“
The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence
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T.S. Eliot (Four Quartets)
“
You are people with a present and with a future. Don't muff the ball. Be excellent.
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Gordon B. Hinckley (Standing for Something: 10 Neglected Virtues That Will Heal Our Hearts and Homes)
“
Beasts of England, beasts of Ireland,
Beasts of every land and clime,
Hearken to my joyful tidings
Of the golden future time.
Soon or late the day is coming,
Tyrant Man shall be o'erthrown,
And the fruitful fields of England
Shall be trod by beasts alone.
Rings shall vanish from our noses,
And the harness from our back,
Bit and spur shall rust forever,
Cruel whips shall no more crack.
Riches more than mind can picture,
Wheat and barley, oats and hay,
Clover, beans, and mangel-wurzels,
Shall be ours upon that day.
Bright will shine the fields of England,
Purer shall its water be,
Sweeter yet shall blow its breezes
On the day that sets us free.
For that day we all must labour,
Though we die before it break;
Cows and horses, geese and turkeys,
All must toils for freedom's sake.
Beasts of England, beasts of Ireland,
Beasts of every land and clime,
Hearken well and spread my tidings
Of the golden future time.
”
”
George Orwell (Animal Farm)
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...all normal expectations went by the board and one’s daily habits were disrupted by a sense of ever-spreading all-consuming chaos which rendered the future unpredictable, the past unrecallable and ordinary life so haphazard that people simply assumed that whatever could be imagined might come to pass, that if there were only one door in a building it would no longer open, that wheat would grow head downwards into the earth not out of it, and that, since once could only note the symptoms of disintegration, the reasons for it remaining unfathomable and inconceivable, there was nothing anyone could do except to get a tenacious grip on anything that was still tangible…
”
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László Krasznahorkai (The Melancholy of Resistance)
“
But clouds bellied out in the sultry heat, the sky cracked open with a crimson gash, spewed flame-and the ancient forest began to smoke. By morning there was a mass of booming, fiery tongues, a hissing, crashing, howling all around, half the sky black with smoke, and the bloodied sun just barely visible.
And what can little men do with their spades, ditches, and pails? The forest is no more, it was devoured by fire: stumps and ash. Perhaps illimitable fields will be plowed here one day, perhaps some new, unheard-of wheat will ripen here and men from Arkansas with shaven faces will weigh in their palms the heavy golden grain. Or perhaps a city will grow up-alive with ringing sound and motion, all stone and crystal and iron-and winged men will come here flying over seas and mountains from all ends of the world. But never again the forest, never again the blue winter silence and the golden silence of summer. And only the tellers of tales will speak in many-colored patterned words about what had been, about wolves and bears and stately green-coated century-old grandfathers, about old Russia; they will speak about all this to us who have seen it with our own eyes ten years - a hundred years! - ago, and to those others, the winged ones, who will come in a hundred years to listen and to marvel at it all as at a fairy tale. ("In Old Russia")
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Yevgeny Zamyatin (The Dragon: Fifteen Stories (English and Russian Edition))
“
By 1870, Britain’s steam engines generated 4 million horsepower, equivalent to the work of 40 million men, who—if industry had still depended on muscles—would have eaten more than three times Britain’s entire wheat output.
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Ian Morris (Why the West Rules—for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future)
“
Crookes was talking about fixing a couple of million tonnes of nitrogen a year to assure Europe’s wheat supplies for the foreseeable future. Today industry fixes over a hundred million tonnes a year, comfortably more than all the Earth’s nitrogen-fixing soil bacteria put together.
”
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Oliver Morton (The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World)
“
For example, the fact that school is boring, arduous, and full of busywork might hinder students’ ability to learn. But to the extent that school is primarily about credentialing, its goal is to separate the wheat (good future worker bees) from the chaff (slackers, daydreamers, etc.). And if school were easy or fun, it wouldn’t serve this function very well. If there were a way to fast-forward all the learning (and retention) that actually takes place in school—for example, by giving students a magic pill that taught them everything in an instant—we would still need to subject them to boring lectures and nitpicky tests in order to credential them.
