholics given access to alcohol over the course of several days. All subjects were White males between the ages of 31 and 44. Blackouts occurred in five of the seven subjects, as evidenced by an inability to recall salient events that occurred while drinking the day before (e.g., one subject could not recall preparing to hit another over the head with a chair). Estimates of BAC levels during blackout periods suggested that they often began at levels around 0.20 percent and as low as 0.14 percent. The duration of blackouts ranged from 9 hours to 3 days. Based on his observations, Ryback concluded that a key predictor of blackouts was the rate at which subjects consumed their drinks. He stated, "It is important to note that all the blackout periods occurred after a rapid rise in blood alcohol level" (p. 622). The two subjects who did not black out, despite becoming extremely intoxicated, experienced slow increases in blood alcohol levels.

Most of the research conducted on blackouts during the past 50 years has involved surveys, interviews, and direct observation of middle-aged, primarily male alcoholics, many of whom were hospitalized. Researchers have largely ignored the occurrence of blackouts among young social drinkers, so the idea that blackouts are an unlikely consequence of heavy drinking in nonalcoholics has remained deeply entrenched in both the scientific and popular cultures. Yet there is clear evidence that blackouts do occur among social drinkers. Knight and colleagues (1999) observed that 35 percent of trainees in a large pediatric residency program had experienced at least one blackout. Similarly, Goodwin (1995) reported that 33 percent of the first-year medical students he interviewed acknowledged having had at least one blackout. "They were inexperienced," he wrote. "They drank too much too quickly, their blood levels rose extremely quickly, and they experienced amnesia" (p. 315). In a study of 2,076 Finnish males, Poikolainen (1982) found that 35 percent of all males surveyed had had at least one blackout in the year before the survey.

As might be expected given the excessive drinking habits of many college students (Wechsler et al. 2002), this population commonly experiences blackouts. White and colleagues (2002 c) recently surveyed 772 undergraduates regarding their experiences with blackouts. Respondents who answered yes to the question "Have you ever awoken after a night of drinking not able to remember things that you did or places that you went?" were considered to have experienced blackouts. Fifty-one percent of the students who had ever consumed alcohol reported blacking out at some point in their lives, and 40 percent reported experiencing a blackout in the year before the survey. Of those who had consumed alcohol during the 2 weeks before the survey, 9.4 percent reported blacking out during this period. Students in the study reported that they later learned that they had participated in a wide range of events they did not remember, including such significant activities as vandalism, unprotected intercourse, driving an automobile, and spending money.

During the 2 weeks preceding the survey, an equal percentage of males and females experienced blackouts, despite the fact that males drank significantly more often and more heavily than females. This outcome suggests that at any given level of alcohol consumption, females-a group infrequently studied in the literature on blackouts-are at greater risk than males for experiencing blackouts. The greater tendency of females to black out likely arises, in part, from well-known gender differences in physiological factors that affect alcohol distribution and metabolism, such as body weight, proportion of body fat, and levels of key enzymes. There also is some evidence that females are more susceptible than males to milder forms of alcohol-induced memory impairments, even when given comparable doses of alcohol (Mumenthaler et al. 1999).

In a subsequent study, White and colleagues (2004) interviewed 50 undergraduate students, all of whom had experienced at least one blackout, to gather more information about the factors related to blackouts. As in the previous study, students reported engaging in a range of risky behaviors during blackouts, including sexual activity with both acquaintances and strangers, vandalism, getting into arguments and fights, and others. During the night of their most recent blackout, most students drank either liquor alone or in combination with beer. Only 1 student out of 50 reported that the most recent blackout occurred after drinking beer alone. On average, students estimated that they consumed roughly 11.5 drinks before the onset of the blackout. Males reported drinking significantly more than females, but they did so over a significantly longer period of time. As a result, estimated peak BACs during the night of the last blackout were similar for males (0.30 percent) and females (0.35 percent). As Goodwin observed in his work with alcoholics (1969 b), fragmentary blackouts occurred far more often than en bloc blackouts, with four out of five students indicating that they eventually recalled bits and pieces of the events. Roughly half of all students (52 percent) indicated that their first full memory after the onset of the blackout was of waking up in the morning, often in an unfamiliar location. Many students, more females (59 percent) than males (25 percent), were frightened by their last blackout and changed their drinking habits as a result.

