Smog Quotes

Culture is like a smog. To live within it, you must breathe some of it in and, inevitably, be contaminated.

The girl in the mirror wasn't who I wanted to be and her life wasn't the one I wanted to have.

Looking more closely at Earth’s atmospheric fingerprints, human biomarkers will also include sulfuric, carbonic, and nitric acids, and other components of smog from the burning of fossil fuels. If the curious aliens happen to be socially, culturally, and technologically more advanced than we are, then they will surely interpret these biomarkers as convincing evidence for the absence of intelligent life on Earth.

The smog was heavy, my eyes were weeping from it, the sun was hot, the air stank, a regular hell is L.A.

The setting sun burned the sky pink and orange in the same bright hues as surfers' bathing suits. It was beautiful deception, Bosch thought, as he drove north on the Hollywood Freeway to home. Sunsets did that here. Made you forget it was the smog that made their colors so brilliant, that behind every pretty picture there could be an ugly story.

I look across at the line of the city. The nights are mean in this place, full of smog that eats the stars. 'Who does feel hope around here?

My sadness isn’t a way I feel but a thing trapped inside the walls of my flesh, like a smog. It takes the sheen off everything. It rolls the world in soot. It saps the power from my limbs and presses my back into a stoop.

People could say a lot of negative things about the apocalypse, but there was no arguing the air quality in Los Angeles had really improved.

Twenty-three stories up and all I could see out the windows was grey smog. They could call it the City of the Angels if they wanted to, but if there were angels out there, they had to be flying blind.

No matter how bad things get, you can always see the beauty in them. The worse things get, the more you have to make yourself see the magic in order to survive.

Some molecules - ammonia, carbon dioxide, water - show up everywhere in the universe, whether life is present or not. But others pop up especially in the presence of life itself. Among the biomarkers in Earth's atmosphere are ozone-destroying chlorofluorocarbons from aerosol sprays, vapor from mineral solvents, escaped coolants from refrigerators and air conditioners, and smog from the burning of fossil fuels. No other way to read that list: sure signs of the absence of intelligence.

The rain is freedom; it has always been like that in L.A. It’s freedom from smog and unbroken dreary hateful sameness, it’s freedom to look out the window and think of London and little violets and Paris and cobblestones. It’s freedom to be cozy. Cozy! You can be cozy and not even have to go to San Francisco.

And then they were inside, and out of the wind, and surrounded by comforting walls and walls of books. The rich, delightful smell of old paper, leather and ink permeated the place, washing away the pettier odours of blood and oil and smog.

It seems impossible that you can love one person so much, no matter what happens, no matter what they do.

the human race was dying out Noone left to scream n shout People living on the moon Smog will get you pretty soon Ship of Fools

1954. Smog prevents airplanes from landing and ships from docking for three days.

It started when we were little kids. Free spirits, but already tormented by our own hands given to us by our parents. We got together and wrote on desks and slept in laundry rooms near snowy mountains and slipped through whatever cracks we could find, minds altered, we didn't falter in portraving hysterical and tragic characters in a smog filled universe. we loved the dirty city and the journeys away from it. We had not yet been or seen our friends, selves, chase tails round and round in downward spirals, leaving trail of irretrievable, vital life juice behind. Still, the brothersbloodcomradespartnerfamilycuzz was impenetrable and we lived inside it laughing with no clothes, and everything experimental 'till death was upon us. In our face, mortality.

Language is a piss poor attempt at telepathy is what it is. We try to put our thoughts into each other's heads through language...But half the intended meaning gets lost in the transmission, and the other half is filtered through existing assumptions. Everything is a half truth! That's the whole problem! You can't understand me through the smog of your presumptions and prejudices. Multiply that six billion times and you'll begin to understand the desperation of our global situation

This is the most beautiful place on earth. There are many such places. Every man, every woman, carries in heart and mind the image of the ideal place, the right place, the one true home, known or unknown, actual or visionary. A houseboat in Kashmir, a view down Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, a gray gothic farmhouse two stories high at the end of a red dog road in the Allegheny Mountains, a cabin on the shore of a blue lake in spruce and fir country, a greasy alley near the Hoboken waterfront, or even, possibly, for those of a less demanding sensibility, the world to be seen from a comfortable apartment high in the tender, velvety smog of Manhattan, Chicago, Paris, Tokyo, Rio, or Rome — there's no limit to the human capacity for the homing sentiment.

He sat desiring the girl - a speed-hardened straw-colored junkie stewardess, a spoiled Augustana Lutheran, compounded of airport Muzak and beauty parlor school. Her eyes were fouled with smog and propane spray.

Welcome Beauty, banish fear.

You have to make your own family, your own life.

Los Angeles wasn’t a sun-splashed utopia anymore—it was an alienated, smog-choked sprawl rife with racial and class tensions, recession, and stifling boredom.

Loneliness hangs over our culture today like a thick smog.

Africa. That bird came from Africa. But you mustn't cry for that bird, Paulie, because after a while it forgot about how the veldt smelled at noonday, and the sounds of the wildebeests at the waterhole, and the high acidic smell of the ieka-ieka trees in the great clearing north of the Big road. After awhile it forgot the cerise color of the sun dying behind Kilimanjaro. After awhile it only knew the muddy, smogged-out sunsets of Boston, that was all it remembered and all it wanted to remember. After awhile it didn't want to go back anymore, and if someone took it back and set it free it would only crouch in one place, afraid and hurting and homesick in two unknown and terribly ineluctable directions until something came along and killed it. 'Oh Africa, oh, shit,' he said in a trembling voice.

But a human mind is a great sullen lightning-filled cloud of thoughts, all of them occupying a finite amount of brain processing time. Finding whatever the owner thinks they’re thinking in the middle of the smog of prejudices, memories, worries, hopes and fears is almost impossible.

I was staring to learn how to forget the things that made me sad. It was like a charm you followed step-by-step, collecting and blending the ingredients, placing everything in its proper place, reciting the incantation. It was the magic of forgetting.

Somewhere beyond the battening, urged sweep of three-bedroom houses rushing by their thousands across all the dark beige hills, somehow implicit in an arrogance or bite to the smog the more inland somnolence of San Narciso did lack, lurked the sea, the unimaginable Pacific, the one to which all surfers, beach pads, sewage disposal schemes, tourist incursions, sunned homosexuality, chartered fishing are irrelevant, the hole left by the moon’s tearing-free and monument to her exile; you could not hear or even smell this but it was there, something tidal began to reach feelers in past eyes and eardrums, perhaps to arouse fractions of brain current your most gossamer microelectrode is yet too gross for finding.

Maybe he was real. Maybe I'd made him up. Either way, he didn't think I needed him anymore. Maybe he was right.

She grew into a quiet, beautiful young woman. The beauty was a nuisance, like smog and poverty.

