“
When she catches you," the guard snarled, "my queen will eat your heart with salt and pepper." "Well," said Cinder, unconcerned, "my heart is half synthetic, so it'll probably give her indigestion." Kinney looked almost amused.
”
”
Marissa Meyer (Winter (The Lunar Chronicles, #4))
“
No dig saves time and keeps it simple, so that you can continue cropping all year without using synthetic feeds or poisons.
”
”
Charles Dowding (Charles Dowding's Skills for Growing)
“
We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and to create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible, in order to cater to them with the products of our factories and printing presses and movie studios and all the rest.
”
”
Thomas Merton (The Seven Storey Mountain)
“
what bothers me today is the lack of, well, i guess you'd call it authentic experience. so much is a sham. so much is artificial, synthetic, watered-down, and standardized...we're standardizing people, their goals, their ideas. the sham is everywhere.
”
”
Tom Robbins (Jitterbug Perfume)
“
If industrial man continues to multiply his numbers and expand his operations he will succeed in his apparent intention, to seal himself off from the natural and isolate himself within a synthetic prison of his own making.
”
”
Edward Abbey (Desert Solitaire)
“
I nodded with genuine synthetic sympathy.
”
”
Jeff Lindsay (Darkly Dreaming Dexter (Dexter, #1))
“
that is his head, containing a brain of a different brand than that of the synthetic jellies preserved in the skulls around him
”
”
Vladimir Nabokov (Pale Fire)
“
Keep thinking back about what Mum said about being real and the Velveteen Rabbit book (though frankly have had enough trouble with rabbits in this particular house). My favorite book, she claims of which I have no memory was about how little kids get one toy that they love more than all the others, and even when its fur has been rubbed off, and it's gone saggy with bits missing, the little child still thinks it's the most beautiful toy in the world, and can't bear to be parted from it.
That's how it works, when people really love each other, Mum whispered on the way out in the Debenhams lift, as if she was confessing some hideous and embarrassing secret. But, the thing is, darling, it doesn't happen to ones who have sharp edges, or break if they get dropped, or ones made of silly synthetic stuff that doesn't last. You have to be brave and let the other person know who you are and what you feel.
”
”
Helen Fielding (Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (Bridget Jones, #2))
“
if human beings really grasped how synthetic their world was - how much of it was stitched together not from direct perception, but from interpolation, memory, educated guesswork - they would go quietly mad.
”
”
Alastair Reynolds (Absolution Gap (Revelation Space, #3))
“
(Sir Albert)Howard put it this way:"Artificial manures (synthetic fertilizers)lead inevitably to artificial nutrition, artificial food, artificial animals and finally to artificial men and women.
”
”
Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals)
“
Forgetting that beauty and happiness are only ever incarnated in an individual person, we replace them in our minds by a conventional pattern, a sort of average of all the different faces we have ever admired, all the different pleasures we have ever enjoyed, and thus carry about with us abstract images, which are lifeless and uninspiring because they lack the very quality that something new, something different from what is familiar, always possesses, and which is the quality inseparable from real beauty and happiness. So we make our pessimistic pronouncements on life, which we think are valid, in the belief that we have taken account of beauty and happiness, whereas we have actually omitted them from consideration, substituting for them synthetic compounds that contain nothing of them.
”
”
Marcel Proust
“
you were the most beautiful thing i'd ever felt till now. and i was convinced you'd remain the most beautiful thing i'd ever feel. do you know how limiting that is. to think at such a ripe young age i'd experienced the most exhilarating person i'd ever meet. how i'd spend the rest of my life just settling. to think i'd tasted the rawest form of honey and everything else would be refined and synthetic. that nothing else would be refined and synthetic. that nothing beyond this point would add up. that all the years beyond me could not combine themselves to be sweeter than you.
- falsehood
”
”
Rupi Kaur (milk and honey)
“
Manufactured--synthetic--even virtual, if that is what you turned out to be--I would love you.
”
”
Sharon Shinn (Jenna Starborn)
“
Pain is inevitable, yet suffering is optional. It is our heart connections that make all the difference. When we experience mental, physical, emotional, or spiritual pain – love is the one medicine that transcends any synthetic or organic drug we use to suppress pain.
”
”
Alaric Hutchinson (Living Peace: Essential Teachings For Enriching Life)
“
Culture has lead us to betray our own aboriginal spirit and wholeness, into an ever-worsening realm of synthetic, isolating, impoverishing estrangement. Which is not to say that there are no more everyday pleasures, without which we would loose our humanness. But as our plight deepens, we glimpse how much must be erased for our redemption.
”
”
John Zerzan (Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization)
“
They say all foxes are slightly allergic to linoleum, but it's cool to the paw, try it. They say my tail needs to be dry cleaned twice a month, but now it's fully detachable, see? They say our tree may never grow back, but one day, something will. Yes, these crackles are made of synthetic goose and these giblets come from artificial squab and even these apples look fake—but at least they've got stars on them. I guess my point is, we'll eat tonight, and we'll eat together. And even in this not particularly flattering light, you are without a doubt the five and a half most wonderful wild animals I've ever met in my life.
”
”
Wes Anderson
“
Every act he performed was self-haunted and synthetic.
”
”
Don DeLillo (Cosmopolis)
“
At night, the creature that was the Garden peeled back its synthetic skin to show the skeleton beneath.
”
”
Dot Hutchison (The Butterfly Garden (The Collector, #1))
“
In order to be labeled organic, a crop must be grown without the use of certain synthetic pesticides and fertilizers, as specified by the USDA. Though produced with fewer synthetic compounds, organic vegetables are not necessarily tastier or more nutritious than their conventional counterparts. Also keep in mind that the certification process is often too expensive for small farms even though their practices may meet or exceed those set by the USDA. The smallest farms-those selling less than $5,000 worth of crops annually-may by law label their produce organic without being inspected or certified. Rather than rely on labeling, we prefer, when possible, to buy locally grown vegetables in their season.
”
”
Irma S. Rombauer (Joy of Cooking)
“
Today we come across an individual who behaves like an automaton, who does not know or understand himself, and the only person that he knows is the person that he is supposed to be, whose meaningless chatter has replaced communicative speech, whose synthetic smile has replaced genuine laughter, and whose sense of dull despair has taken the place of genuine pain.
”
”
Erich Fromm
“
Time spent for temporary happiness like movie or outing or weekend on a beach is all synthetic; with shelf life of a day or two. Work for your bigger dreams that should last for whole life. Then movie and beach would seem more interesting, realising that you have done something.
”
”
Vikrmn: CA Vikram Verma (Guru with Guitar)
“
Leadership cannot be created synthetically. Men must be what they were made by the Almighty or the American people will find them out in time.
”
”
Herbert Hoover
“
The coming wave is defined by two core technologies: artificial intelligence (AI) and synthetic biology.
”
”
Mustafa Suleyman (The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma)
“
My knowledge of myself is direct, synthetic, from within outwards; my knowledge of other persons is indirect, analytical, from outside inwards. My knowledge of myself starts at the core; that of others at the crust.
