"His first memory is an execution. He walked with his mother to a wheat field, where guards had rounded up several thousand prisoners. The boy crawled between legs to the front row, where he saw guards tying a man to a wooden pole. Escape from Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West
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Shin In Geun was four years old, too young to understand the speech that came before that killing. At dozens of executions in years to come, he would listen to a guard telling the crowd that the prisoner about to die had been offered “redemption” through hard labour, but had rejected the generosity of the North Korean government."

How one man escaped from a North Korean prison camp | World news | The Guardian

"Michael’s problems started, according to his mother, around age 3, shortly after his brother Allan was born. At the time, she said, Michael was mostly just acting “like a brat,” but his behavior soon escalated to throwing tantrums during which he would scream and shriek inconsolably. These weren’t ordinary toddler’s fits. “It wasn’t, ‘I’m tired’ or ‘I’m frustrated’ — the normal things kids do,” Anne remembered. “His behavior was really out there. And it would happen for hours and hours each day, no matter what we did.” For several years, Michael screamed every time his parents told him to put on his shoes or perform other ordinary tasks, like retrieving one of his toys from the living room. “Going somewhere, staying somewhere — anything would set him off,” Miguel said. These furies lasted well beyond toddlerhood. At 8, Michael would still fly into a rage when Anne or Miguel tried to get him ready for school, punching the wall and kicking holes in the door. Left unwatched, he would cut up his trousers with scissors or methodically pull his hair out. He would also vent his anger by slamming the toilet seat down again and again until it broke."

Can You Call a 9-Year-Old a Psychopath? - NYTimes.com

"I say that one must be a seer, make oneself a seer. The poet makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious, and rational disordering of all the senses. Every form of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he consumes all the poisons in him, and keeps only their quintessences. This is an unspeakable torture during which he needs all his faith and superhuman strength, and during which he becomes the great patient, the great criminal, the great accursed – and the great learned one! – among men. – For he arrives at the unknown! Because he has cultivated his own soul – which was rich to begin with – more than any other man! He reaches the unknown; and even if, crazed, he ends up by losing the understanding of his visions, at least he has seen them! Let him die charging through those unutterable, unnameable things: other horrible workers will come; they will begin from the horizons where he has succumbed!"

Cigars from the gutter

"If scuba diving is an outward journey—Krack calls it tearing through a forest in a Hummer with the AC on and the windows up—free diving is an inward passage. It’s a lone descent, as you feel your body adapt to the depth. The mammalian diving reflex kicks in: the heart slows, peripheral blood vessels constrict, the spleen compresses and dopes the body with red blood cells. As I kick down, I’m bubbleless, sleek. A bright metal plate at the end of the line marks 100 feet. A solitary squid watches me descend. I kick and kick, feeling my fins paddle back and forth, through a medium with 800 times the density of air. The water is clear here. I shouldn’t be looking at the plate, but I can’t help myself. I reach and grab it, before turning to head up to the surface. I’ve been sinking, so now I have to kick hard, as I bring my hands together overhead. I’ve slipped from my Zen state. My legs feel leaden, as my diaphragm contracts. What can I do but kick? At 33 feet, I’m aware of my instructor motioning for me to sweep my arms down in a final push. The contractions are worse, but I know I’m not far. So I kick. The air expands inside my mask. It’s possible—and thrilling—to take the minutest sniff. Then I exhale, as I’ve been taught, before breaking the surface, so I can immediately breathe in. Thor takes me through six recovery breaths, aware that 90 percent of blackouts occur after surfacing, and I signal that I’m okay. I look at my gauge, and it reads 102 feet, with an underwater time of 1 minute and 11 seconds—longer than it should have taken, but I’m alive. Floating, I keep breathing in. I’m breathing hard."

Waiting to Exhale - Magazine - The Atlantic