Andromeda.” Allister moved closer. “An autumn constellation, forty-four light-years away.” His steps were smooth and indifferent, but his voice was dry, as though he found my panic attack positively boring. His attitude brought a small rush of annoyance in, but it was suddenly swayed as my lungs contracted and wouldn’t release. I couldn’t keep a strangled gasp from escaping. “Look up.” It was an order, carrying a harsh edge. With no fight in me, I complied and tilted my head. Tears blurred my vision. Stars swam together and sparkled like diamonds. I was glad they weren’t. Humans would find a way to pluck them from the sky. “Andromeda is the dim, fuzzy star to the right. Find it.” My eyes searched it out. The stars weren’t often easy to see, hidden behind smog and the glow of city lights, but sometimes, on a lucky night like tonight, pollution cleared and they became visible. I found the star and focused on it. “Do you know her story?” he asked, his voice close behind me. A cold wind touched my cheeks, and I inhaled slowly. “Answer me.” “No,” I gritted. “Andromeda was boasted to be one of the most beautiful goddesses.” He moved closer, so close his jacket brushed my bare arm. His hands were in his pockets and his gaze was on the sky. “She was sacrificed for her beauty, tied to a rock by the sea.” I imagined her, a red-haired goddess with a heart of steel chained to a rock. The question bubbled up from the depths of me. “Did she survive?” His gaze fell to me. Down the tear tracks to the blood on my bottom lip. His eyes darkened, his jaw tightened, and he looked away. “She did.

It's time now to rent a car, roll down the windows and prepare for your first big thrill: the freeways. They're so much fun they should charge admission. Never fret about zigzagging back and forth through six lanes of traffic at high speeds; it erases jet lag in a split second. You're now heading toward Hollywood, like any normal tourist. Breathe in that smog and feel lucky that only in L.A. will you glimpse a green sun or a brown moon. Forget the propaganda you've heard about clean air; demand oxygen you can see in all its glorious discoloration.

Dakle, drage moje devojčice, nije uopšte važno imate li četrnaest, sedamnaest, dvadest ili pedeset šest godina! Susretao sam ja i devojčice od sedamdeset dve, i odmah se nekako videlo da su još klinke: mislim, videlo se to po načinu na koji su zrikale unaokolo i krile smešak u prste, kako su isprobavale perike sa loknama boje zlata u robnoj kući, ogledajući se malčice iskosa i vrlo koketno – bile su to prave klinke od sedamdeset dve godine, na časnu reč! Jer, drage moje naglo ostarele devojčice, niste vi krive što se život našalio sa vama, pa vas jednog jutra probudio kao i obično u pola šest, kad ono 8 banki! Opa! A vi se još pitate da li je 1900. i neke trebalo da popustite jednom putujućem glumcu i dozvolite mu da vas poljubi, pitate se i pitate, a sve idete na prstima da ne probudite unuke; bosim nogama šljapkate po betonu (koliko sam vam samo puta rekao da navučete papuče, a vi opet ništa!), oblačite se onako još spvajući i ložite peć, pa ronite kroz jutarnji smog da kupite kilo polubelog, paklo butera, jogurt, kifle, mortadelu... – atamo vec 8 banki, a još niste načisto da li je trebalo dozvoliti onom putujućem glumcu da vas coki, ili nije?

The Chinese call it woo The French les brumes The British Fog L A Smog Heaven Cellar Door

The smog curled between the streetlamps and the spokes of the wrought iron framework. It seemed through your body and into your bones.

We look back on history, and what do we see? Empires rising and falling; revolutions and counter-revolutions succeeding one another; wealth accumulating and wealth dispersed; one nation dominant and then another. As Shakespeare’s King Lear puts it, “the rise and fall of great ones that ebb and flow with the moon.” In one lifetime I’ve seen my fellow countrymen ruling over a quarter of the world, and the great majority of them convinced – in the words of what is still a favorite song – that God has made them mighty and will make them mightier yet. I’ve heard a crazed Austrian announce the establishment of a German Reich that was to last for a thousand years; an Italian clown report that the calendar will begin again with his assumption of power; a murderous Georgian brigand in the Kremlin acclaimed by the intellectual elite as wiser than Solomon, more enlightened than Ashoka, more humane than Marcus Aurelius. I’ve seen America wealthier than all the rest of the world put together; and with the superiority of weaponry that would have enabled Americans, had they so wished, to outdo an Alexander or a Julius Caesar in the range and scale of conquest. All in one little lifetime – gone with the wind: England now part of an island off the coast of Europe, threatened with further dismemberment; Hitler and Mussolini seen as buffoons; Stalin a sinister name in the regime he helped to found and dominated totally for three decades; Americans haunted by fears of running out of the precious fluid that keeps their motorways roaring and the smog settling, by memories of a disastrous military campaign in Vietnam, and the windmills of Watergate. Can this really be what life is about – this worldwide soap opera going on from century to century, from era to era, as old discarded sets and props litter the earth? Surely not. Was it to provide a location for so repetitive and ribald a production as this that the universe was created and man, or homo sapiens as he likes to call himself – heaven knows why – came into existence? I can’t believe it. If this were all, then the cynics, the hedonists, and the suicides are right: the most we can hope for from life is amusement, gratification of our senses, and death. But it is not all.

STEVE CARELL IS NICE BUT IT IS SCARY It has been said many times, but it is true: Steve Carell is a very nice guy. His niceness manifests itself mostly in the fact that he never complains. You could screw up a handful of takes outside in 104-degree smog-choked Panorama City heat, and Steve Carell’s final words before collapsing of heat stroke would be a friendly and hopeful “Hey, you think you have that shot yet?” I’ve always found Steve gentlemanly and private, like a Jane Austen character. The one notable thing about Steve’s niceness is that he is also very smart, and that kind of niceness has always made me nervous. When smart people are nice, it’s always terrifying, because I know they’re taking in everything and thinking all kinds of smart and potentially judgmental things. Steve could never be as funny as he is, or as darkly observational an actor, without having an extremely acute sense of human flaws. As a result, I’m always trying to impress him, in the hope that he’ll go home and tell his wife, Nancy, “Mindy was so funny and cool on set today. She just gets it.” Getting Steve to talk shit was one of the most difficult seven-year challenges, but I was determined to do it. A circle of actors could be in a fun, excoriating conversation about, say, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and you’d shoot Steve an encouraging look that said, “Hey, come over here; we’ve made a space for you! We’re trashing Dominique Strauss-Kahn to build cast rapport!” and the best he might offer is “Wow. If all they say about him is true, that is nuts,” and then politely excuse himself to go to his trailer. That’s it. That’s all you’d get. Can you believe that? He just would not engage. That is some willpower there. I, on the other hand, hear someone briefly mentioning Rainn, and I’ll immediately launch into “Oh my god, Rainn’s so horrible.” But Carell is just one of those infuriating, classy Jane Austen guys. Later I would privately theorize that he never involved himself in gossip because—and I am 99 percent sure of this—he is secretly Perez Hilton.

And it was to this city, whenever I went home, that I always knew I must return, for it was mistress of one's wildest hopes, protector of one's deepest privacies. It was half insane with its noise, violence, and decay, but it gave one the tender security of fulfillment. On winter afternoons, from my office, there were sunsets across Manhattan when the smog itself shimmered and glowed… Despite its difficulties, which become more obvious all the time, one was constantly put to the test by this city, which finally came down to its people; no other place in America had quite such people and they would not allow you to go stale; in the end they were its triumph and its reward.