”
”
Salvador de Madariaga (Essays with a Purpose)
“
The rest of us, not chosen for enlightenment, left on the outside of Earth, at the mercy of a Gravity we have only begun to learn how to detect and measure, must go on blundering inside our front-brain faith in Kute Korrespondences, hoping that for each psi-synthetic taken from Earth's soul there is a molecule, secular, more or less ordinary and named, over here - kicking endlessly among the plastic trivia, finding in each Deeper Significance and trying to string them all together like terms of a power series hoping to zero in on the tremendous and secret Function whose name, like the permuted names of God, cannot be spoken... plastic saxophone reed sounds of unnatural timbre, shampoo bottle ego-image, Cracker Jack prize one-shot amusement, home appliance casing fairing for winds of cognition, baby bottles tranquilization, meat packages disguise of slaughter, dry-cleaning bags infant strangulation, garden hoses feeding endlessly the desert... but to bring them together, in their slick persistence and our preterition... to make sense out of, to find the meanest sharp sliver of truth in so much replication, so much waste... [Gravity's Rainbow, p. 590]
”
”
Thomas Pynchon
“
An Urban Indian belongs to the city, and cities belong to the earth. Everything here is formed in relation to every other living and nonliving thing from the earth. All our relations. The process that brings anything to its current form—chemical, synthetic, technological, or otherwise—doesn’t make the product not a product of the living earth. Buildings, freeways, cars—are these not of the earth? Were they shipped in from Mars, the moon? Is it because they’re processed, manufactured, or that we handle them? Are we so different? Were we at one time not something else entirely, Homo sapiens, single-celled organisms, space dust, unidentifiable pre-bang quantum theory? Cities form in the same way as galaxies.
”
”
Tommy Orange (There There)
“
I have reached far beyond my competence and have probably secured for good a reputation for flamboyant gestures. But the times still crowd me and give me no rest, and I see no way to avoid ambitious synthetic attempts; either we get some kind of grip on the accumulation of thought or we continue to wallow helplessly, to starve amidst plenty. So I gamble with science and write.
”
”
Ernest Becker (Escape from Evil)
“
A lot of business opportunities exist at the intersection of synthetic biology and material ecology.
”
”
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
If I cannot read and learn and have things that are worth thinking about, I would rather immolate myself than go on living. Synthetic
”
”
Walter Tevis (Mockingbird)
“
What sets the new synthetic insecticides is their enormous biological potency.
”
”
Rachel Carson (Silent Spring)
“
When had she so internalized the feeling that if something wasn’t great she needed to bridge the gap between reality and idealism with her own manufactured enthusiasm? Her enthusiasm was like one of those faux snow machines at a ski resort. For most of her life it had been churning out synthetic delight. It had basically forgotten the original recipe.
”
”
Alissa Nutting (Made for Love)
“
When I'm your boss, I'm implementing a corporate support uniform policy. No more of your weird little retro costumes. I've already got it circled in the Corporate Wear catalog. A gray shift dress." He pauses for effect. "Polyester. It's supposed to be knee length, so it should reach your ankles."
I am insanely sensitive about my height and I absolutely hate synthetic fibers.
”
”
Sally Thorne (The Hating Game)
“
I consider myself a synthetic thinker in a virtual domain therefore if I’m way off there is no solid foundation or reference for authentic stupidity.
”
”
Carl Henegan (Darkness Left Undone)
“
Artist paint images unseen, musicians create sounds that emerge from silence, and authors write from a synthetic point of view about a world that can never exist.
”
”
Carl Henegan
“
Of the animals I saw, I could write volumes. All were wild; for the Great Race's mechanised culture had long since done away with domestic beasts, while food was wholly vegetable or synthetic.
”
”
H.P. Lovecraft
“
Pass by the synthetic yarn department, then, with your nose in the air. Should a clerk come out with the remark that All Young Mothers In This Day and Age (why can't they save their breath and say "now"?) insist on a yarn which can be machine-washed and machine-dried, come back at her with the reply that one day, you suppose, they will develop a baby that can be machine-washed and -dried.
”
”
Elizabeth Zimmermann (Elizabeth Zimmermann's Knitter's Almanac)
“
All this has come about because of the sudden rise and prodigious growth of an industry for the production of man-made or synthetic chemicals with insecticidal properties. This industry is a child of the Second World War. In the course of developing agents of chemical warfare, some of the chemicals created in the laboratory were found to be lethal to insects. The discovery did not come by chance: insects were widely used to test chemicals as agents of death for man.
”
”
Rachel Carson (Silent Spring)
“
There’s something hypnotic about the word ‘tea’. I’m asking you to enjoy the beauties of the English countryside; to tell me your adventures and hear mine; to plan a campaign involving the comfort and reputation of two-hundred people; to honor me with your sole presence and to bestow upon me the illusion of paradise, and I speak as though the pre-eminent object of all desire were a pot of boiled water and a plateful of synthetic pastries in Ye Olde Worlde Tudor Tea Shoppe.
”
”
Dorothy L. Sayers (Gaudy Night (Lord Peter Wimsey, #12))
“
I'm 100% natural. No silicon, no synthetic hormones or steroids, no artificial flavors, colors or preservatives.
”
”
Jayde Scott (A Job From Hell (Ancient Legends, #1))
“
Synthetic chocolate sounds wrong.
”
”
Missy Lyons (Alien Promise)
“
Fear not the waking world, my mortal,
Fear not the flat, synthetic blood,
Nor the heart in the ribbing metal.
Fear not the tread, the seeded milling,
The trigger and scythe, the bridal blade,
Nor the flint in the lover's mauling.
”
”
Dylan Thomas
“
What bothers me today is the lack of, well, I guess you'd call it authentic experience. So much is a sham. So much is artificial, synthetic, watered-down, and standardized. You know, less than half a century ago there were sixty-three varieties of lettuce in California alone. Today, there are four. And they are not the four best lettuces, either; not the most tasty or nutritious. They are the hybrid lettuces with built-in shelf life, the ones that have a safe, clean, consistent look in the supermarket. It's that way with so many things. We're even standardizing people, their goals, their ideas. The sham is everywhere.
”
”
Tom Robbins (Jitterbug Perfume)
“
And there’s no synthetic owners manual?” His lips twitched, smile threatening to break into a grin.
A joke. He wasn’t funny. “Do you come with an owners’ manual, Captain? Because I’d like to study your troubleshooting section.”
“Would you like to strip me down to my nuts and bolts, and figure out what makes me tick?”
“I knew what made you tick from the moment we first met. That’s why I punched you between the legs.”
~ #1001 & Caleb
”
”
Pippa DaCosta (Girl From Above: Trapped (The 1000 Revolution, #3))
“
It’s not about how women are deficient. It’s more about how men are deficient. Our social deficiencies, lack of perspective, or whatever you want to call it, is what enables us to study one species of dragonfly for twenty years, or sit in front of a computer for a hundred hours a week writing code. This is not the behavior of a well-balanced and healthy person, but it can obviously lead to great advances in synthetic fibers. Or whatever.