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Kevin Simler (The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life)
“
Goldman Sachs hoards rice, wheat, corn, sugar and livestock and jacks up commodity prices around the globe so that poor families can no longer afford basic staples and literally starve. Goldman Sachs is able to carry out its malfeasance at home and in global markets because it has former officials filtered throughout the government and lavishly funds compliant politicians—including Barack Obama, who received $1 million from employees at Goldman Sachs in 2008 when he ran for president. These politicians, in return, permit Goldman Sachs to ignore security laws that under a functioning judiciary system would see the firm indicted for felony fraud. Or, as in the case of Bill Clinton, these politicians pass laws such as the 2000 Commodity Futures Modernization Act that effectively removed all oversight and outside control over the speculation in commodities, one of the major reasons food prices have soared. In 2008 and again in 2010 prices for crops such as rice, wheat and corn doubled and even tripled, making life precarious for hundreds of millions of people. And it was all done so a few corporate oligarchs, the 1 percent, could make personal fortunes in the tens and hundreds of millions of dollars. Despite a damning 650-page Senate subcommittee investigation report, no individual at Goldman Sachs has been indicted, although the report accuses Goldman of defrauding its clients.319
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Tim Wise (Under the Affluence: Shaming the Poor, Praising the Rich and Sacrificing the Future of America (City Lights Open Media))
“
In the future, white supremacy will no longer need white people,” the artist Lorraine O’Grady said in 2018, a prognosis that seemed, at least on the surface, to counter what James Baldwin said fifty years ago, which is that “the white man’s sun has set.” Which is it then? What prediction will hold? As an Asian American, I felt emboldened by Baldwin but haunted and implicated by O’Grady. I heard the ring of truth in her comment, which gave me added urgency to finish this book. Whiteness has already recruited us to become their junior partners in genocidal wars; conscripted us to be antiblack and colorist; to work for, and even head, corporations that scythe off immigrant jobs like heads of wheat. Conscription is every day and unconscious. It is the default way of life among those of us who live in relative comfort, unless we make an effort to choose otherwise. Unless we are read as Muslim or trans, Asian Americans are fortunate not to live under hard surveillance, but we live under a softer panopticon, so subtle that it’s internalized, in that we monitor ourselves, which characterizes our conditional existence. Even if we’ve been here for four generations, our status here remains conditional; belonging is always promised and just out of reach so that we behave, whether it’s the insatiable acquisition of material belongings or belonging as a peace of mind where we are absorbed into mainstream society. If the Asian American consciousness must be emancipated, we must free ourselves of our conditional existence. But what does that mean? Does that mean making ourselves suffer to keep the struggle alive? Does it mean simply being awake to our suffering? I can only answer that through the actions of others. As of now, I’m writing when history is being devoured by our digital archives so we never have to remember. The administration has plans to reopen a Japanese internment camp in Oklahoma to fill up with Latin American children. A small band of Japanese internment camp survivors protest this reopening every day. I used to idly wonder whatever happened to all the internment camp survivors. Why did they disappear? Why didn’t they ever speak out? At the demonstration, protester Tom Ikeda said, “We need to be the allies for vulnerable communities today that Japanese Americans didn’t have in 1942.” We were always here.