Use of Other Drugs During Blackouts

Alcohol interacts with several other drugs, many of which are capable of producing amnesia on their own. For instance, diazepam (Valium ®) and flunitrazepam (Rohypnol) are benzodiazepine sedatives that can produce severe memory impairments at high doses (White et al. 1997; Saum and Inciardia 1997). Alcohol enhances the effects of benzodiazepines (for a review, see Silvers et al. 2003). Thus, combining these compounds with alcohol could dramatically increase the likelihood of experiencing memory impairments. Similarly, the combination of alcohol and THC, the primary psychoactive compound in marijuana, produces greater memory impairments than when either drug is given alone (Ciccocioppo et al. 2002). Given that many college students use other drugs in combination with alcohol (O'Malley and Johnston 2002), some of the blackouts reported by students may arise from polysubstance use rather than from alcohol alone. Indeed, based on interviews with 136 heavy-drinking young adults (mean age 22), Hartzler and Fromme (2003 b) concluded that en bloc blackouts often arise from the combined use of alcohol and other drugs. White and colleagues (2004) observed that, among 50 undergraduate students with a history of blackouts, only 3 students reported using other drugs during the night of their most recent blackout, and marijuana was the drug in each case.

Are Some People More Likely Than Others to Experience Blackouts?

In classic studies of hospitalized alcoholics by Goodwin and colleagues (1969 a,b), 36 out of the 100 patients interviewed indicated that they had never experienced a blackout. In some ways, the patients who did not experience blackouts are as interesting as the patients who did. What was it about these 36 patients that kept them from blacking out, despite the fact that their alcoholism was so severe that it required hospitalization? Although they may actually have experienced blackouts but simply were unaware of them, there may have been something fundamentally different about these patients that diminished their likelihood of experiencing memory impairments while drinking.

The argument for an inherent vulnerability to alcohol-induced memory impairments, including blackouts, is strengthened by two recent studies. In an impressive longitudinal study, Baer and colleagues (2003) examined the drinking habits of pregnant women in 1974 and 1975, and then studied alcohol use and related problems in their offspring at seven different time points during the following 21 years. These authors observed that prenatal alcohol exposure was associated with increased rates of experiencing alcohol-related consequences, including blackouts, even after controlling for the offsprings' general drinking habits. In addition, a recent report by Nelson and colleagues (2004) suggests that there might actually be a genetic contribution to the susceptibility to blackouts, indicating that some people simply are built in a way that makes them more vulnerable to alcohol-induced amnesia.

As discussed in the section below on the potential brain mechanisms underlying alcohol-induced amnesia, it is easy to imagine that the impact of alcohol on brain circuitry could vary from person to person, rendering some people more sensitive than others to the memory-impairing effects of the drug.

HOW DOES ALCOHOL IMPAIR MEMORY?

During the first half of the 20th century, two theoretical hurdles hampered progress toward an understanding of the mechanisms underlying the effects of alcohol on memory. More recent research has cleared away these hurdles, allowing for tremendous gains in the area during the past 50 years.

The first hurdle concerned scientists' understanding of the functional neuroanatomy of memory. In the 1950s, following observations of an amnesic patient known as H.M., it became clear that different brain regions are involved in the formation, storage, and retrieval of different types of memory. In 1953, large portions of H.M.'s medial temporal lobes, including most of his hippocampus, were removed in an effort to control intractable seizures (Scoville and Milner 1957). Although the frequency and severity of H.M.'s seizures were significantly reduced by the surgery, it soon became clear that H.M. suffered from a dramatic syndrome of memory impairments. He still was able to learn basic motor skills, keep information active in short-term memory for a few seconds or more if left undistracted, and remember episodes of his life from long ago, but he was unable to form new long-term memories for facts and events. The pattern of H.M.'s impairments also forced a re-examination of models of long-term memory storage. Specifically, although H.M. was able to retrieve long-term memories formed roughly a year or more before his surgery, he could not recall events that transpired within the year preceding his surgery. This strongly suggests that the transfer of information into long-term storage actually takes place over several years, with the hippocampus being necessary for its retrieval for the first year or so.