”
”
Neal Stephenson (Cryptonomicon)
“
The daughter of Lithuanian immigrants, born with a precocious scientific intellect and a thirst for chemical knowledge, Elion had completed a master's degree in chemistry from New York University in 1941 while teaching high school science during the day and preforming her research for her thesis at night and on the weekends. Although highly qualified, talented, and driven, she had been unable to find a job in an academic laboratory. Frustrated by repeated rejections, she had found a position as a supermarket product supervisor. When Hitchings found Trudy Elion, who would soon become on of the most innovative synthetic chemists of her generation (and a future Nobel laureate), she was working for a food lab in New York, testing the acidity of pickles and the color of egg yolk going into mayonnaise. Rescued from a life of pickles and mayonnaise…
”
”
Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer)
“
The bulletproof vest--'bullet resistant,' technically--is made of two double panels of a synthetic material called Kevlar, inside a cloth carrier that holds it around your torso like a lead X-ray smock. One cop wrote phrases from the Bible on his, 'Yea, though I walk in the valley of the Shadow of Death...' Other cops wrote their blood type.
”
”
Edward Conlon (Blue Blood by Conlon, Edward (2004) Paperback)
“
We live in an age in which saving is subterfuge for spending. No doubt you sincerely believe that there is margarine in your refrigerator because it is more economical than butter. But you are wrong. Look in your bread drawer. How many boxes of cute snack crackers are there? How many packages of commercial cookies reeking of imitation vanilla badly masked with oil of coconut? How many presweetened breakfast cereals? Tell me now that you bought the margarine because you couldn't afford butter. You see - you can't. You bought the bread drawer of goodies because you were conned into them; and you omitted the butter because you were conned out of it. The world has slipped you culinary diagrams instead of food. It counts on your palate being not only wooden, but buried under ten coats of synthetic varnish as well. Therefore, the next time you go to check out of the supermarket, simply put back one box of crackers, circle round the dairy case again, swap your margarine for a pound of butter and walk up to the checker with your head held high, like the last of the big spenders. This is no time for cost-counters: It is time to be very rich or very poor - or both at once.
”
”
Robert Farrar Capon (The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection (Modern Library Food))
“
Hedge funds have made massive leveraged credit bets, knowing that their upside is billions in fees and their downside is millions in fees.
”
”
Janet M. Tavakoli (Structured Finance and Collateralized Debt Obligations: New Developments in Cash and Synthetic Securitization)
“
Be more dedicated to making solid achievements than in running after swift but synthetic happiness,
”
”
A.P.J. Abdul Kalam (Wings of Fire)
“
synthetic judgments a priori should not "be possible" at all; we have no right to them; in our mouths they are nothing but false judgments.
”
”
Friedrich Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil (Illustrated))
“
Then, first of all, let us admit that there is no such thing as objectivity, no such objective fact as objectivity. Objectivity is a fabricated concept, a synthetic intellectual construction...
”
”
Richard Wright (White Man, Listen!)
“
Charlotte leveled him with a glare the likes of which he had never seen in synthetic women. It seemed to penetrate his every cell, as though she were watching him decay one picosecond at a time
”
”
Madeline Ashby (vN (The Machine Dynasty, #1))
“
The chemicals to which life is asked to make its adjustment are no longer merely the calcium and silica and copper and all the rest of the minerals washed out of the rocks and carried in rivers to the sea; they are the synthetic creations of man’s inventive mind, brewed in his laboratories, and having no counterparts in nature.
”
”
Rachel Carson (Silent Spring)
“
The moderns, carrying little baggage of the kind that Shelly called "merely cultural," not even living in the traditional air, but breathing into their space helmets a scientific mixture of synthetic gases (and polluted at that) are the true pioneers. Their circuitry seems to include no atavistic domestic sentiment, they have suffered empathectomy, their computers hum no ghostly feedback of Home, Sweet Home. How marvelously free they are! How unutterably deprived!
”
”
Wallace Stegner (Angle of Repose)
“
We hold these truths to be self-evident.
{Franklin's edit to the assertion in Thomas Jefferson's original wording, 'We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable' in a draft of the Declaration of Independence changes it instead into an assertion of rationality. The scientific mind of Franklin drew on the scientific determinism of Isaac Newton and the analytic empiricism of David Hume and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. In what became known as 'Hume's Fork' the latters' theory distinguished between synthetic truths that describe matters of fact, and analytic truths that are self-evident by virtue of reason and definition.}
”
”
Benjamin Franklin
“
Do you want a drink?” “You mean synthetic blood,” she said after a slight hesitation. “Yes, that would be nice. A sociable gesture.” “I’m all about the gestures. Bubba, you, too?” “Yes, ma’am, I reckon so,” he said.
”
”
Charlaine Harris (Deadlocked (Sookie Stackhouse, #12))
“
A lot of business opportunities exist at the intersection of synthetic biology and material ecology. And when that's applied at global systems level scale, it has multiplicative value effect for humanity as a whole.
”
”
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
4. The falseness of an opinion is not for us any objection to it: it is here, perhaps, that our new language sounds most strangely. The question is, how far an opinion is life-furthering, life- preserving, species-preserving, perhaps species-rearing, and we are fundamentally inclined to maintain that the falsest opinions (to which the synthetic judgments a priori belong), are the most indispensable to us, that without a recognition of logical fictions, without a comparison of reality with the purely IMAGINED world of the absolute and immutable, without a constant counterfeiting of the world by means of numbers, man could not live—that the renunciation of false opinions would be a renunciation of life, a negation of life. TO RECOGNISE UNTRUTH AS A CONDITION OF LIFE; that is certainly to impugn the traditional ideas of value in a dangerous manner, and a philosophy which ventures to do so, has thereby alone placed itself beyond good and evil.
”
”
Friedrich Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil)
“
Ecstasy is only recognizable when one has experienced pain. Beauty only exists when set against ugliness. Peace is not appreciated without war ahead of it. How we wish that life could support only the good. But it vanishes when its opposite no longer exists as a setting. It is a white marble on unmelting snow. And Jimmy stands clear and unique in a world where much is synthetic and dishonest and drab. He came and rearranged our molecules.
”
”
Shaun Usher (Letters of Note: Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience)
“
In order for grass to grow and be green, it has to be watered often. If the sky is al- ways sunny and bright, there is no way the grass will grow and become greener. It will become brittle, dry, and it will change colors and eventually die. Unless their grass is synthetic, most definitely you will see that people with green grass have been surprised with numerous battles.
When we think about it, people who seem to have trouble-free lives are often the same ones who are still in the same place after time has passed. Their synthetic grass is still shining green, but the one catch is that it hasn’t grown because they haven’t received showers and battled the storms of life.
”
”
Charlena E. Jackson (No Cross No Crown)
“
I’d removed all but my underclothes, that night I took you home. Took off all the drab corporate synthetics as if stripping my armor to uncover the vulnerable man I was underneath it.