”
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Cathy Park Hong (Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning)
“
epigenetic marks are the remote control not only to your health and longevity but also to how you pass your genes on to future generations. Our
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David Perlmutter (Grain Brain: The Surprising Truth about Wheat, Carbs, and Sugar--Your Brain's Silent Killers)
“
He knew no future then, no kind of life except the life he led. He fled the cave-bear over the rocks full of iron ore and the promise of sword and spear; he froze to death upon a ledge of coal; he drank water muddy with the clay that would one day make cups of porcelain; he chewed the ear of wild wheat he had plucked and gazed with a dim speculation in his eyes at the birds that soared beyond his reach. Or suddenly he became aware of the scent of another male and rose up roaring, his roars the formless precursors of moral admonitions. For he was a great individualist, that original,
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H.G. Wells (The World Set Free)
“
Beasts of England, beasts of Ireland, Beasts of every land and clime, Hearken to my joyful tidings Of the golden future time. Soon or late the day is coming, Tyrant Man shall be o’erthrown, And the fruitful fields of England Shall be trod by beasts alone. Rings shall vanish from our noses, And the harness from our back, Bit and spur shall rust forever, Cruel whips no more shall crack. Riches more than mind can picture, Wheat and barley, oats and hay, Clover, beans, and mangel-wurzels Shall be ours upon that day. Bright will shine the fields of England, Purer shall its waters be, Sweeter yet shall blow its breezes On the day that sets us free. For that day we all must labour, Though we die before it break; Cows and horses, geese and turkeys, All must toil for freedom’s sake. Beasts of England, beasts of Ireland, Beasts of every land and clime, Hearken well and spread my tidings Of the golden future time.
”
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George Orwell (1984 & Animal Farm)
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In the morning, on the day of remembrance, put the wheat in a bowl with walnuts, almonds and parsley. Add a message of devotion, a wish for the future, your gratitude to God. Sprinkle in cinnamon, not guilt. Throw in sesame seeds, throw away your fear. Turn out your mixture and create a mound - a monument to love. Brown some flour and sift. Add a layer of sugar. Press flat. Finally, crush the skin of a pomegranate with the remains of your fury and spread the seeds with love, in the shape of a cross.
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Julie Mayhew (Red Ink)
“
Let’s take a look at the five major asset classes: Alternative assets, which are usually physical assets like fine watches, real estate, collectible cars, art, and jewelry Stocks, which represent ownership of a piece of a publicly traded company Fixed-income investments such as government bonds and deposit certificates Cash, such as dollar bills, and cash equivalents such as savings accounts, retirement accounts, and 401(k)s Futures and other derivatives, which are contracts between two parties agreeing to buy and sell assets, usually commodities like gold, corn, wheat, or cows, at a future date
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Lauren Simmons (Make Money Move: A Guide to Financial Wellness)
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This book makes the case that the future of food lies in the past, including such lost, forgotten, or nearly vanished foods as emmer wheat. The fact that bread, the age-old staff of life, has lately come to stand for all the ills of civilization is a basic mistake and an indication of how much we need to learn – or relearn.
Don't blame the grain, in other words, blame what we've done with it.
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Taras Grescoe (The Lost Supper: Searching for the Future of Food in the Flavors of the Past)
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First, price changes are not independent of each other. Research over the past few decades, by me and then by others, shows that many financial price series have a "memory," of sorts. Today does, in fact, influence tomorrow. If prices take a big leap up or down now, there is a measurably greater likelihood that they will move just as violently the next day. It is not a well-behaved, predictable pattern of the kind economists prefer-not, say, the periodic up-and-down procession from boom to bust with which textbooks trace the standard business cycle. Examples of such simple patterns, periodic correlations between prices past and present, have long been observed in markets-in, say, the seasonal fluctuations of wheat futures prices as the harvest matures, or the daily and weekly trends of foreign exchange volume as the trading day moves across the globe.
”
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Benoît B. Mandelbrot (The (Mis)Behavior of Markets)
“
The Future of Food (which can be accessed online for free viewing). Among the most common examples of GMO-containing foods are soy, corn, and wheat, but GMOs are
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Nora T. Gedgaudas (Primal Body, Primal Mind: Beyond Paleo for Total Health and a Longer Life)
“
I’m looking at flour like you would a carton of milk or a bag of peaches. Because it’s a fresh product. It’s alive.” “Versus everyone else?” I asked. “Everyone else pursues shelf life. Most flour preservation is done by toasting it slightly—it’s called kilning—and what you’re doing is drying out the grain further so there’s absolutely no moisture. That’s what we eat. Wheat picked long past ripeness, then broken apart, and then mummified. Mills are abattoirs for wheat.