Subsequent research with other patients confirmed that the hippocampus, an irregularly shaped structure deep in the forebrain, is critically involved in the formation of memories for events (see figure 2 for a depiction of the brain, with the hippocampus and other relevant structures highlighted). Patient R.B. lost a significant amount of blood as a result of heart surgery. He survived but showed memory impairments similar to those exhibited by H.M. Upon his death, histology revealed that the loss of blood to R.B.'s brain damaged a small region of the hippocampus called hippocampal area CA1, which contains neurons known as pyramidal cells because of the triangular shape of their cell bodies (Zola-Morgan et al. 1986). Hippocampal CA1 pyramidal cells assist the hippocampus in communicating with other areas of the brain. The hippocampus receives information from a wide variety of brain regions, many of them located in the tissue, called the neocortex, that blankets the brain and surrounds other brain structures. (Neocortex literally means "new bark" or "new covering." When one looks at a picture of the human brain, most of what is visible is neocortex.) The hippocampus somehow ties information from other brain regions together to form new autobiographical memories, and CA1 pyramidal cells send the results of this processing back out to the neocortex. As is clear from patient R.B., removing CA1 pyramidal cells from the circuitry prevents the hippocampal memory system from doing its job.

Figure 2 The human brain, showing the location of the hippocampus, the frontal lobes, and the medial septum.

The second barrier to understanding the mechanisms underlying alcohol's effects on memory was an incomplete understanding of how alcohol affects brain function at a cellular level. Until recently, alcohol was assumed to affect the brain in a general way, simply shutting down the activity of all cells with which it came in contact. The pervasiveness of this assumption is reflected in numerous writings during the early 20th century. For instance, Fleming (1935) wrote, "The prophetic generalization of Schmiedeberg in 1833 that the pharmacological action of alcohol on the cerebrum is purely depressant has been found, most pharmacologists will agree, to characterize its action in general on all tissues" (p. 89). During the 1970s, researchers hypothesized that alcohol depressed neural activity by altering the movement of key molecules (in particular, lipids) in nerve cell membranes. This change then led to alterations in the activity of proteins, including those that influence communication between neurons by controlling the passage of positively or negatively charged atoms (i.e., ions) through cell membranes (e.g., Chin and Goldstein 1977). This view persisted into the late 1980s, at which time the consensus began to shift as evidence mounted that alcohol has selective effects on the brain's nerve-cell communication (i.e., neurotransmitter) systems, altering activity in some types of receptors but not others (e.g., Criswell et al. 1993). Substantial evidence now indicates that alcohol selectively alters the activity of specific complexes of proteins embedded in the membranes of cells (i.e., receptors) that bind neurotransmitters such as gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), glutamate, serotonin, acetylcholine, and glycine (for a review, see Little 1999). In some cases, only a few amino acids appear to distinguish receptors that are sensitive to alcohol from those that are not (Peoples and Stewart 2000). It remains unclear exactly how alcohol interacts with receptors to alter their activity.

Alcohol, Memory, and the Hippocampus

More than 30 years ago, both Ryback (1970) and Goodwin and colleagues (1969 a) speculated that alcohol might impair memory formation by disrupting activity in the hippocampus. This speculation was based on the observation that acute alcohol exposure (in humans) produces a syndrome of memory impairments similar in many ways to the impairments produced by hippocampal damage. Specifically, both acute alcohol exposure and hippocampal damage impair the ability to form new long-term, explicit memories but do not affect short-term memory storage or, in general, the recall of information from long-term storage.

Research conducted in the past few decades using animal models supports the hypothesis that alcohol impairs memory formation, at least in part, by disrupting activity in the hippocampus (for a review, see White et al. 2000 b). Such research has included behavioral observation; examination of slices of and brain tissue, neurons in cell culture, and brain activity in anesthetized or freely behaving animals; and a variety of pharmacological techniques.

As mentioned above, damage limited to the CA1 region of the hippocampus dramatically disrupts the ability to form new explicit memories (Zola-Morgan et al. 1986). In rodents, the actions of CA1 pyramidal cells have striking behavioral correlates. Some cells tend to discharge electrical signals that result in one cell communicating with other cells (i.e., action potentials) when the rodent is in a distinct location in its environment. The location differs for each cell. For instance, while a rat searches for food on a plus-shaped maze, one pyramidal cell might generate action potentials primarily when the rat is at the far end of the north arm, while another might generate action potentials primarily when the rat is in the middle of the south arm, and so on. Collectively, the cells that are active in that particular environment create a spatial, or contextual map that serves as a framework for event memories created in that environment. Because of the location-specific firing of these cells, they often are referred to as "place-cells," and the regions of the environment in which they fire are referred to as "place-fields" (for reviews, see Best and White 1998; Best et al. 2001). Given that CA1 pyramidal cells are critically important to the formation of memories for facts and events, and the clear behavioral correlates of their activity in rodents, it is possible to assess the impact of alcohol on hippocampal output in an intact, fully functional brain by studying these cells.