The man who needed to be near you.
I’d pressed my back into your solid length, eyes wet as I fell asleep.
That’s why I was calm.
”
”
Julio Alexi Genao (When You Were Pixels (Syntax #0.1))
“
If all bank loans were paid, no one would have a bank deposit, and there would not be a dollar of currency or coin in circulation.
This is a staggering thought. We are completely dependent on the commercial banks. Someone has to borrow every dollar we have in circulation, cash or credit. If the banks create ample synthetic money, we are prosperous; if not, we starve. We are absolutely without a permanent monetary system.
When one gets a complete grasp upon this picture, the tragic absurdity of our helpless position is almost incredible–but there it is.
”
”
Robert H. Hemphill
“
The ads have also helped manufacture a sense of panic about time, depicting families so rushed and harried in the morning that there is no time to make breakfast, not even to pour some milk over a bowl of cereal. No, the only hope is to munch on a cereal bar (iced with synthetic “milk” frosting) in the bus or car. (Tell me: Why can’t these hassled families set their alarm clocks, like, ten minutes earlier?!)
”
”
Michael Pollan (Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation)
“
True artistry in perfumery is the marriage of notes that may juxtapose each other but become harmonious in a blend. Born of pure creativity and an astounding knowledge of literally thousands of synthetics and hundreds of Essential oils, they must possess the ability to marry disparate and conjugal notes into a harmonious blend.
”
”
Marian Bendeth
“
Perhaps the most serious obstacle impeding the evolution of a land ethic is the fact that our educational and economic system is headed away from, rather than toward, an intense consciousness of land. Your true modern is separated from the land by many middlemen, and by innumerable physical gadgets. He has no vital relation to it; to him it is the space between cities on which crops grow. Turn him loose for a day on the land, and if the spot does not happen to be a golf links or a "scenic" area, he is bored stiff. If crops could be raised by hydroponics instead of farming, it would suit him very well. Synthetic substitutes for wood, leather, wool, and other natural land products suit him better than the originals. In short, land is something he has "outgrown
”
”
Aldo Leopold
“
Like memory, history was synthetic. Humans thought of both as factual records, but study after study confirmed that they were more like dreams, narratives constructed and reconstructed by the mind to fit the demands of the present, not the reality of the past.
”
”
Eliot Peper (Bandwidth (Analog #1))
“
But the self is precisely the integrator; it is the synthetic unity, as Kant said. It is the artist of life. It is only a small factor in the total organism/environment interaction, but it plays the crucial role of finding and making the meanings that we grow by.
”
”
Paul Goodman (Gestalt Therapy: Excitement & Growth in the Human Personality)
“
...our brains are minuscule fragments of the universe, much too small to hold all the facts of the world but not too idle to speculate about them.
”
”
Valentino Braitenberg (Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology)
“
it seems to me that, on balance, soul/body dualism has been the enemy of compassion. For instance, the moral stigma that still surrounds disorders of mood and cognition seems largely the result of viewing the mind as distinct from the brain. When the pancreas fails to produce insulin, there is no shame in taking synthetic insulin to compensate for its lost function.
”
”
Sam Harris (The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values)
“
That very afternoon the police arrived at Cho Oyu in a line of toad-colored jeeps that appeared through the moving static of a small anxious sleet. They left their opened umbrellas in a row on the veranda, but the wind undid them and they began to wheel about - mostly black ones that leaked a black dye, but also a pink, synthetic made-in-Taiwan one, abloom with flowers.
”
”
Kiran Desai (The Inheritance of Loss)
“
It is true that the materialistic society, the so-called culture that has evolved under the tender mercies of capitalism, has produced what seems to be the ultimate limit of this worldliness. And nowhere, except perhaps in the analogous society of pagan Rome, has there ever been such a flowering of cheap and petty and disgusting lusts and vanities as in the world of capitalism, where there is no evil that is not fostered and encouraged for the sake of making money. We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and to create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible, in order to cater to them with the products of our factories and printing presses and movie studios and all the rest.
”
”
Thomas Merton (The Seven Storey Mountain)
“
Hard to believe that it was only ten minutes ago that this actually seemed like a good idea,’ Otto said, staring at the tiny cars passing by on the street hundreds of metres below him.
I would like it noted that I have never classified what you are about to do as a ‘good idea’, a calm voice with a slight synthetic edge said inside Otto’s head.
”
”
Mark Walden (Deadlock (H.I.V.E., #8))
“
Despite my earlier concerns, I realised now I didn't care that his emotions were synthetic. I didn't care that he was programmed to suit me, to want me, to smile when he saw me. I didn't care that his love for me was binary coded, programmed. It was real to me. And in many ways, it was more real that anything I'd had with any human. Human love came with conditions and limits, with mess and noise, and was fleeting at best
Shaun's love wasn't. It was forever and completely, unequivocally mine.
”
”
N.R. Walker (Evolved)
“
In theoretical, metaphorical terms, the idea I began to explore was this one: that teaching is nothing like the art of painting, where, by the addition of material to a surface, an image is synthetically produced, but more like the art of sculpture, where, by the subtraction of material, an image already locked in the stone is enabled to emerge. It is a crucial distinction.
”
”
John Taylor Gatto (Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling)
“
Our cultures used to be almost hereditary, but now we choose them from a menu as various as the food court of a suburban shopping mall. Ambition, curiosity, talent, sexuality or religion can draw us to new cities and cultures, where we become foreigners to our parents. Synthetic cultures are nimbler than old ones, often imprudently so. They have scattered so widely that they can no longer hear each other and now some have gone so far afield that they have passed through the apocalypse while the rest of us are watching it on TV.
”
”
Neal Stephenson (Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing)
“
On Harlan’s World, you don’t see many mandroids. They’re expensive to build, compared to a synthetic or even a clone, and most jobs that require a human form are better done by those organic alternatives. The truth is that a robot human is a pointless collision of two disparate functions: artificial intelligence, which really works better strung out on a mainframe, and hard-wearing, hazard-proof bodywork, which most cyberengineering firms designed to spec for the task at hand. The last robot I’d seen on the World was a gardening crab.
”
”
Richard K. Morgan (Altered Carbon (Takeshi Kovacs, #1))
“
For me it's connection-the pleasure of an expansive, long-ranging dinner conversation with people who do all sorts of things and being able to come back to that night, night after night, and pick up threads and follow them. There's a voyeuristic pleasure, there's a synthetic pleasure, but primarily it's the pleasure of being able to live in a frame of time that the rest of life conspires to annihilate.