Sunflower poised against the sunset, crackly bleak and dusty with the smut and smog and smoke of olden locomotives in its eye— corolla of bleary spikes pushed down and broken like a battered crown, seeds fallen out of its face, soon-to-be-toothless mouth of sunny air, sunrays obliterated on its hairy head like a dried wire spiderweb, leaves stuck out like arms out of the stem, gestures from the sawdust root, broke pieces of plaster fallen out of the black twigs, a dead fly in its ear

You apologize for how you carry your mother's loneliness quietly between your teeth. You apologize for how you carry your father's sins inside your blood. You forgot how to carry yourself away for the histories that threatens to break you open, leaving you with grief and unbearable weight of emptiness. Tell me, apart from the sadness thick as smog living inside your chest tell me the last time you held your face and saw love staring back at you. How does destroying yourself prove your worth to others?

An ant has an easy mind to read. There’s just one stream of big simple thoughts: Carry, Carry, Bite, Get Into The Sandwiches, Carry, Eat. Something like a dog is more complicated—a dog can be thinking several thoughts at the same time. But a human mind is a great sullen lightning-filled cloud of thoughts, all of them occupying a finite amount of brain processing time. Finding whatever the owner thinks they’re thinking in the middle of the smog of prejudices, memories, worries, hopes and fears is almost impossible.

The earth. Smog, murder, the poisoned air, the poisoned water, the poisoned food, the hatred, the hopelessness, everything. The only beautiful thing about the earth is the animals and now they are being killed off, soon they will be gone except for pet rats and race horses. It’s so sad, no wonder you drink so much.

Dear Natasha, It's the middle of the night. I can't sleep. Thoughts are creeping through my head like darkness slips around the bodies of sky scrapers in every city we've ever been to. From the bottom up, suffocating the life on the street first and then raising to the head and the brain, circling into smog and clouds until the black stretches up so high that nobody can even remember what the stars used to look like. This is how I feel when I lie awake and think of you. I miss you.

We live in a world of media overload and data smog, where everything distracts us from everything else. Yet underlying this noisy assault, our culture offers us nothing transcendent. No deeper meaning, no abiding hope. In my crisis, every facet of the contemporary world seemed part of a diabolical mechanism carefully designed to keep people from wondering about the real purpose of their endless frantic activity.

The grime was no man’s grime but death and human locomotives, all that dress of dust, that veil of darkened railroad skin, that smog of cheek, that eyelid of black mis’ry, that sooty hand or phallus or protuberance of artificial worse-than-dirt—industrial—modern—all that civilization spotting your crazy golden crown— and those blear thoughts of death and dusty loveless eyes and ends and withered roots below, in the home-pile of sand and sawdust, rubber dollar bills, skin of machinery, the guts and innards of the weeping coughing car, the empty lonely tincans with their rusty tongues alack, what more could I name, the smoked ashes of some cock cigar, the cunts of wheelbarrows and the milky breasts of cars, wornout asses out of chairs & sphincters of dynamos—all these entangled in your mummied roots—and you there standing before me in the sunset, all your glory in your form!

They found it hard to imagine the smog-choked cities of the Twentieth Century, and the waste, greed, and appalling environmental disasters of the Oil Age.

I maintained my steady post-breakfast diet of air, which is more substantial in LA because of the smog. All

he was like smog: there were always some of his molecules in the air.

I unrolled my window to get away from the cigarette smog a little and watched a different world roll by.

She glanced outside at the sky, filled with clouds and smog. All the pollution, all that hell—even the stars didn’t stand a chance.

I was starting to learn how to forget the things that made me sad. It was like a charm you followed step-by-step, collecting and blending the ingredients, placing everything in its proper place. It was the magic of forgetting.

Brendan Harris loved everyone now because he loved Katie and Katie loved him. Brendan loved traffic and smog and the sound of jackhammers. He loved his worthless old man who hadn't sent him a single birthday or Christmas card since he'd walked out on Brendan and his mother when Brendan was six. He loved Monday mornings, sitcoms that couldn't make a retard laugh, and standing in line at the RMV. He even loved his job, though he wouldn't be going in ever again.

È uno speciale piacere che ti dà il libro appena pubblicato, non è solo un libro che porti con te ma la sua novità, che potrebbe essere anche solo quella dell’oggetto uscito ora dalla fabbrica, la bellezza dell’asino di cui anche i libri s’adornano, che dura finché la copertina non comincia a ingiallire, un velo di smog a depositarsi sul taglio, il dorso a sdrucirsi agli angoli, nel rapido autunno delle biblioteche. No, tu speri sempre d’imbatterti nella novità vera, che essendo stata novità una volta, continui a esserlo per sempre. Avendo letto il libro appena uscito, ti approprierai di questa novità dal primo istante, senza dover poi inseguirla, rincorrerla. Sarà questa la volta buona? Non si sa mai. Vediamo come comincia.

For some days, now, the termperature had wavered between freezing and thawing and it was difficult to tell whether the sediment thickening the atmostphere was rain or sleet or smog. Through the murk the dull red eye of a sun that had scarcely been able to drag itself above roof level all day was sinking blearily beneath the horizon, spreading a rusty stain across the snow-covered surfaces. Read pathetic fallacy weather.

Smog hung all round the horizon, the sun on the bright beige countryside was painful; she and the Chevy seemed parked at the centre of an odd, religious instant. As if, on some other frequency, or out of the eye of some whirlwind rotating too slow for her heated skin even to feel the centrifugal coolness of, words were being spoken.

Still, this particular fantasy nagged him. He'd stroll through the streets, eat, bathe, weed his rose garden, and it would gather strength over his head, an insidious halo, as black as dried blood, glittering with the thunder of snapping bones. It tugged at him like a tornado. He would peer up and see George affixed to its sphere, and the smog made him think of a woodcut he'd seen as a child. It showed every bone in some man's body broken and woven through spokes of a wagon wheel. Hoisted aloft in the Renaissance, they had continued to twirl for Philippe ever since.

Ethanol is a volatile, flammable, colourless liquid with a slight chemical odour. It is used as an antiseptic, a solvent, in medical wipes and antibacterial formulas because it kills organisms by denaturing their proteins. Ethanol is an important industrial ingredient. Ethanol is a good general purpose solvent and is found in paints, tinctures, markers and personal care products such as perfumes and deodorants. The largest single use of ethanol is as an engine fuel and fuel additive. In other words, we drink, for fun, the same thing we use to make rocket fuel, house paint, anti-septics, solvents, perfumes, and deodorants and to denature, i.e. to take away the natural properties of, or kill, living organisms. Which might make sense on some level if we weren’t a generation of green minded, organic, health-conscious, truth seeking individuals. But we are. We read labels, we shun gluten, dairy, processed foods, and refined sugars. We buy organic, we use natural sunscreen and beauty products. We worry about fluoride in our water, smog in our air, hydrogenated oils in our food, and we debate whether plastic bottles are safe to drink from. We replace toxic cleaning products with Mrs. Myers and homemade vinegar concoctions. We do yoga, we run, we SoulCycle and Fitbit, we go paleo and keto, we juice, we cleanse. We do coffee enemas and steam our yonis, and drink clay and charcoal, and shoot up vitamins, and sit in infrared foil boxes, and hire naturopaths, and shamans, and functional doctors, and we take nootropics and we stress about our telomeres. These are all real words. We are hyper-vigilant about everything we put into our body, everything we do to our body, and we are proud of this. We Instagram how proud we are of this, and we follow Goop and Well+Good, and we drop 40 bucks on an exercise class because there are healing crystals in the floor. The global wellness economy is estimated to be worth $4 trillion. $4 TRILLION DOLLARS. We are on an endless and expensive quest for wellness and vitality and youth. And we drink fucking rocket fuel.