In recent work with awake, freely behaving rats, White and Best (2000) showed that alcohol profoundly suppresses the activity of pyramidal cells in region CA1. The researchers allowed the rats to forage for food for 15 minutes in a symmetric, Y-shaped maze and measured the animals' hippocampal activity using tiny wires (i.e., microelectrodes) implanted in their brains. Figure 3 displays the activity of an individual CA1 pyramidal cell. The activity-which corresponds to the middle portion of the lower left arm of the maze-is shown before alcohol administration (A), 45 to 60 minutes after alcohol administration (B), and 7 hours after alcohol administration (C). The dose of alcohol used in the testing session was 1.5 grams per kilogram of body weight-enough to produce a peak BAC of about 0.16 percent. (A corresponding BAC in humans would be twice the legal driving limit in most States.) As the figure illustrates, the cell's activity was essentially shut off by alcohol. Neural activity returned to near-normal levels within about 7 hours of alcohol administration.

Figure 3 Alcohol suppresses hippocampal pyramidal cell activity in an awake, freely behaving rat. Pyramidal cells often fire when the animal is in discrete regions of its environment, earning them the title "place-cells." The specific areas of the environment where these cells fire are referred to as place-fields. The figure shows the activity of an individual pyramidal cell before alcohol administration (baseline), 45 to 60 minutes after alcohol administration, and 7 hours after alcohol administration (1.5 g/kg). Each frame in the figure shows the firing rate and firing location of the cell across a 15-minute block of time during which the rat was foraging for food on a symmetric, Y-shaped maze. White pixels are pixels in which the cell fired at very low rates, and darker colors represent higher firing rates (see key to the right of figure). As is clear from a comparison of activity during baseline and 45 to 60 minutes after alcohol administration, the activity of the cell was essentially shut off by alcohol. Neural activity returned to near normal levels within roughly 7 hours after alcohol administration.

White and Best administered several doses of alcohol in this study, ranging from 0.5 g/kg to 1.5 g/kg. (Only one of the experiments is represented in figure 3.) They found that the dose affected the degree of pyramidal cell suppression. Although 0.5 g/kg did not produce a significant change in the firing of hippocampal pyramidal cells, 1.0 and 1.5 g/kg produced significant suppression of firing during a 1-hour testing session following alcohol administration. The dose-dependent suppression of CA1 pyramidal cells is consistent with the dose-dependent effects of alcohol on episodic memory formation.

Alcohol and Hippocampal Long-Term Potentiation

In addition to suppressing the output from pyramidal cells, alcohol has several other effects on hippocampal function. For instance, alcohol severely disrupts the ability of neurons to establish long-lasting, heightened responsiveness to signals from other cells (Bliss and Collinridge 1993). This heightened responsiveness is known as long-term potentiation (LTP). Because researchers have theorized that something like LTP occurs naturally in the brain during learning (for a review, see Martin and Morris 2002), many investigators have used LTP as a model for studying the neurobiology underlying the effects of drugs, including alcohol, on memory.

In a typical LTP experiment, two electrodes (A and B) are lowered into a slice of hippocampal tissue kept alive by bathing it in oxygenated artificial cerebral spinal fluid (ACSF). A small amount of current is passed through electrode A, causing the neurons in this area to send signals to cells located near electrode B. Electrode B then is used to record how the cells in the area respond to the incoming signals. This response is the baseline response. Next, a specific pattern of stimulation intended to model the pattern of activity that might occur during an actual learning event is delivered through electrode A. When the original stimulus that elicited the baseline response is delivered again through electrode A, the response recorded at electrode B is larger (i.e., potentiated). In other words, as a result of the patterned input, cells at position B now are more responsive to signals sent from cells at position A. The potentiated response often lasts for an extended period of time, hence the term long-term potentiation.

