Before me, life mysterious, ordinary— holding off pain with its muscular wings.
But perhaps her motive, hidden in plain sight, is prodigiously ordinary: to hold the interest of a man.
In "The Man Who Was Thursday," he recaptures a childhood sense of what it feels like to be frightened by a nothing that is still a something, and by the sense that ordinary things hold intimations of another world, that the crack in the teacup opens a lane to the land of the dead so easily that the dead are already in the living room, pouring out of the broken porcelain.
College groups now forbid discussion of politics, religious Muslims avoid going to mosque, and ordinary people hold their tongues for fear of making the wrong kinds of jokes, since any stranger could be a spy.
Rather than proclaim their innocence all the way to bankruptcy court, the two investment banks chose to transform themselves into ordinary bank holding companies.
She is routinely greeted as a rock star wherever she goes, and has enjoyed mixing with ordinary people: holding a spirited discussion with the teenage audience of an Indonesian television show, "Awesome", for example.
But if that were not enough to prop up the lender, small companies and ordinary savers holding uninsured deposits worth more than 100,000 euros (£85,000) would also take a hit, officials said.
(For an example closer to the current financial crisis, Felix Salmon has a nice post on the way regulatory arbitrage has left a bunch of ordinary Germans holding worthless pieces of Lehman Brothers debt).
They include ordinary processions, held on certain yearly festivals throughout the universal church and on other days according to the customs of the local churches, and extraordinary processions, held for special occasions (e.g., to pray for rain or good weather, in time of storm, famine, plague, war, and other disasters).
They were mostly very ordinary people, held for not having a license plate on their car, or because they'd got into an argument with a man who turned out to be a Baath Party official, or because their children had been coaxed at school into reporting their parents' unappreciative remarks at the dinner table about Saddam.