”
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Dan Barber (The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food)
“
The domestication of grain was accompanied by an equally radical innovation in the preparation of food: the invention of bread. In an endless variety of forms, from the unleavened wheat or barley of the Near East to the corn tortillas of the Mexicans and the yeast-risen bread of later cultures, bread has been up to now the center of every diet. No other form of food is so acceptable, so transportable, or so universal. "Give us this day our daily bread" became a universal prayer, and so venerated was this food, as the very flesh of God, that to cut it with a knife is still, in some cultures, a sacrilege.
Daily bread brought a security in the food supply that had never before been possible. Despite seasonal fluctuations in yield due to floods or droughts, the cultivation of grains made man assured of his daily nourishment, provided he worked steadily and consecutively, as he had never been certain of the supply of game or his luck in killing it. With bread and oil, bread and butter, or bread and bacon, neolithic cultures had the backbone of a balanced diet, rich in energy, needing only fresh garden produce to be entirely adequate.
With this security, it was possible to look ahead and plan ahead with confidence. Except in the tropical areas, where soil regeneration was not mastered, groups could now remain rooted in one spot, surrounded by fields under permanent cultivation, slowly making improvements in the landscape, digging ditches and irrigation canals, making terraces, planting trees, which later generations would be grateful for. Capital accumulation begins at this point: the end of hand-to-mouth living. With the domestication of grains, the future became predictable as never before; and the cultivator not merely sought to retain the ancestral past, but to expand all his present possibilities: once the daily bread was assured, those wider migrations and transplantations of men, which made the country town and the city possible, speedily followed.
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Lewis Mumford (Technics and Human Development (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 1))
“
And how will I accomplish this? First I will set goals for the day, the week, the month, the year, and my life. Just as the rain must fall before the wheat will crack its shell and sprout, so must I have objectives before my life will crystallize. In setting my goals I will consider my best performance of the past and multiply it a hundredfold. This will be the standard by which I will live in the future. Never will I be of concern that my goals are too high for is it not better to aim my spear at the moon and strike only an eagle than to aim my spear at the eagle and strike only a rock? Today I will multiply my value a hundredfold.
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Og Mandino (The Greatest Salesman In The World)
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The combined biomass of all domesticated animals is now some twenty-five times that of all remaining wild terrestrial mammals. Some of our favored plants have become among the most widely propagated on the planet. Wheat, rice, coffee, and cannabis, to name a few, have gone worldwide by giving us what we want. You have to wonder who has been using whom, because in terms of evolutionary success, these plants have done well by us 7—others, not so much. Through our reworking of landscapes, especially for agriculture, we have destroyed and altered habitats and, often without realizing it, created new ones. We’ve
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David Grinspoon (Earth in Human Hands: Shaping Our Planet's Future)
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And yet erewhile, when thou wert in the ear, Even as a (golden) glittering grain, even then The fireflies came to cast on thee their light ^ And aid thy growth, because without their help Thou couldsl not grow nor beautiful become; Therefore thou dost belong unto the race Of witches or of fairies, and because The fireflies do belong unto the sun. . , , Queen of the Fireflies ! hurry apace,-Come to me now as if running a race, Bridle the horse as you hear me now sing! Bridle, O bridle the son of the king ! Come in a hurry and bring him to me! The son of the king will ere long set thee free; ' Theie is an evident association here of [he body of the firefly which much resembles a grain of wheat) wilh the latter. ' The six lines followiDg are oilen heard as 3. nursery rhyme. And because thou for ever art brilliant and fair, Under a glass I will keep thee; while there, With a lens I will study thy secrets concealed, Till all their bright mysteries are fully revealed. Yea, all the wondrous lore perplexed Of this life of our cross and of the next. Thus to all mysteries I shall attain, Yea, even to that at last of the grain; And when this at last I shall truly know. Firefly, freely I'll let thee go! When Earth's dark secrets are known to me. My blessing at last I will give to thee! Here follows the Conjuration