In boxing, they say it's the punch you don't see coming that knocks you out. In the wider world, the reality we ignore or deny is the one that weakens our most impassioned efforts toward improvement.

The more potent, unasked question is how society at large reacts to eager, voluntary violence by females, and to the growing evidence that women can be just as aggressive as men.

And while national military forces have historically resisted the full participation of women soldiers, female talent has found plenty of scope in revolutionary and terrorist groups around the planet.

Training of female athletes is so new that the limits of female possibility are still unknown.

The spoken word is man's physician in grief. For this alone has soothing charms for the soul.

Challenging orthodoxy is a death sentence in Washington.

I pored over art books and absorbed the placidness of Monet's garden, the sparkling color of the Impressionists, the strength and solidity of Michelangelo's figures showing the titanic power of humans at one with God, Jan Vermeer's serene Dutch women bathed in gorgeous honey-colored light... My conviction grew that art was stronger than death.

We do have trouble dealing with death, but it's the one thing that is guaranteed we are all going to have to do, and we are going to have to face it many times before we die ourselves.