”
”
Richard Powers
“
Science and reason have, from the beginning of time, played a secondary and subordinate part in the life of nations; so it will be till the end of time. Nations are built up and moved by another force which sways and dominates them, the origin of which is unknown and inexplicable: that force is the force of an insatiable desire to go on to the end, though at the same time it denies that end. It is the force of the persistent assertion of one's own existence, and a denial of death. It's the spirit of life, as the Scriptures call it, 'the river of living water,' the drying up of which is threatened in the Apocalypse. It's the æsthetic principle, as the philosophers call it, the ethical principle with which they identify it, 'the seeking for God,' as I call it more simply. The object of every national movement, in every people and at every period of its existence is only the seeking for its god, who must be its own god, and the faith in Him as the only true one. God is the synthetic personality of the whole people, taken from its beginning to its end. It has never happened that all, or even many, peoples have had one common god, but each has always had its own. It's a sign of the decay of nations when they begin to have gods in common. When gods begin to be common to several nations the gods are dying and the faith in them, together with the nations themselves. The stronger a people the more individual their God. There never has been a nation without a religion, that is, without an idea of good and evil. Every people has its own conception of good and evil, and its own good and evil. When the same conceptions of good and evil become prevalent in several nations, then these nations are dying, and then the very distinction between good and evil is beginning to disappear. Reason has never had the power to define good and evil, or even to distinguish between good and evil, even approximately; on the contrary, it has always mixed them up in a disgraceful and pitiful way; science has even given the solution by the fist. This is particularly characteristic of the half-truths of science, the most terrible scourge of humanity, unknown till this century, and worse than plague, famine, or war. A half-truth is a despot... such as has never been in the world before. A despot that has its priests and its slaves, a despot to whom all do homage with love and superstition hitherto inconceivable, before which science itself trembles and cringes in a shameful way.
”
”
Fyodor Dostoevsky (Demons)
“
For us, the falsity of a judgment is still no objection to that judgment — that’s where our new way of speaking sounds perhaps most strange. The question is the extent to which it makes demands on life, sustains life, maintains the species, perhaps even creates species. And as a matter of principle we are ready to assert that the falsest judgments (to which a priori synthetic judgments belong) are the most indispensable to us, that without our allowing logical fictions to count, without a way of measuring reality against the purely invented world of the unconditional and self-identical, without a constant falsification of the world through numbers, human beings could not live — that if we managed to give up false judgments, it would amount to a renunciation of life, a denial of life.
To concede the fictional nature of the conditions of life means, of course, taking a dangerous stand against the customary feelings about value. A philosophy which dares to do that is for this reason alone already standing beyond good and evil.
”
”
Friedrich Nietzsche (Além do Bem e do Mal)
“
In the words of Erich Fromm, an astute observer of the roots and fruits of the Personality Ethic: Today we come across an individual who behaves like an automaton, who does not know or understand himself, and the only person that he knows is the person that he is supposed to be, whose meaningless chatter has replaced communicative speech, whose synthetic smile has replaced genuine laughter, and whose sense of dull despair has taken the place of genuine pain. Two statements may be said concerning this individual. One is that he suffers from defects of spontaneity and individuality which may seem to be incurable. At the same time it may be said of him he does not differ essentially from the millions of the rest of us who walk upon this earth.
”
”
Stephen R. Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change)
“
So should we ban or restrict synthetic chemicals until we have a full understanding of their effects? This attractively simple idea is a lot more complicated than it appears. If pesticides were banned, agricultural yields would decline, fruits and vegetables would get more expensive and people would buy and eat fewer of them. But cancer scientists believe that fruits and vegetables can reduce the risk of cancer if we eat enough of them, which most people do not do even now. And so banning pesticides in order to reduce exposure to carcinogens could potentially result in more people getting cancer.
”
”
Daniel Gardner (The Science of Fear: Why We Fear the Things We Shouldn't--and Put Ourselves in Greater Danger)
“
To begin with, there is the frightful debauchery of taste that has already been effected by a century of mechanisation. This is almost too obvious and too generally admitted to need pointing out. But as a single instance, take taste in its narrowest sense - the taste for decent food. In the highly mechanical countries, thanks to tinned food, cold storage, synthetic flavouring matters, etc., the palate it almost a dead organ. As you can see by looking at any greengrocer’s shop, what the majority of English people mean by an apple is a lump of highly-coloured cotton wool from America or Australia; they will devour these things, apparently with pleasure, and let the English apples rot under the trees. It is the shiny, standardized, machine-made look of the American apple that appeals to them; the superior taste of the English apple is something they simply do not notice. Or look at the factory-made, foil wrapped cheeses and ‘blended’ butter in an grocer’s; look at the hideous rows of tins which usurp more and more of the space in any food-shop, even a dairy; look at a sixpenny Swiss roll or a twopenny ice-cream; look at the filthy chemical by-product that people will pour down their throats under the name of beer. Wherever you look you will see some slick machine-made article triumphing over the old-fashioned article that still tastes of something other than sawdust. And what applies to food applies also to furniture, houses, clothes, books, amusements and everything else that makes up our environment. These are now millions of people, and they are increasing every year, to whom the blaring of a radio is not only a more acceptable but a more normal background to their thoughts than the lowing of cattle or the song of birds. The mechanisation of the world could never proceed very far while taste, even the taste-buds of the tongue, remained uncorrupted, because in that case most of the products of the machine would be simply unwanted. In a healthy world there would be no demand for tinned food, aspirins, gramophones, gas-pipe chairs, machine guns, daily newspapers, telephones, motor-cars, etc. etc.; and on the other hand there would be a constant demand for the things the machine cannot produce. But meanwhile the machine is here, and its corrupting effects are almost irresistible. One inveighs against it, but one goes on using it. Even a bare-arse savage, given the change, will learn the vices of civilisation within a few months. Mechanisation leads to the decay of taste, the decay of taste leads to demand for machine-made articles and hence to more mechanisation, and so a vicious circle is established.
”
”
George Orwell (The Road to Wigan Pier)
“
12. Each symbol, moreover, admits of interpretation upon the different planes, and through its astrological associations can be related to the gods of any pantheon, thus opening up vast new fields of implication in which the mind ranges endlessly, symbol leading on to symbol in an unbroken chain of associations; symbol confirming symbol as the many-branching threads gather themselves together into a synthetic glyph once more, and each symbol capable of interpretation in terms of whatever plane the mind may be functioning upon. 13. This mighty, all-embracing glyph of the soul of man and of the universe, by virtue of its logical association of symbols, evokes images in the mind; but these images are not randomly evolved, but follow along well-defined association-tracks in the Universal Mind. The symbol of the Tree is to the Universal Mind what the dream is to the individual ego; it is a glyph synthesized from subconsciousness to represent the hidden forces.
”
”
Dion Fortune (The Mystical Qabalah)
“
He meditated resentfully on the physical texture of life. Had it always been like this? Had food always tasted like this? He looked round the canteen. A low-ceilinged, crowded room, its walls grimy from the contact of innumerable bodies; battered metal tables and chairs, placed so close together that you sat with elbows touching; bent spoons, dented trays, coarse white mugs; all surfaces greasy, grime in every crack; and a sourish, composite smell of bad gin and bad coffee and metallic stew and dirty clothes. Always in your stomach and in your skin there was a sort of protest, a feeling that you had been cheated of something that you had a right to. It was true that he had no memories of anything greatly different. In any time that he could accurately remember, there had never been quite enough to eat, one had never had socks or underclothes that were not full of holes, furniture had always been battered and rickety, rooms underheated, tube trains crowded, houses falling to pieces, bread dark-coloured, tea a rarity, coffee filthy-tasting, cigarettes insufficient -- nothing cheap and plentiful except synthetic gin. And though, of course, it grew worse as one's body aged, was it not a sign that this was not the natural order of things, if one's heart sickened at the discomfort and dirt and scarcity, the interminable winters, the stickiness of one's socks, the lifts that never worked, the cold water, the gritty soap, the cigarettes that came to pieces, the food with its strange evil tastes? Why should one feel it to be intolerable unless one had some kind of ancestral memory that things had once been different?
”
”
George Orwell (1984)
“
Because one must produce,
one must by all possible means of activity replace nature wherever it can be replaced,
one must find a major field of action for human inertia,
the worker must have something to keep him busy,
new fields of activity must be created,
in which we shall see at last the reign
of all the fake manufactured products,
of all the vile synthetic substitutes
in which beautiful real nature has no part,
and must give way finally and shamefully
before all the victorious
substitute products
in which the sperm
of all the artificial insemination factories
will make a miracle
in order to produce armies and battleships.
No more fruit, no more trees, no more vegetables, no more plants pharmaceutical or otherwise
and consequently no more food,
but synthetic products to satiety,
amid the fumes,
amid the special humors of the atmosphere,
on the particular axes of atmospheres wrenched violently and synthetically from the resistances of a nature which has known nothing of war except fear.
”
”
Antonin Artaud
“
The drama which he unfolds in Revelation is synthetic and therefore truly Christian in that it includes the great teachings of all ages. Some believe that God has not willed that man should understand the mystery of his own destiny, but let these recall those immortal words; "There is nothing concealed that shall not be revealed; there is nothing hidden that shall not be made known." This being true, let us take up the labor of solving, or unveiling, of reconstructing. Following in the footsteps of the illumined of all ages, we too shall discover truth, by following the winding stairs up which the candidates of every nation and religion have passed,
”
”
Manly P. Hall (Melchizedek and the Mystery of Fire)
“
The summer dresses are unpacked and hanging in the closet, two of them, pure cotton, which is better than synthetics like the cheaper ones, though even so, when it's muggy, in July and August, you sweat inside them. No worry about sunburn though, said Aunt Lydia. The spectacles women used to make of themselves. Oiling themselves like roast meat on a spit, and bare backs and shoulders, on the street, in public, and legs, not even stockings on them, no wonder those things used to happen. [...] And not good for the complexion, not at all, wrinkle you up like a dried apple. But we weren't supposed to care about our complexions any more, she'd forgotten that.
”
”
Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale (The Handmaid's Tale, #1))
“
An emptiness comes from this combination of over-the-top nonnatural sources of reward and the inevitability of habituation; this is because unnaturally strong explosions of synthetic experience and sensation and pleasure evoke unnaturally strong degrees of habituation.90 This has two consequences. First, soon we barely notice the fleeting whispers of pleasure caused by leaves in autumn, or by the lingering glance of the right person, or by the promise of reward following a difficult, worthy task. And the other consequence is that we eventually habituate to even those artificial deluges of intensity. If we were designed by engineers, as we consumed more, we’d desire less. But our frequent human tragedy is that the more we consume, the hungrier we get. More and faster and stronger. What was an unexpected pleasure yesterday is what we feel entitled to today, and what won’t be enough tomorrow.
”
”
Robert M. Sapolsky (Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst)
“
When someone dies they get very cold and very still. That probably sounds obvious, but when it’s your mother it doesn’t feel obvious—it feels shocking. You watch, winded and reeling, as the medical technicians neutralize the stasis field and power down the synthetic organ metabolizer. But the sentimental gesture of kissing her forehead makes you recoil because the moment your lips touch her skin you realize just how cold and just how still she is, just how permanent that coldness and that stillness feel. Your body lurches like it’s been plunged into boiling water and for the first time in your life you understand death as a biological state, an organism ceasing to function. Unless you’ve touched a corpse before, you can’t comprehend the visceral wrongness of inert flesh wrapped around an inanimate object that wears your mother’s face. You feel sick with guilt and regret and sadness about inconsequential anecdote. You can’t remember anything thoughtful or sweet or tender that you ever did even though logically you know you must have. All you can recall is how often you were small and petty and false. She was your mother and she loved you in a way nobody ever has and nobody ever will and now she’s gone.
”
”
Elan Mastai (All Our Wrong Todays)
“
In 1999 the National Research Council concluded that 'the total exposure to naturally occurring carcinogens exceeds the exposure to synthetic carcinogens.'...
The point was that even if organics were pesticide-free, the gain wouldn't make up for the downside of organic food: It's more likely to be infested with bacteria because it's grown in 'natural' fertilizer. Natural fertilizer is the health food business's euphemism for cow manure. (The much-criticized 'nonorganic' produce is grown in nitrogen fertilizers. Although organics advocates sneer at the chemicals, 'chemical' nitrogen is perfectly healthy; air is 78 percent nitrogen, after all. We have a choice between foods grown in nitrogen taken from the air, and 'organic' food grown in cow manure.)
”
”
John Stossel (Give Me a Break: How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media...)
“
For eight years I dreamed of fire. Trees ignited as I passed them; oceans
burned. The sugary smoke settled in my hair as I slept, the scent like a cloud left on my pillow as I rose. Even so, the moment my mattress started to burn, I bolted awake. The sharp, chemical smell was nothing like the hazy syrup of my dreams; the two were as different as Carolina and Indian jasmine, separation and attachment. They could not be confused.
Standing in the middle of the room, I located the source of the fire. A neat row of wooden matches lined the foot of the bed. They ignited, one after the next, a glowing picket fence across the piped edging. Watching them light, I felt a terror unequal to the size of the flickering flames, and for a paralyzing moment I was ten years old again, desperate and hopeful in a way I had never been before and never would be again.
But the bare synthetic mattress did not ignite like the thistle had in late October. It smoldered, and then the fire went out.
It was my eighteenth birthday.
”
”
Vanessa Diffenbaugh (The Language of Flowers)
“
We came back [from Mars]," Pris said, "because nobody should have to live there. It wasn't conceived for habitation, at least not within the last billion years. It's so old. You feel it in the stones, the terrible old age. Anyhow, at first I got drugs from Roy; I lived for that new synthetic pain-killer, that silenizine.
And then I met Horst Hartman, who at that time ran a stamp store, rare postage stamps; there's so much time on your hands that you've got to have a hobby, something you can pore over endlessly.
And Horst got me interested in pre-colonial fiction."
"You mean old books?"
"Stories written before space travel but about space travel."
"How could there have been stories about space travel before - "
"The writers," Pris said, "made it up."
"Based on what?"
"On imagination. A lot of times they turned out wrong [...] Anyhow, there's a fortune to be made in smuggling pre-colonial fiction, the old magazines and books and films, to Mars. Nothing is as exciting. To read about cities and huge industrial enterprises, and really successful colonization. You can imagine what it might have been like. What Mars ought to be like. Canals."