of the Salt. Conjuration of the Salt. I do conjure thee, salt, lo! here at noon, Exactly in the middle of a stream I take my place and see the water round, Likewise the sun, and think of nothing else White here besides the water and the sun: For all my soul is turned in truth to them; I do indeed desire no other thought, I yearn to learn the very truth of truths. For I have suffered long with the desire To know my future or my coming fate. If good or evil will prevail in it. Water and sun, be gracious unto me ! Here follows the Conjuration of Cain. AMDU Scongiurasione di Caino. Tuo Caino, tu non possa aver Ne pace e ne bene fino che Dal sole' andaCe non sarai coi piedi Correndo, le mani battendo, E pregarlo per me che mi faccia sapere, II mio destino, se cattiva fosse, Allora me lo faccia cambiare, Se questa grazia mi farete, L' acqua al lo splendor del sol la guardero: E tu Caino colla tua bocca mi diiai II mio destino quale sark: Se questa grazia o Caino non mi farai, Pace e bene non avrai! The
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Charles Godfrey Leland (Aradia, Gospel of the Witches)
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For, I think, when I woke up today, with a dream of yesterday still in my eyes,I felt tired in life. And thinking of the little blond girl of Mays & Junes long gone by,I felt strange looking on a field of wheat, and I thought, in a moment I was God and so was she, and this field was us too. So long gone, she goes. But I am still her, whether she comes and goes like all of life, or she stays awhile.
Once, a man of physics told me, matter cannot be created or destroyed. And on
another occasion he said everything came from one point, in the beginning.
So we are all flowers and rivers and trees. That was all of us together. Every one of the past, present, and future.
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Derek Keck (The Kitchen Sinks of Yesterday Morning: The Urinal Cakes of Tomorrow)
“
Here was the essence of hope on a farm. The color of the future. Green now, and delicate, but with sunshine and rain, the wheat would become as sturdy as the family, as strong as the land itself, and turn into a sea of waving gold that would sustain them all.
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Kristin Hannah (The Four Winds)
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It is implicit in the idea of the agricultural engineering students... that their farm of the future would require the blending of human values. To propose to blend the farm with human values is simply to propose that it has no human values. That human values have been removed from it. The analogy is not accidental I think between this blending with human values and the enrichment of bread after the nutrients have been removed from the wheat. If human values are removed from production, how can they be preserved in consumption? How can we value our lives if we devalue them in making a living? If we do not live where we work and when we work, we are wasting our lives, and our work too.
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Wendell Berry (The Unsettling of America Culture & Agriculture)
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It has abundant natural resources including many that are perfectly suited for selling around the world. Its wool, lamb, beef, wheat and wine industries remain world leaders; it holds a quarter of the world’s uranium reserves, the largest zinc and lead deposits, and is a major producer of tungsten and gold, as well as having healthy deposits of silver; and it is a key supplier of liquefied natural gas while also still producing large quantities of coal. And there we see how the country is caught between an Ayers Rock and a hard place.
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Tim Marshall (The Power of Geography: Ten Maps that Reveal the Future of Our World – the sequel to Prisoners of Geography)
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Who, in examining a grain of wheat, could infer intrinsically from it what it will be? And they say now (whoever 'they' are) that even a grain of sand contains the coding from which the whole universe, if it blew up, could be reconstructed, and maybe better." (Which is the plot of my next book after the SCANNER one I described to you on the phone: a girl, crossing a national frontier, is detained by suspicious police; she is "pregnant," but what she contains in her womb is not organic but is in fact the "electronic, technological" seed of the entire future world, which, without her knowing it, is to be blown apart; she is a simple girl, my Kathy again, who genuinely imagines herself to be pregnant, and being Catholic, must bear the "child." And that "child"—can you imagine it? Not the universe, with stars and planets, but the new and better society, of Freedom which the enslavers have tried, and thought to have successfully wiped out, to obliterate. And there it is, in microsize, in her womb, as she placidly waits to be allowed to leave the "U.S.," it could be any "Rome," to enter a small nation. On, as she thinks of it, a Party-time trip.