We shouldn’t be forced to choose at all. The fury in Aida’s voice was familiar. Nostalgic. I’d once possessed that strain of fury, as had my fellow cooks, my friends, my produce guy, a virulent rage against our tainted inheritance of this stupid, smog-choked planet. But it couldn’t last. We’d been inoculated from rage by other, more immediate concerns. For example: how to pay rent, how to stay alive. Aida, rich as she was, hadn’t been forced to choose between anger and dinner. For the first time in years, I tasted, through her, that feeling.

As a result of this “racism smog,” many of our children have internalized all of the negative stereotypes inherent in our society’s views of black people. A student teacher at Southern University told me that she didn’t know what to say when an African American eighth-grade boy came up to her and said, “They made us the slaves because we were dumb, right, Ms. Summers?” Working with a middle schooler on her math, a tutor was admonished, “Why you trying to teach me to multiply, Ms. L.? Black people don’t multiply; black people just add and subtract. White people multiply.

And when we run into technology failures and problems—dropped calls, the Blue Screen of Death, smog, and so on—let’s not curse our tools like fools do. Instead, when the medicine no longer works, let us redirect our hope away from our tools and to the one who will restore all human things, human souls, human bodies, and human creations.

Love, that elusive leading lady, plays too many parts to be typecast.

Silence hung around the corners, draped like spider webs across all surfaces and hanging like smog in the air.

The sun was setting, giving the smog a sickly glow that made the landscape look to Eve like an alien world populated by creatures that breathed radiant vomit.

The sun was bright and the smog an exquisite orange tint as I drove back to Culver City.

Scorching hot surfaces, screaming children on summer vacay, smog, heatstroke, and everything that belonged in hell. August was a bitch even the devil wouldn’t want to fuck.

Commuters lining up at the tube stations, waiting to cross the Causeway into Greater Shanghai, seen only as a storm front of neonstained, coal-scented smog that encompassed the horizon.

Whatever love meant there was some version of it that I felt for Winter. And it didn't matter if he felt that for me or not or if it was real love or just my sadness about my dad that had turned into longing. Love, that elusive leading lady, plays too many parts to be typecast.

There’s a brief period most nights when the two moons float side by side on the surface. The fake moon, which has the advantage of being closer and not obscured by smog, is almost always brighter than the real one.

With all control look for the hole, your mind gets weak, unless it’s truth you seek. Swirled and twirled into another world, into the smog, a doorway within the fog.” Deetkatu, The Little People Journey into the Mystic Sea

Sometimes I think Earth has got to be the insane asylum of the universe. . . and I'm here by computer error. At sixty-eight, I hope I've gained some wisdom in the past fourteen lustrums and it’s obligatory to speak plain and true about the conclusions I've come to; now that I have been educated to believe by such mentors as Wells, Stapledon, Heinlein, van Vogt, Clarke, Pohl, (S. Fowler) Wright, Orwell, Taine, Temple, Gernsback, Campbell and other seminal influences in scientifiction, I regret the lack of any female writers but only Radclyffe Hall opened my eyes outside sci-fi. I was a secular humanist before I knew the term. I have not believed in God since childhood's end. I believe a belief in any deity is adolescent, shameful and dangerous. How would you feel, surrounded by billions of human beings taking Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the tooth fairy and the stork seriously, and capable of shaming, maiming or murdering in their name? I am embarrassed to live in a world retaining any faith in church, prayer or a celestial creator. I do not believe in Heaven, Hell or a Hereafter; in angels, demons, ghosts, goblins, the Devil, vampires, ghouls, zombies, witches, warlocks, UFOs or other delusions; and in very few mundane individuals--politicians, lawyers, judges, priests, militarists, censors and just plain people. I respect the individual's right to abortion, suicide and euthanasia. I support birth control. I wish to Good that society were rid of smoking, drinking and drugs. My hope for humanity - and I think sensible science fiction has a beneficial influence in this direction - is that one day everyone born will be whole in body and brain, will live a long life free from physical and emotional pain, will participate in a fulfilling way in their contribution to existence, will enjoy true love and friendship, will pity us 20th century barbarians who lived and died in an atrocious, anachronistic atmosphere of arson, rape, robbery, kidnapping, child abuse, insanity, murder, terrorism, war, smog, pollution, starvation and the other negative “norms” of our current civilization. I have devoted my life to amassing over a quarter million pieces of sf and fantasy as a present to posterity and I hope to be remembered as an altruist who would have been an accepted citizen of Utopia.

The glow lasted through the night, beyond the bar's closing, when there were no cabs on the street. And so Mathilde and Lotto decided to walk home, her arm in his, chatting about nothing, about everything, the unpleasant, hot breath of the subway belching up from the grates. 'Chthonic', he said, booze letting loose the pretension at his core, which she still found sweet, an allowance from the glory. It was so late, there were few other people out, and it felt, just for this moment, that they had the city to themselves. She thought of all the life just underfoot, the teem of it that they were passing over, unknowing. She said, 'Did you know that the total weight of all the ants on Earth is the same as the total weight of all the humans on Earth.' She, who drank to excess, was a little bit drunk, it was true, there was so much relief in the evening. When the curtains closed against the backdrop, an enormous bolder blocking their future had rolled away. 'They'll still be here when we're gone,' he said. He was drinking from a flask. By the time they were home, he'd be sozzeled. 'The ants and the jellyfish and the cockroaches, they will be the kings of the Earth.'... 'They deserve this place more than we do,' she said. 'We've been reckless with our gifts.' He smiled and looked up. There were no stars, there was too much smog for them. 'Did you know,' he said, 'they just found out just a while ago that there are billions of worlds that can support life in our galaxy alone.' ...She felt a sting behind here eyes, but couldn't say why this thought touched her. He saw clear through and understood. He knew her. The things he didn't know about her would sink an ocean liner. He knew her. 'We're lonely down here,' he said, 'it's true, but we're not alone.' In the hazy space after he died, when she lived in a sort of timeless underground grief, she saw on the internet a video about what would happen to our galaxy in billions of years. We are in an immensely slow tango with the Andromeda galaxy, both galaxies shaped like spirals with outstretched arms, and we are moving toward each other like spinning bodies. The galaxies will gain speed as they draw near, casting off blue sparks, new stars until they spin past each other, and then the long arms of both galaxies will reach longingly out and grasp hands at the last moment and they will come spinning back in the opposite direction, their legs entwined, never hitting, until the second swirl becomes a clutch, a dip, a kiss, and then at the very center of things, when they are at their closest, there will open a supermassive black hole.

If the real human environment in developed countries today is third-growth monocultured “forests,” tar-sand petroleum, cow-burnt grasslands, and smog-like clouds of microplastics floating in oceans where fish once thrived, then human cultures need to distinguish between sentimentality about loss and the imperative to survive. They need to establish a more relevant politics than the competitive politics of nation-states. And to found economies built not on profit but on conservation.