Alcohol interferes with the establishment of LTP (Morrisett and Swartzwelder 1993; Givens and McMahon 1995; Pyapali et al. 1999; Schummers and Browning 2001), and this impairment begins at concentrations equivalent to those produced by consuming just one or two standard drinks (e.g., a 12-oz beer, 1.5-oz of liquor in a shot or mixed drink, or a 5-oz glass of wine) (Blitzer et al. 1990). If sufficient alcohol is present in the ACSF bathing the slice of hippocampal tissue when the patterned stimulation is given, the response recorded later at position B will not be larger than it was at baseline (that is, it will not be potentiated). And, just as alcohol tends not to impair recall of memories established before alcohol exposure, alcohol does not disrupt the expression of LTP established before alcohol exposure.

One of the key requirements for the establishment of LTP in the hippocampus is that a type of signal receptor known as the NMDA ² receptor becomes activated. ( ² N -methyl-D-aspartate [NMDA] is a receptor for the neurotransmitter glutamate.) Activation of the NMDA receptor allows calcium to enter the cell, which sets off a chain of events leading to long-lasting changes in the cell's structure or function, or both. Alcohol interferes with the activation of the NMDA receptor, thereby preventing the influx of calcium and the changes that follow (Swartzwelder et al. 1995). This is believed to be the primary mechanism underlying the effects of alcohol on LTP, though other transmitter systems probably are also involved (Schummers and Browning 2001).

Indirect Effects of Alcohol on Hippocampal Function

Like other brain regions, the hippocampus does not operate in isolation. Information processing in the hippocampus depends on coordinated input from a variety of other structures, which gives alcohol and other drugs additional opportunities to disrupt hippocampal functioning. One brain region that is central to hippocampal functioning is a small structure in the fore brain known as the medial septum (Givens et al. 2000). The medial septum sends rhythmic excitatory and inhibitory signals to the hippocampus, causing rhythmic changes in the activity of hippocampal pyramidal cells. In electroencephalograph recordings, this rhythmic activity, referred to as the theta rhythm, occurs within a frequency of roughly 6 to 9 cycles per second (hertz) in actively behaving rats. The theta rhythm is thought to act as a gatekeeper, increasing or decreasing the likelihood that information entering the hippocampus from cortical structures will be processed (Orr et al. 2001). (For more information on the role of electrophysiology in diagnosing alcohol problems, see the article in this issue by Porjesz and Begleiter.) Information entering the hippocampus when pyramidal cells are slightly excited (i.e., slightly depolarized) has a better chance of influencing hippocampal circuitry than signals that arrive when the cells are slightly suppressed (i.e., slightly hyperpolarized).

Manipulations that disrupt the theta rhythm also disrupt the ability to perform tasks that depend on the hippocampus (Givens et al. 2000). Alcohol disrupts the theta rhythm in large part by suppressing the output of signals from medial septal neurons to the hippocampus (Steffensen et al. 1993; Givens et al. 2000). Given the powerful influence that the medial septum has on information processing in the hippocampus, the impact of alcohol on cellular activity in the medial septum is likely to play an important role in the effects of alcohol on memory. Indeed, in rats, putting alcohol directly into the medial septum alone produces memory impairments (Givens and McMahon 1997).

Other Brain Regions Involved in Alcohol-Induced Memory Impairments

The hippocampus is not the only structure involved in memory formation. A host of other brain structures also are involved in memory formation, storage, and retrieval (Eichenbaum 2002). Recent research with humans has yielded compelling evidence that key areas of the frontal lobes play important roles in short-term memory and the formation and retrieval of long-term explicit memories (e.g., Shastri 2002; Curtis and D'Esposito 2003; Ranganath et al. 2003). Damage to the frontal lobes leads to profound cognitive impairments, one of which is a difficulty forming new memories. Recent evidence suggests that memory processes in the frontal lobes and the hippocampus are coordinated via reciprocal connections (Wall and Messier 2001; Shastri 2002), raising the possibility that dysfunction in one structure could have deleterious effects on the functioning of the other.