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Philip K. Dick (The Selected Letters, 1974)
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Mycorrhizal fungi can increase the quality of a harvest, as the experiments with basil, strawberries, tomatoes, and wheat illustrate. They can also increase the ability of crops to compete with weeds and enhance their resistance to diseases by priming plants’ immune systems. They can make crops less susceptible to drought and heat, and more resistant to salinity and heavy metals. They even boost the ability of plants to fight off attacks from insect pests by stimulating the production of defensive chemicals. The list goes on: The literature is awash with examples of the benefits that mycorrhizal relationships provide to plants. However, putting this knowledge into practice is not always straightforward. For one thing, mycorrhizal associations don’t always increase crop yields. In some cases, they can even reduce them.
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Merlin Sheldrake (Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures)
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A lap in which to weep, but a huge and shapeless lap, spacious like a summer evening, and yet cosy, warm, feminine, next to a fireplace… To be able to weep in that lap over inconceivable things, failures I can’t remember, poignant things that don’t exist, and huge shuddering doubts concerning I don’t know what future…
A second childhood, an old nursemaid like I used to have, and a tiny bed where I’d be lulled to sleep by tales of adventure that my flagging attention would hardly even follow – stories that once ran through infant hair as blond as wheat… And all of this enormous and eternal, guaranteed for ever and having God’s lofty stature, there in the sad, drowsy depths of the ultimate reality of Things…
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Fernando Pessoa (The Book of Disquiet: The Complete Edition)
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He fled, not from his past, but to escape his future. It took him twelve years to learn you cannot escape either of them....He had been a Kansas wheat-hand, he had herded sheep in New Mexico, he was again with a construction gang in Arizona and west Texas and then a longshoreman on the Galveston docks; if he were still fleeing, he did not know it because it had been years now since he had even remembered that he had forgotten the face. And when he proved that at least you cannot escape either past or future with nothing better than geography, he did not know that. (Geography: that paucity of invention, that fatuous faith in distance of man, who can invent no better means than geography for escaping; himself of all, to whom, so he believed he believed, geography had never been merely something to walk upon but was the very medium which the fetterless to- and fro-going required to breathe in.)
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William Faulkner (The Hamlet (The Snopes Trilogy, #1))
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Transportation Sector The transportation sector is a close second to industry in terms of energy use. While air travel gets a bad rap, it is transport on highways that by far dominates this sector’s energy use, using more than 10 times the energy of air travel. Of this highway energy, about 75% is expended by small vehicles, the passenger cars and trucks used to move ourselves around. Amazingly, almost half of this is used on trips of less than 20 miles, mostly to get to and from work and for family responsibilities—things like church, shopping, and school. Of non-highway transport, air travel is the largest contributor, followed by ships and then trains. Incidentally, a fully loaded modern jet aircraft gets the equivalent of around 60 miles per gallon (MPG) per passenger, so for traveling long distances, they beat solo road trips in cars (but if you take four friends with you, even a gas-guzzling American car is not so bad—something hyped by the ride-share community). We can even see that the energy required to transport fossil fuels is significant, with about 1% of US energy use committed to transporting natural gas (we’ll come back to this later). Nearly half of freight-rail transportation is used to move coal—most of the other half is wheat and food. A not-so-surprising revelation from a close study
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Saul Griffith (Electrify: An Optimist's Playbook for Our Clean Energy Future)
“
The challenge and the solution were described in memorable terms in September 1898 by William Crookes, a chemist and a physicist, in his presidential address on wheat delivered at the British Association’s annual meeting in Bristol. The most quoted sentence from his presentation was that “all civilised nations stand in deadly peril of not having enough to eat,” and he estimated that the rising demand would bring a global wheat supply shortfall as soon as 1930. But he also identified the most effective solution and its most important component: increased crop fertilization and higher applications of nitrogen, the macronutrient that most often limits wheat (and indeed all cereal) yields. Crookes correctly observed that neither the animal manures nor the planting of green manures (alfalfa, clover) could meet future needs, and that the supply of the era’s only important inorganic fertilizer, Chilean nitrates mined in the desert of Atacama, was obviously limited. What was needed was to tap the unlimited supply of atmospheric nitrogen, to change the inert molecule (N2) that forms nearly 80 percent of air’s mass into a reactive compound (preferably ammonia, NH3) that could be assimilated by crops and supply the macronutrient guaranteeing higher yields.