And it was true, there were rocks and there was smog, but there was also stars. The city was like life itself: good and bad, pretty and ugly, kindness and cruelty all in one. But most important, it simply was. And that felt like a kind of magic too.

It was not a purer realm that loomed vastly over the city. Smokestacks punctured the membrane between the land and the air and disgorged tons of poisonous smog into that upper world as if out of spite. In a thicker, stinking haze just above the rooftops, the detritus from a million low chimneys eddied together. Crematoria vented into the airborne ashes of wills burnt by jealous executors, which mixed with coaldust burnt to keep dying lovers warm. Thousands of sordid smoke-ghosts wrapped New Crobuzon in a stench that suffocated like guilt.

Oh, Haifa. City of glistering grime, smog hovering over foamy sea. Of blocky apartment buildings facing the coast, topped with white water tanks crowded together like flocks of squat storks. Of palm trees and pine trees and electric wires, twisting green and black toward the chalky beachfront and rows of factory smokestacks. The way you put it once, Laith, your voice warped to mimic a radio announcer: 'Welcome to Haifa: you may die an early and also agonizing carcinogenic death, but at least you'll have a killer view from your hospital room.

DOCTOR AIN WAS recognized on the Omaha-Chicago flight. A biologist colleague from Pasadena came out of the toilet and saw Ain in an aisle seat. Five years before, this man had been jealous of Ain's huge grants. Now he nodded coldly and was surprised at the intensity of Ain's response. He almost turned back to speak, but he felt too tired; like nearly everyone, he was fighting the flu. The stewardess handing out coats after they landed remembered Ain too: A tall thin nondescript man with rusty hair. He held up the line staring at her; since he already had his raincoat with him she decided it was some kooky kind of pass and waved him on. She saw Ain shamble off into the airport smog, apparently alone. Despite the big Civil Defense signs, O'Hare was late getting underground. No one noticed the woman. - 'The Last Flight of Doctor Ain

The fog turned a strange yellow, then orange, then black. The gilded winged statue Victory at Buckingham Palace retreated into mist. St. Paul's was a hazy outline, ghostlike in the gloom. La Traviata at the Sadler's Wells theatre was terminated midway because the audience could no longer see the singers on stage. Pedestrians noticed how everything below the waist disappeared. Knees, shoes, dogs became indistinguishable. The Great Smog was days and nights of people and things passing out of sight and existence. It seemed a fitting time for a mother to evaporate.

A choking dry-ice smog of disappointment, pooling in the drops and troughs of suddenly uncertain ground. Mudyards, wit here and there the smoking wrecks of ideologies, their wheels and radios gone. River of litter rustling in a swollen course below the sky's black drag and in the ditches mustard gas, a mulch of sodden colouring books, imploded television sets. These are the fretful margins of twentieth century, the boomtowns ragged edge, out past the sink estates, the human landfill, where the wheelchair access paving quakes, gives way like sphagnum moss beneath our feet. It’s 1999, less like date than like a number we restore to in emergencies. pre-packaged in its national front hunting. It’s millennial mummy-wraps. The zeitgeist yawns, as echoing and hollow as the Greenwich dome. It’s April 10th; we find ourselves in red lion square....caught in the crosshairs of geography and time like sitting ducks, held always by surface tension of the instant, by the sensory dazzle. Constant play of light on neural ripples. Fluttering attention pinned to where and when and who we are. The honey-trap of our personal circumstance, of our familiar bodies restless in these chairs.

Ah, God, what an ugly city Ilium is! 'Ah, God,' says Bokonon, 'what an ugly city every city is!' Sleet was falling through a motionless blanket of smog. It was early morning. I was riding in the Lincoln sedan of Dr. Asa Breed. I was vaguely ill, still a little drunk from the night before. Dr. Breed was driving. Tracks of a long-abandoned trolley system kept catching the wheels of his car. Breed was a pink old man, very prosperous, beautifully dressed. His manner was civilized, optimistic, capable. I, by contrast, felt bristly, diseased, cynical. I had spent the night with Sandra. My soul seemed as foul as smoke from burning cat fur.

Over the years I have read many, many books about the future, my ‘we’re all doomed’ books, as Connie liked to call them. ‘All the books you read are either about how grim the past was or how gruesome the future will be. It might not be that way, Douglas. Things might turn out all right.’ But these were well-researched, plausible studies, their conclusions highly persuasive, and I could become quite voluble on the subject. Take, for instance, the fate of the middle-class, into which Albie and I were born and to which Connie now belongs, albeit with some protest. In book after book I read that the middle-class are doomed. Globalisation and technology have already cut a swathe through previously secure professions, and 3D printing technology will soon wipe out the last of the manufacturing industries. The internet won’t replace those jobs, and what place for the middle-classes if twelve people can run a giant corporation? I’m no communist firebrand, but even the most rabid free-marketeer would concede that market-forces capitalism, instead of spreading wealth and security throughout the population, has grotesquely magnified the gulf between rich and poor, forcing a global workforce into dangerous, unregulated, insecure low-paid labour while rewarding only a tiny elite of businessmen and technocrats. So-called ‘secure’ professions seem less and less so; first it was the miners and the ship- and steel-workers, soon it will be the bank clerks, the librarians, the teachers, the shop-owners, the supermarket check-out staff. The scientists might survive if it’s the right type of science, but where do all the taxi-drivers in the world go when the taxis drive themselves? How do they feed their children or heat their homes and what happens when frustration turns to anger? Throw in terrorism, the seemingly insoluble problem of religious fundamentalism, the rise of the extreme right-wing, under-employed youth and the under-pensioned elderly, fragile and corrupt banking systems, the inadequacy of the health and care systems to cope with vast numbers of the sick and old, the environmental repercussions of unprecedented factory-farming, the battle for finite resources of food, water, gas and oil, the changing course of the Gulf Stream, destruction of the biosphere and the statistical probability of a global pandemic, and there really is no reason why anyone should sleep soundly ever again. By the time Albie is my age I will be long gone, or, best-case scenario, barricaded into my living module with enough rations to see out my days. But outside, I imagine vast, unregulated factories where workers count themselves lucky to toil through eighteen-hour days for less than a living wage before pulling on their gas masks to fight their way through the unemployed masses who are bartering with the mutated chickens and old tin-cans that they use for currency, those lucky workers returning to tiny, overcrowded shacks in a vast megalopolis where a tree is never seen, the air is thick with police drones, where car-bomb explosions, typhoons and freak hailstorms are so commonplace as to barely be remarked upon. Meanwhile, in literally gilded towers miles above the carcinogenic smog, the privileged 1 per cent of businessmen, celebrities and entrepreneurs look down through bullet-proof windows, accept cocktails in strange glasses from the robot waiters hovering nearby and laugh their tinkling laughs and somewhere, down there in that hellish, stewing mess of violence, poverty and desperation, is my son, Albie Petersen, a wandering minstrel with his guitar and his keen interest in photography, still refusing to wear a decent coat.