Considerable evidence suggests that chronic alcohol use damages the frontal lobes and leads to impaired performance of tasks that rely on frontal lobe functioning (Kril and Halliday 1999; Moselhy et al. 2001). "Shrinkage" in brain volume, changes in gene expression, and disruptions in how performing certain tasks affects blood flow in the brain all have been observed in the frontal lobes of alcohol-dependent subjects (Kril and Halliday 1999; Lewohl et al. 2000; Tapert et al. 2001; Kubota et al. 2001; Desmond et al. 2003).

Although much is known about the effects of chronic (i.e., repeated) use of alcohol on frontal lobe function, little is known about the effects of one-time (i.e., acute) use of alcohol on activity in the frontal lobes, or the relationship of such effects to alcohol-induced memory impairments. Compelling evidence indicates that acute alcohol use impairs the performance of a variety of frontal lobe-mediated tasks, like those that require planning, decisionmaking, and impulse control (Weissenborn and Duka 2003; Burian et al. 2003), but the underlying mechanisms are not known. Research also suggests that baseline blood flow to the frontal lobes increases during acute intoxication (Volkow et al. 1988; Tiihonen et al. 1994), that metabolism in the frontal lobes decreases (Wang et al. 2000), and that alcohol reduces the amount of activity that occurs in the frontal lobes when the frontal lobes are exposed to pulses from a strong magnetic field (Kahkonen et al. 2003). Although the exact meaning of these changes remains unclear, the evidence suggests that acute intoxication alters the normal functioning of the frontal lobes. Future research is needed to shed more light on this important question. In particular, research in animals will be an important supplement to studies in humans, affording a better understanding of the underlying prefrontal circuitry involved in alcohol-induced memory impairment.

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

As detailed in this brief review, alcohol can have a dramatic impact on memory. Alcohol primarily disrupts the ability to form new long-term memories; it causes less disruption of recall of previously established long-term memories or of the ability to keep new information active in short-term memory for a few seconds or more. At low doses, the impairments produced by alcohol are often subtle, though they are detectable in controlled conditions. As the amount of alcohol consumed increases, so does the magnitude of the memory impairments. Large quantities of alcohol, particularly if consumed rapidly, can produce a blackout, an interval of time for which the intoxicated person cannot recall key details of events, or even entire events. En bloc blackouts are stretches of time for which the person has no memory whatsoever. Fragmentary blackouts are episodes for which the drinker's memory is spotty, with "islands" of memory providing some insight into what transpired, and for which more recall usually is possible if the drinker is cued by others. Blackouts are much more common among social drinkers than previously assumed and should be viewed as a potential consequence of acute intoxication regardless of age or whether one is clinically dependent upon alcohol.

Tremendous progress has been made toward an understanding of the mechanisms underlying alcohol-induced memory impairments. Alcohol disrupts activity in the hippocampus via several routes-directly, through effects on hippocampal circuitry, and indirectly, by interfering with interactions between the hippocampus and other brain regions. The impact of alcohol on the frontal lobes remains poorly understood, but probably plays an important role in alcohol-induced memory impairments.

Modern neuroimaging techniques, such as positron emission tomography (PET) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), provide incredible opportunities for investigating the impact of drugs like alcohol on brain function during the performance of cognitive tasks. The use of these techniques will no doubt yield important information regarding the mechanisms underlying alcohol-induced memory impairments in the coming years. Memory formation and retrieval are highly influenced by factors such as attention and motivation (e.g., Kensinger et al. 2003). With the aid of neuroimaging techniques, researchers may be able to examine the impact of alcohol on brain activity related to these factors, and then determine how alcohol contributes to memory impairments.

Despite advances in human neuroimaging techniques, animal models remain absolutely essential in the study of mechanisms underlying alcohol-induced memory impairments. Hopefully, future work will reveal more regarding the ways in which the effects of alcohol on multiple transmitter systems interact to disrupt memory formation. Similarly, recent advances in electrophysiological recording techniques, which allow for recordings from hundreds of individual cells in several brain regions simultaneously (Kralik et al. 2001), could provide much-needed information regarding the impact of alcohol on the interactions between disparate brain regions involved in the encoding, storage, and retrieval of information.

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# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
What Happened? Alcohol, Memory Blackouts, and the Brain

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Alcohol Research & Health. 2003;27(2): 186-96. Aaron M. White, Ph.D., is an assistant research professor in the Department of Psychiatry, Duke University Medical Center, Durham, North Carolina. This work was supported by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism grant AA-12478 and the Institute for Medical Research at the VA Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina.