Mayan Ruins Quotes

And even if you hate her, can't stand her, even if she's ruining your life, there's something about her, some romance, some power. She's absolutely herself. No matter how hard you try, you'll never get to her. And when she dies, the world will be flat, too simple, reasonable, fair.

I removed the freeway from its temporal context. Overpasses, cloverleafs, exit ramps took on the personality of Mayan ruins for me. Without destination, without cessation, my run was often silent and empty; there were no increments, no arbitrary graduations reducing time to functional units. I abstracted and purified.

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe is one of the most extraordinary ventures in the entire history of catering. It is built on the fragmented remains of an eventually ruined planet which is (wioll haven be) enclosed in a vast time bubble and projected forward in time to the precise moment of the End of the Universe. This is, many would say, impossible. In it, guests take (willan on-take) their places at table and eat (willan on eat) sumptuous meals while watching (willing watchen) the whole of creation explode around them. This, many would say, is equally impossible. You can arrive (mayan arrivan on-when) for any sitting you like without prior (late fore-when) reservation because you can book retrospectively, as it were, when you return to your own time (you can have on-book haventa forewhen presooning returningwenta retrohome). This is, many would now insist, absolutely impossible. At the Restaurant you can meet and dine with (mayan meetan con with dinan on when) a fascinating cross-section of the entire population of space and time. This, it can be explained patiently, is also impossible. You can visit it as many times as you like (mayan on-visit re onvisiting ... and so on – for further tense correction consult Dr. Streetmentioner's book) and be sure of never meeting yourself, because of the embarrassment this usually causes.

Our Society, which seems so sturdily built out of concrete and custom, is just a temporary resting place, a hotel our civilization checked into a couple hundred years ago and must one day check out of. It's an inevitability tourists can't help but realize when visiting Mayan ruins, Egyptian ruins, Roman ruins. How long will it be before someone is visiting American ruins?

Mexico, as it was in the 1970s—and isn’t now—was my Paris. With Mexicans, Europeans, and Americans I celebrated life and the journey, which took on qualities of a pilgrimage in which every moment was a movable feast and every place was a shrine. Among the intricately carved ruins in the jungle at Palenque, I partook of the Mayan sacrament, the sacred psilocybin mushroom, and there I learned to see.

It occurred to him that houses die when they are no longer fed with the energy of their owners. He wondered whether the ancients had experienced the same thing: the Mayans, the Romans, the Egyptians. He wondered whether, when they abandoned their homes, when they left their villages after some catastrophe, never to return, they had caused the death, deterioration, and then ruin of houses, villages, and temples. Much like what was happening now in Linares: The plague’s here, let’s go. Then, a few years or a generation later, nobody would remember the original settlement, which, under sustained neglect, bit by bit, dust mote by dust mote, would return to its mistress, the earth. For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return: as certain for living cells as it was for any heap of bricks, whether Roman, Mayan, or Linarense. In this particular case, the heap of bricks being suffocated by dust was the one that formed the protective shell around the hopes and dreams of generations of the Morales family. And he would not let it die.

The discomfort you’re sensing all around you? It’s the American Establishment loading its Depends diapers over the prospect of a younger generation that is turning its back on political parties and other zombified artifacts of our glorious past. Millennials (defined by Pew as Americans ages 18 to 33) are drifting away from traditional institutions—political, religious, and cultural,” muses Charles M. Blow, who sees “a generation in which institutions are subordinate to the individual.” It’s easy to understand why folks at The New York Times and, say, Democratic and Republican headquarters, and the National Council of Churches are worried about all of this. After all, it’s their “traditional institutions” that are being left behind like Mayan ruins. But who can blame Millennials for, say, vacating worn-out, pre-Civil War political brands such as the Democrats and Republicans, two groups that are about as relevant as your father’s Oldsmobile?

CIVILIZATIONS OVER THE PAST SIX thousand years have the habit of eventually squandering their futures through acts of colossal stupidity and hubris. We are not an exception. The physical ruins of these empires, including the Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Ottoman, Mayan, and Indus, litter the earth. They elevated, during acute distress, inept and corrupt leaders who channeled anger, fear, and dwindling resources into self-defeating wars and vast building projects. These ruling elites, consumed by greed and hedonism, retreated into privileged compounds—the Forbidden City, Versailles. They hoarded wealth as their populations endured mounting misery, hunger, and poverty. The worse it got, the more the people lied to themselves and the more they wanted to be lied to. Reality was too painful to confront

When it was backlit like that, but there was still enough light that you could see the mustang vines growing up the sides and poking out through the windows, the modernist concrete blocks of the old JCPenney store looked every bit like a Mayan ruin.