Korea is often called the “Land of the Morning Calm.” It’s a country where you notice the filth and the smog on your first trip and you can’t imagine why you ever thought it was a good idea to visit. Then you meet the people and you walk among their culture and you get a sense there is something deeper beneath the surface, and before you know it, the smog doesn’t matter and the filth is gone—and in its place there is incredible beauty. The sun rises first over Japan, and as Korea is waiting for the earth to spin, for streaks of light to brighten its eastern sky, in that quiet moment there is a calmness that makes Korea the most beautiful country in the world.

The setting sun burned the sky pink and orange in the same bright hues as surfers’ bathing suits. It was beautiful deception, Bosch thought, as he drove north on the Hollywood Freeway to home. Sunsets did that here. Made you forget it was the smog that made their colors so brilliant, that behind every pretty picture there could be an ugly story.

Why else were we here except to love?

And the entire world was just as bad; it was perishing of pollution, drowning and suffocating in chemical and atomic poisons, detergents and insecticides, industrial effluvia, smog, the stench of sulfuric acid, the quantities of steel, cement, aluminum ever bright, eternal plastics, omnipresent paper, gas and electron floods - electro-mephitic city-stuff indeed!

It's hot as a barbecue the smog is pressed up against the foothills so that you can't even see them. everyone is irritated, but noone argues because noone can breathe. i laid on the couch in my bikini and watched His Girl Friday. I have decided that i will be a journalist like Josland Russel (in the movie) and not take any flak for anyone unless they look and act like Cary Grant.

A portmanteau is a word whose form and meaning are a blend of the forms and meanings of two other words. That’s a stuffy explanation for a fun class of words: consider “smog,” a blend of “smoke” and “fog,” or “brunch,” a blend of “breakfast” and “lunch.” “Portmanteau” is itself a portmanteau: it’s the medieval French word for a large suitcase and is a blend of porter (“ to carry”) and manteau (“ mantle, cloak”).

I looked up at the ivory towers above us all. Nowhere else equals the feral design of this city. Tall skyscrapers that act as gorges hollowing out between flat cement dancing into narrow alleyways like bottomless pits. Building walls rusted the color of blood. Sometimes when you look down the horizon from afar the city looks wider than it is, like a thin field of magical lights gleaming with the hopes of children and idealists; a light on at midnight in one of the penthouses or the changing hues of the Empire State Building. Most of the time though, the city is covered with a layer of honking cars and greed, sirens and the war cry of solicitors, all full of brambles and impenetrable conscience; garbage, steaming manholes, and heat waves twirling smog and pollution through your lungs like mirages as you walk breathlessly through a boiling desert.

Do you want to know my favorite?” My grip tightened on the railing. In. Out. “Andromeda.” Allister moved closer. “An autumn constellation, forty-four light-years away.” His steps were smooth and indifferent, but his voice was dry, as though he found my panic attack positively boring. His attitude brought a small rush of annoyance in, but it was suddenly swayed as my lungs contracted and wouldn’t release. I couldn’t keep a strangled gasp from escaping. “Look up.” It was an order, carrying a harsh edge. With no fight in me, I complied and tilted my head. Tears blurred my vision. Stars swam together and sparkled like diamonds. I was glad they weren’t. Humans would find a way to pluck them from the sky. “Andromeda is the dim, fuzzy star to the right. Find it.” My eyes searched it out. The stars weren’t often easy to see, hidden behind smog and the glow of city lights, but sometimes, on a lucky night like tonight, pollution cleared and they became visible. I found the star and focused on it. “Do you know her story?” he asked, his voice close behind me. A cold wind touched my cheeks, and I inhaled slowly. “Answer me.” “No,” I gritted. “Andromeda was boasted to be one of the most beautiful goddesses.” He moved closer, so close his jacket brushed my bare arm. His hands were in his pockets and his gaze was on the sky. “She was sacrificed for her beauty, tied to a rock by the sea.” I imagined her, a red-haired goddess with a heart of steel chained to a rock. The question bubbled up from the depths of me. “Did she survive?” His gaze fell to me. Down the tear tracks to the blood on my bottom lip. His eyes darkened, his jaw tightened, and he looked away. “She did.” I found the star again. Andromeda. “Ask me what her name means.” It was another rough demand, and I had the urge to refuse. To tell him to stop bossing me around. However, I wanted to know—I suddenly needed to. But he was already walking away, toward the exit. “Wait,” I breathed, turning to him. “What does her name mean?” He opened the door and a sliver of light poured onto the terrace. Black suit. Broad shoulders. Straight lines. His head turned just enough to meet my gaze. Blue. “It means ruler of men.” An icy breeze almost swallowed his words before they reached me, whipping my hair at my cheeks. And then he was gone.

The sound of diesel fuel rushing through grimy pistons and cylinders below a morning-fogged window bored through his ears like a deep-water drill bit, and the thump of his own heartbeat cursed him for breaking one of his many rules.

Why describe God as organic? More and more I realize that my own understanding of God is largely polluted. I have preconceived notions, thoughts and biases when it comes to God. I have a tendency to favor certain portions of Scripture over others. I have a bad habit of reading some stories with a been-there-done-that attitude, knowing the end of the story before it begins, and in the process denying God's ability to speak to me through it once again. ...The result is that my understanding and perception of God is clouded, much like the dingy haze of pollution that hands over most major cities. The person in the middle of a city looking up at the sky doesn't aways realize just how much their view and perceptions are altered by the smog. Without symptoms such as burning eyes or an official warning of scientists or media, no one may even notice just how bad the pollution has become. That's why I describe God as organic.

As melancholia replaced the jarring of my invention, I sat. Unable to breathe in the smog I had created, unable to stand on my betraying legs, unable to howl at the heavens over my sordid soul. In this inferno, I became paroxysmic, my self-hatred, superparamount, numbness dulling the agony of such a devilish act, An iron curtain fell upon the surrounding world, or at least what I had left of it to be owned by the laconic eclipse. All the angels fled, disowning my prayers, the lurid world backed away, leaving me forsaken and detached, I could no longer hear the bombings, hear them fall, my own fabrication, only the dead air that came after, the intense silence. Cynical and paralyzed, I realized I had purloined a portion of Hell and given it to the unwilling Earth, Punishing those I had no right to punish, judging those I had no reason to condemn, destroying cities I had never set foot in. This is how I became Death, the destroyer of Worlds.