"Canals?" Dimly, he remembered reading about that; in the olden days they had believed in canals on Mars.
"Crisscrossing the planet," Pris said. "And beings from other stars. With infinite wisdom. And stories about Earth, set in our time and even later. Where there's no radioactive dust." [...]
"Did you bring any of that pre-colonial reading material back with you?" It occurred to him that he ought to try some.
"It's worthless, here, because here on Earth the craze never caught on. Anyhow there's plenty here, in the libraries; that's where we get all of ours - stolen from libraries here on Earth and shot by autorocket to Mars. You're out at night humbling across the open space, and all of a sudden you see a flare, and there's a rocket, cracked open, with old pre-colonial fiction magazines spilling out everywhere. A fortune. But of course you read them before you sell them." She warmed to her topic.
"Of all -
”
”
Philip K. Dick (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?)
“
This has been a book about people trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems. In the course of reporting it, I spoke to engineers and genetic engineers, biologists and microbiologists, atmospheric scientists and atmospheric entrepreneurs. Without exception, they were enthusiastic about their work. But, as a rule, this enthusiasm was tempered by doubt. The electric fish barriers, the concrete crevasse, the fake cavern, the synthetic clouds- these were presented to me less in a spirit of techno-optimism than what might be called techno-fatalism. They weren't improvements on the originals; they were the best that anyone could come up with, given the circumstances...
It's in this context that interventions like assisted evolution and gene drives and digging millions of trenches to bury billions of trees have to be assessed. Geoengineering may be 'entirely crazy and quite disconcerting', but if it could slow the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, or take some of 'the pain and suffering away', or help prevent no-longer-fully-natural ecosystems from collapsing, doesn't it have to be considered?
”
”
Elizabeth Kolbert (Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future)
“
The “9/11 truth movement” seemed to reach peak momentum around 2006. Possible factors in the slow-down since then include infiltration, infighting and fatigue. The economic crisis focused concern on existential issues. Elections under the two-party system always force attention to the politically correct middle ground, and the color revolution of the false prophet Obama sapped the energies of many idealists. Regime rotation removed Bush, the target the opposition most loved to hate. With him and his neo-con team went also much of the immediate and obvious relevance of 9/11. Is there still a way forward with 9/11 awareness as a political force? There needs to be, if only because if they can get away with 9/11, they can get away with anything.
”
”
Webster Griffin Tarpley (9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA)
“
The world has been changing even faster as people, devices and information are increasingly connected to each other. Computational power is growing and quantum computing is quickly being realised. This will revolutionise artificial intelligence with exponentially faster speeds. It will advance encryption. Quantum computers will change everything, even human biology. There is already one technique to edit DNA precisely, called CRISPR. The basis of this genome-editing technology is a bacterial defence system. It can accurately target and edit stretches of genetic code. The best intention of genetic manipulation is that modifying genes would allow scientists to treat genetic causes of disease by correcting gene mutations. There are, however, less noble possibilities for manipulating DNA. How far we can go with genetic engineering will become an increasingly urgent question. We can’t see the possibilities of curing motor neurone diseases—like my ALS—without also glimpsing its dangers.
Intelligence is characterised as the ability to adapt to change. Human intelligence is the result of generations of natural selection of those with the ability to adapt to changed circumstances. We must not fear change. We need to make it work to our advantage.
We all have a role to play in making sure that we, and the next generation, have not just the opportunity but the determination to engage fully with the study of science at an early level, so that we can go on to fulfil our potential and create a better world for the whole human race. We need to take learning beyond a theoretical discussion of how AI should be and to make sure we plan for how it can be. We all have the potential to push the boundaries of what is accepted, or expected, and to think big. We stand on the threshold of a brave new world. It is an exciting, if precarious, place to be, and we are the pioneers.
When we invented fire, we messed up repeatedly, then invented the fire extinguisher. With more powerful technologies such as nuclear weapons, synthetic biology and strong artificial intelligence, we should instead plan ahead and aim to get things right the first time, because it may be the only chance we will get. Our future is a race between the growing power of our technology and the wisdom with which we use it. Let’s make sure that wisdom wins.
”
”
Stephen Hawking (Brief Answers to the Big Questions)
“
It was a dead hole, smelling of synthetic leather and disinfectant, both of which odors seemed to emanate from the torn scratched material of the seats that lined the three walls. It smelled of the tobacco ashes which had flooded the two standing metal ashtrays. On the chromium lip of one, a cigar butt gleamed wetly like a chewed piece of beef. There was the smell of peanut shells and of the waxy candy wrappers that littered the floor, the smell of old newspapers, dry, inky, smothering and faintly like a urinal, the smell of sweat from armpits and groins and backs and faces, pouring out and drying up in the lifeless air, the smell of clothes—cleaning fluids imbedded in fabric and blooming horribly in the warm sweetish air, picking at the nostrils like thorns—all the exudations of the human flesh, a bouquet of animal being, flowing out, drying up, but leaving a peculiar and ineradicable odor of despair in the room as though chemistry was transformed into spirit, an ascension of a kind,
…Light issuing from spotlights in the ceiling was sour and blinding like a sick breath.
There was in that room an underlying confusion in the function of the senses. Smell became color, color became smell. Mute started at mute so intently they might have been listening with their eyes, and hearing grew preternaturally acute, yet waited only for the familiar syllables of surnames. Taste died, mouth opened in the negative drowsiness of waiting.
”
”
Paula Fox (Desperate Characters)
“
Within the bounds of positivity we say and find it obvious that, in my own experience, I experience not only myself but others—in the particular form: experiencing someone else. The indubitable transcendental explication showed us not only that this positive statement is transcendentally legitimate but also that the concretely apprehended transcendental ego (who first becomes aware of himself, with his undetermined horizon, when he effects transcendental reduction) grasps himself in his own primordial being, and likewise (in the form of his transcendental experience of what is alien) grasps others: other transcendental egos, though they are given, not originaliter and in unqualifiedly apodictic evidence, but only in an evidence belonging to ‘external’ experience. ‘In’ myself I experience and know the Other; in me he becomes constituted—appresentatively mirrored, not constituted as the original. Hence it can very well be said, in a broadened sense, that the ego acquires—that I, as the one who meditatingly explicates, acquire by ‘self-explication’ (explication of what I find in myself) every transcendency: as a transcendentally constituted transcendency and not as a transcendency accepted with naive positivity. Thus the illusion vanishes: that everything I, qua transcendental ego, know as existing in consequence of myself, and explicate as constituted in myself, must belong to me as part of my own essence. This is true only of ‘immanent transcendencies’. As a title for the systems of synthetic actuality and potentiality that confer sense and being on me as ego in my own essentialness, constitution signifies constitution of immanent objective actuality.
”
”
Edmund Husserl (Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology)
“
Stepfather—January 6, 1980 In addition to imitation mayonnaise, fake fur, sugar substitutes and plastic that wears like iron, the nuclear family has added another synthetic to its life: step-people. There are stepmothers, stepfathers, stepsons and stepdaughters. The reception they get is varied. Some are looked upon as relief pitchers who are brought in late but are optimistic enough to try to win the game. Some are regarded as double agents, who in the end will pay for their crimes. There are few generalizations you can make about step-people, except they’re all locked into an awkward family unit none of them are too crazy about. I know. I’ve been there. Perhaps you’ve heard of me. I became a hyphenated child a few years after my “real” father died. I was the only stepchild in North America to have a stepfather who had the gall to make me go to bed when I was sleepy, do homework before I went to school, and who yelled at me for wearing bedroom slippers in the snow. My real father wouldn’t have said that. My stepfather punished me for sassing my mother, wouldn’t allow me to waste food and wouldn’t let me spend money I didn’t have. My real father wouldn’t have done that. My stepfather remained silent when I slammed doors in his face, patient when I insisted my mother take “my side” and emotionless when I informed him he had no rights. My real father wouldn’t have taken that. My stepfather paid for my needs and my whims, was there through all my pain of growing up...and checked himself out of the VA hospital to give me away at my wedding. My real father...was there all the time, and I didn’t know it. What is a “real” mother, father, son or daughter? “Real” translates to something authentic, genuine, permanent. Something that exists. It has nothing to do with labor pains, history, memories or beginnings. All love begins with one day and builds. “Step” in the dictionary translates to “a short distance.” It’s shorter than you think.
”
”
Erma Bombeck (Forever, Erma)
“
Moving on, while he wondered, the dark through which Mr. Lecky's light cut grew more beautiful with scents. Particles of solid matter so minute, gases so subtle, that they filtered through stopping and sealing, hung on the unstirred air. Drawn in with Mr. Lecky's breath came impalpable dews cooked out of disintegrating coal. Distilled, chemically split and reformed, they ended in flawless simulation of the aromas of gums, the scent of woods and the world's flowers. The chemists who made them could do more than that. Loose on the gloom were perfumes of flowers which might possibly have bloomed but never had, and the strong-smelling saps of trees either lost or not yet evolved.
Mixed in the mucus of the pituitary membrane, these volatile essences meant more than synthetic chemistry to Mr. Lecky. Their microscopic slime coated the bushed-out ends of the olfactory nerve; their presence was signaled to the anterior of the brain's temporal lobe. At once, thought waited on them, tossing down from the great storehouse of old images, neglected ideas - sandalwood and roses, musk and lavender. Mr. Lecky stood still, wrung by pangs as insistent and unanswerable as hunger. He was prodded by the unrest of things desired, not had; the surfeit of things had, not desired. More than anything he could see, or words, or sounds, these odors made him stupidly aware of the past. Unable to remember it, whence he was, or where he had previously been, all that was sweet, impermanent and gone came back not spoiled by too much truth or exact memory. Volatile as the perfumes, the past stirred him with longing for what was not - the only beloved beauty which you will have to see but which you may not keep.
Mr. Lecky's beam of light went through glass top and side of a counter, displayed bottles of colored liquid - straw, amber, topaz - threw shadows behind their diverse shapes. He had no use for perfume. All the distraction, all the sense of loss and implausible sweetness which he felt was in memory of women.
Behind the counter, Mr. Lecky, curious, took out bottles, sniffed them, examined their elaborately varied forms - transparent squares, triangles, cones, flattened ovals. Some were opaque, jet or blue, rough with embedded metals in intricate design. This great and needless decoration of the flasks which contained it was one strange way to express the inexpressible. Another way was tried in the names put on the bottles. Here words ran the suggestive or symbolic gamut of idealized passion, or festive night, of desired caresses, or of abstractions of the painful allure yet farther fetched.
Not even in the hopeful, miracle-raving fancy of those who used the perfumes could a bottle of liquid have any actual magic. Since the buyers at the counters must be human beings, nine of every ten were beyond this or other help. Women, young, but unlovely and unloved, women, whatever they had been, now at the end of it and ruined by years or thickened to caricature by fat, ought to be the ones called to mind by perfume. But they were not. Mr. Lecky held the bottle in his hand a long while, aware of the tenth woman.
”
”
James Gould Cozzens
“
After the plates are removed by the silent and swift waiting staff, General Çiller leans forward and says across the table to Güney, ‘What’s this I’m reading in Hürriyet about Strasbourg breaking up the nation?’
‘It’s not breaking up the nation. It’s a French motion to implement European Regional Directive 8182 which calls for a Kurdish Regional Parliament.’
‘And that’s not breaking up the nation?’ General Çiller throws up his hands in exasperation. He’s a big, square man, the model of the military, but he moves freely and lightly ‘The French prancing all over the legacy of Atatürk? What do you think, Mr Sarioğlu?’
The trap could not be any more obvious but Ayşe sees Adnan straighten his tie, the code for, Trust me, I know what I’m doing,
‘What I think about the legacy of Atatürk, General? Let it go. I don’t care. The age of Atatürk is over.’
Guests stiffen around the table, breath subtly indrawn; social gasps. This is heresy. People have been shot down in the streets of Istanbul for less. Adnan commands every eye.
‘Atatürk was father of the nation, unquestionably. No Atatürk, no Turkey. But, at some point every child has to leave his father. You have to stand on your own two feet and find out if you’re a man. We’re like kids that go on about how great their dads are; my dad’s the strongest, the best wrestler, the fastest driver, the biggest moustache. And when someone squares up to us, or calls us a name or even looks at us squinty, we run back shouting ‘I’ll get my dad, I’ll get my dad!’ At some point; we have to grow up. If you’ll pardon the expression, the balls have to drop. We talk the talk mighty fine: great nation, proud people, global union of the noble Turkic races, all that stuff. There’s no one like us for talking ourselves up. And then the EU says, All right, prove it. The door’s open, in you come; sit down, be one of us. Move out of the family home; move in with the other guys. Step out from the shadow of the Father of the Nation.
‘And do you know what the European Union shows us about ourselves? We’re all those things we say we are. They weren’t lies, they weren’t boasts. We’re good. We’re big. We’re a powerhouse. We’ve got an economy that goes all the way to the South China Sea. We’ve got energy and ideas and talent - look at the stuff that’s coming out of those tin-shed business parks in the nano sector and the synthetic biology start-ups. Turkish. All Turkish. That’s the legacy of Atatürk. It doesn’t matter if the Kurds have their own Parliament or the French make everyone stand in Taksim Square and apologize to the Armenians. We’re the legacy of Atatürk. Turkey is the people. Atatürk’s done his job. He can crumble into dust now. The kid’s come right. The kid’s come very right. That’s why I believe the EU’s the best thing that’s ever happened to us because it’s finally taught us how to be Turks.’
General Çiller beats a fist on the table, sending the cutlery leaping.
‘By God, by God; that’s a bold thing to say but you’re exactly right.
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Ian McDonald (The Dervish House)