Transcendental generosity is generally misunderstood in the study of the Buddhist scriptures as meaning being kind to someone who is lower than you.  Someone has this pain and suffering and you are in a superior position and can save them—which is a very simple-minded way of looking down on someone.  But in the case of the bodhisattva, generosity is not so callous.  It is something very strong and powerful; it is communication.   Communication must transcend irritation, otherwise it will be like trying to make a comfortable bed in a briar patch.  The penetrating qualities of external color, energy, and light will come toward us, penetrating our attempts to communicate like a thorn pricking our skin.  We will wish to subdue this intense irritation and our communication will be blocked.   Communication must be radiation and receiving and exchange.  Whenever irritation is involved, then we are not able to see properly and fully and clearly the spacious quality of that which is coming toward us, that which is presenting itself as communication.  The external world is immediately rejected by our irritation which says, “no, no, this irritates me, go away.”  Such an attitude is the complete opposite of transcendental generosity.   So the bodhisattva must experience the complete communication of generosity, transcending irritation and self-defensiveness.  Otherwise, when thorns threaten to prick us, we feel that we are being attacked, that we must defend ourselves.  We run away from the tremendous opportunity for communication that has been given to us, and we have not been brave enough even to look to the other shore of the river.  We are looking back and trying to run away.   Generosity is a willingness to give, to open without philosophical or pious or religious motives, just simply doing what is required at any moment in any situation, not being afraid to receive anything.  Opening could take place in the middle of a highway.  We are not afraid that smog and dust or people’s hatreds and passions will overwhelm us; we simply open, completely surrender, give.  This means that we do not judge, do not evaluate.  If we attempt to judge or evaluate our experience, if we try to decide to what extent we should open, to what extent we should remain closed, the openness will have no meaning at all and the idea of paramita, of transcendental generosity, will be in vain.  Our action will not transcend anything, will cease to be the act of a bodhisattva.   The whole implication of the idea of transcendence is that we see through the limited notions, the limited conceptions, the warfare mentality of this as opposed to that. Generally, when we look at an object, we do not allow ourselves to see it properly.  Automatically we see our version of the object instead of actually seeing the object as it is.  Then we are quite satisfied, because we have manufactured or own version of the thing within ourselves.   Then we comment on it, we judge, we take or reject; but there is on real communication going on at all.   Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, p.167, Chogyam Trungpa Rimpoche

It wasn't tuna ventresca that drew diners to this community over others, nor was it heritage beef. It was the final bottle of a 1985 Cannonau, salt-crusted from its time on the Sardinian coast. Each diner had barely a swallow. My employer bid us not to swallow, not yet, but hold the wine at the back of the throat till it stung and warmed to the temperature of blood and spit, till we wrung from it the terroir of fields cracked by quake and shadowed by smog; only then, swallowing, choking, grateful, did we appreciate the fullness of its flavor. His face was ferocious and sublime in this moment, cracked open; I saw it briefly behind the mask. He was a man who knew the gradations of pleasure because he knew, like me, the calculus of its loss. To me that wine was fig and plum; volcanic soil; wheat fields shading to salt stone; sun; leather, well-baked; and finally, most lingering, strawberry. Psychosomatic, I'm sure, but what flavor isn't? I raised my glass to the memory of my drunk in the British market. I imagined him sat across the table, calmed at last, sane among the sane. He would have tasted in that wine the starch of a laundered sheet, perhaps, or the clean smooth shot of his dignity. My employer decanted these deepest longings, mysterious to each diner until it flooded the palate: a lost child's yeasty scalp, the morning breath of a lover, huckleberries, onion soup, the spice of a redwood forest gone up in smoke. It is easy, all these years later, to dismiss that country's purpose as decadent, gluttonous. Selfish. It was those things. But it was, also, this connoisseurship of loss.

Smokers exist in every kitchen. It kills a tastebud or two but we all die, and no one knows better than those who club the fish, clean the guts from the meat, and serve for your delectation a plate from which all blood has been wiped. We cook despite bad pay and sore backs and inadequate sleeps in apartments we can't afford and we wake up choosing again that most temporary of glories that is made, and then consumed: we know. We all die. Whether it comes after thirty years of hard labor or sixty at a desk, whether we calculate or plan, in the end we have only the choice of what touches the lips before we go: lobster if you like it or cold pizza if you don't, a sip of smoke, a drink, a job, a reckless passion, raw fish, the beguilement of mushrooms, cheese luscious beneath its crown of mold. What sustains in the end are doomed romances, and nicotine, and crappy peanut butter, damn the additives and cholesterol because life is finite and not all nourishment can be measured. When I learned to smoke behind a restaurant, my breath curling toward an inconsolable sky, I learned what it means to live by the tongue, dumb beast, obedient to neither time nor money, past nor future, loyal to a now worth living. I took my cigarette to the filter, and for the first time I appraised my employer back. He claimed to have evolved past fear. He lied. Behind the mask was a damp, scared boy. Fear of toxins, fear of carcinogens, tear of flood and smog and protest and entropy and all that could not be optimized, controlled, bought and held behind glass. Fear fueled a country so intent on perfection that they would give up the world.

How Evolution Came to Indiana In Indianapolis they drive five hundred miles and end up where they started: survival of the fittest. In the swamps of Auburn and Elkhart, in the jungles of South Bend, one-cylinder chain-driven runabouts fall to air-cooled V-4’s, a-speed gearboxes, 16-horse flat-twin midships engines— carcasses left behind by monobloc motors, electric starters, 3-speed gears, six cylinders, 2-chain drive, overhead cams, supercharged to 88 miles an hour in second gear, the age of Leviathan ... There is grandeur in this view of life, as endless forms most beautiful and wonderful are being evolved. And then the drying up, the panic, the monsters dying: Elcar, Cord, Auburn, Duesenberg, Stutz—somewhere out there, the chassis of Studebakers, Marmons, Lafayettes, Bendixes, all rusting in high-octane smog, ashes to ashes, they end up where they started.

Here are the world's first brothers, Abel and Cain, sons of Adam and Eve. They lived when the world was young, when everything was much different than it is today. It was before the days of income tax and smog and clogged highways and the terrible problems we struggle with. Yet, despite the fact that they enjoyed what we call "the simple life," they longed for something better, they hungered after God. For no matter how good life is, it is never good enough if you do not have God. Man is never satisfied without Him, and these boys hungered for God. Both had been told the way by which they could come to Him; this is implied in the account. But Cain chose to believe a lie, the lie that is still very evident today, that "one way is as good as another." He took the way that was easiest for him to work out and as a result he was rejected; for, of course, it is always a lie that one way is as good as another. That never works in anything- nature, life, or with God.

The underlying assumption of this system is that wealth, leisure, comfort, health, and a long life belonged by right only to the dominant minority; while hard work and constant deprivation and denial, a 'slaves' diet and an early death, became the lot of the mass of men. Once this division was established, is it any wonder that the dreams of the working classes throughout history, at least in those relatively happy periods when they dared to tell each other fairy stories, was a desire for idle days and for a surfeit of material goods? These desires were kept from an explosive eruption, perhaps, by the institution of occasional feasts and carnivals. But the dreams of an existence which counterfeited closely that of the ruling classes, as the brummagen jewelry worn by the poor in Victorian England imitated in brass the gold baubles of the upper classes, have remained alive from age to age: indeed they are still an active ingredient in the fantasy of effortless affluence that currently hovers like a pink smog over Megalopolis.

DAYS ONE THROUGH SIX, ETC. You keep on asking me that – “Which day was the hardest?” Blockheads! They were all hard – And of course, since I’m omnipotent, they were all easy. It was Chaos, to begin with. Can you imagine Primeval Chaos? Of course you can’t. How long had it been swirling around out there? Forever. How long had I been there? Longer than that. It was a mess, that’s what it was. Chaos is Rocky. Fuzzy. Slippery. Prickly. As scraggly and obstreperous as the endless behind of an infinite jackass. Shove on it anywhere, it gives, then slips in behind you, like smog, like lava, like slag. I’m telling you, chaos is – chaotic. You see what I was up against. Who could make a world out of that muck? I could, that’s who – land from water, light from dark, and so on. It might seem like a piece of cake now that it’s done, but back then, without a blueprint, without a set of instructions, without a committee, could you have created a firmament? Of course there were bugs in the process, grit in the gears, blips, bloopers – bringing forth grass and trees on Day Three and not making sunlight until Day Four, that, I must say, wasn’t my best move. And making the animals and vegetables before there was any rain whatsoever – well, anyone can have a bad day. Even Adam, as it turned out, wasn’t such a great idea – those shifty eyes, the alibis, blaming things on his wife – I mean, it set a bad example. How could he expect that little toddler, Cain, to learn correct family values with a role model like him? And then there was the nasty squabble Over the beasts and birds. OK, I admit I told Adam to name them, but – Platypus? Aardvark? Hippopotamus? Let me make one thing perfectly clear – he didn’t get that gibberish from Me. No, I don’t need a planet to fall on Me, I know something about subtext. He did it to irritate Me, just plain spite – and did I need the aggravation? Well, as you know, things went from bad to worse, from begat to begat, father to son, the evil fruit of all that early bile. So next there was narcissism, then bigotry, then jealousy, rage, vengeance! And finally I realized, the spawn of Adam had become exactly like – Me. No Deity with any self-respect would tolerate that kind of competition, so what could I do? I killed them all, that’s what! Just as the Good Book says, I drowned man, woman, and child, like so many cats. Oh, I saved a few for restocking, Noah and his crew, the best of the lot, I thought. But now you’re back to your old tricks again, just about due for another good ducking, or maybe a giant barbecue. And I’m warning you, if I have to do it again, there won’t be any survivors, not even a cockroach! Then, for the first time since it was Primeval Chaos, the world will be perfect – nobody in it but Me.

Oedipa spent the next several days in and out of libraries and earnest discussions with Emory Bortz and Genghis Cohen. She feared a little for their security in view of what was happening to everyone else she knew. The day after reading Blobb's Peregrinations she, with Bortz, Grace, and the graduate students, attended Randolph Driblette's burial, listened to a younger brother's helpless, stricken eulogy, watched the mother, spectral in afternoon smog, cry, and came back at night to sit on the grave and drink Napa Valley muscatel, which Driblette in his time had put away barrels of. There was no moon, smog covered the stars, all black as a Tristero rider. Oedipa sat on the earth, ass getting cold, wondering whether, as Driblette had suggested that night from the shower, some version of herself hadn't vanished with him. Perhaps her mind would go on flexing psychic muscles that no longer existed; would be betrayed and mocked by a phantom self as the amputee is by a phantom limb. Someday she might replace whatever of her had gone away by some prosthetic device, a dress of a certain color, a phrase in a ' letter, another lover. She tried to reach out, to whatever coded tenacity of protein might improbably have held on six feet below, still resisting decay-any stubborn quiescence perhaps gathering itself for some last burst, some last scramble up through earth, just-glimmering, holding together with its final strength a transient, winged shape, needing to settle at once in the warm host, or dissipate forever into the dark. If you come to me, prayed Oedipa, bring your memories of the last night. Or if you have to keep down your payload, the last five minutes-that may be enough. But so I'll know if your walk into the sea had anything to do with Tristero. If they got rid of you for the reason they got rid of Hilarius and Mucho and Metzger-maybe because they thought I no longer needed you. They were wrong. I needed you. Only bring me that memory, and you can live with me for whatever time I've got. She remembered his head, floating in the shower, saying, you could fall in love with me. But could she have saved him? She looked over at the girl who'd given her the news of his death. Had they been in love? Did she know why Driblette had put in those two extra lines that night? Had he even known why? No one could begin to trace it. A hundred hangups, permuted, combined-sex, money, illness, despair with the history of his time and place, who knew. Changing the script had no clearer motive than his suicide. There was the same whimsy to both. Perhaps-she felt briefly penetrated, as if the bright winged thing had actually made it to the sanctuary of her heart-perhaps, springing from the same slick labyrinth, adding those two lines had even, in a way never to be explained, served him as a rehearsal for his night's walk away into that vast sink of the primal blood the Pacific. She waited for the winged brightness to announce its safe arrival. But there was silence. Driblette, she called. The signal echoing down twisted miles of brain circuitry. Driblette! But as with Maxwell's Demon, so now. Either she could not communicate, or he did not exist.

We tend to be unaware that stars rise and set at all. This is not entirely due to our living in cities ablaze with electric lights which reflect back at us from our fumes, smoke, and artificial haze. When I discussed the stars with a well-known naturalist, I was surprised to learn that even a man such as he, who has spent his entire lifetime observing wildlife and nature, was totally unaware of the movements of the stars. And he is no prisoner of smog-bound cities. He had no inkling, for instance, that the Little Bear could serve as a reliable night clock as it revolves in tight circles around the Pole Star (and acts as a celestial hour-hand at half speed - that is, it takes 24 hours rather than 12 for a single revolution). I wondered what could be wrong. Our modern civilization does not ignore the stars only because most of us can no longer see them. There are definitely deeper reasons. For even if we leave the sulphurous vapours of our Gomorrahs to venture into a natural landscape, the stars do not enter into any of our back-to-nature schemes. They simply have no place in our outlook any more. We look at them, our heads flung back in awe and wonder that they can exist in such profusion. But that is as far as it goes, except for the poets. This is simply a 'gee whiz' reaction. The rise in interest in astrology today does not result in much actual star-gazing. And as for the space programme's impact on our view of the sky, many people will attentively follow the motions of a visible satellite against a backdrop of stars whose positions are absolutely meaningless to them. The ancient mythological figures sketched in the sky were taught us as children to be quaint 'shepherds' fantasies' unworthy of the attention of adult minds. We are interested in the satellite because we made it, but the stars are alien and untouched by human hands - therefore vapid. To such a level has our technological mania, like a bacterial solution in which we have been stewed from birth, reduced us. It is only the integral part of the landscape which can relate to the stars. Man has ceased to be that. He inhabits a world which is more and more his own fantasy. Farmers relate to the skies, as well as sailors, camel caravans, and aerial navigators. For theirs are all integral functions involving the fundamental principle - now all but forgotten - of orientation. But in an almost totally secular and artificial world, orientation is thought to be un- necessary. And the numbers of people in insane asylums or living at home doped on tranquilizers testifies to our aimless, drifting metaphysic. And to our having forgotten orientation either to seasons (except to turn on the air- conditioning if we sweat or the heating system if we shiver) or to direction (our one token acceptance of cosmic direction being the wearing of sun-glasses because the sun is 'over there'). We have debased what was once the integral nature of life channelled by cosmic orientations - a wholeness - to the ennervated tepidity of skin sensations and retinal discomfort. Our interior body clocks, known as circadian rhythms, continue to operate inside us, but find no contact with the outside world. They therefore become ingrown and frustrated cycles which never interlock with our environment. We are causing ourselves to become meaningless body machines programmed to what looks, in its isolation, to be an arbitrary set of cycles. But by tearing ourselves from our context, like the still-beating heart ripped out of the body of an Aztec victim, we inevitably do violence to our psyches. I would call the new disease, with its side effect of 'alienation of the young', dementia temporalis.