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Vaclav Smil (Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure)
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In her country drives she had killed more chickens than a hotel kitchen.
I had never been in a crowd this big. I felt like a grain of wheat in a box of rat droppings.
“To my thinking, a great librarian must have a clear head, a strong hand and, above all, a great heart. And when I look into the future, I am inclined to think that most of the men who will achieve this greatness will be women.”
About the best we could do was keep our heads down and our hopes small.
I saw that it took a lady to show a boy how to be a gentleman.
There wasn't a cloud in the summer sky and the corn was knee-high by the Fourth of July. It was like first morning of Creation.
Pride strengthens a woman, but weakens a man.
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Richard Peck (Here Lies the Librarian)
“
The arts also fail me. Words I know too well to trust. The skeleton of grammar creates a wall that wards off sensation. Sex can only be described sequentially, one stroke after another. Vocabulary discerns distinctions, just as hormones sand down such matters. The visual arts frame things so that they are safe. Dance is the twitching of the body of one species. Music, I still retain hope for music, that bath of sound that words can barely describe and seldom add to. Music echoes with the bark, the grunt, the trilling, the scream, the explosion of the volcano, the purring of the stream. Art seems less an open door than a gilded cage. Van Gogh painted about three hundred canvases during his year in that nut house. The others, the splattering expressionists and impressionists and cubists and dada folk and surrealists, they’re safe. A dripping clock can never punch you in the face like crows rising off a wheat field. I think most of human art and all of human costume results from our notorious discomfort with our own skins.
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Charles Bowden (Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing: Living in the Future)
“
A grain of wheat, by dying, becometh fruitful; so I must die in order to become, on a large scale, an object of faith and source of life. During my lifetime I have had little success. Few have believed, many have disbelieved; and they are about to crown their unbelief by putting me to death. But my death, so far from being, as they fancy, my defeat and destruction, will be but the beginning of my glorification. After I have been crucified, I shall begin to be believed in extensively as the Lord and Saviour of men." Having by the analogy of the corn of wheat set forth death as the condition of fruitfulness, Jesus, in a word subsequently spoken, proclaimed His approaching crucifixion as the secret of His future power. "I," said He, "if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me.
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Alexander Balmain Bruce (The Training of the Twelve: How Jesus Christ Found and Taught the 12 Apostles; A Book of New Testament Biography)
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In ordinary times the Jhelum river flows gently between high stable banks of deep soil, and until the stream shrinks in November, navigation, in spite of the absence of a proper tow-path, is easy. But in the winter the river above Sriiiagar is blocked by shoals, and the boatmen often have to dig out a channel for the heavy grain barges. In times of flood the river overtops its natural banks, and when the flood is high the water pours over the artificial embankments which have been constructed on either side of the river. Great damage is then caused to the crops of maize and linseed, and sometimes stacks of wheat, barley, and rape-seed are swept away. The loss caused by floods is always greatest below Srinagar, as the fall of the country is slight and the flood-water remains on the land rotting the crops. Above Srinagar the fall of the river and the slope of the country cause the flood-water to run down quickly and the crops often recover. In former times the villages lying along the river were obliged to keep the artificial embankments in repair, and flood-gates existed which let out the water of the mountain streams, and protected the country against the floods of the Jhelum. For many years this obligation had not been enforced, and under my supervision the embankments below Srinagar were repaired, and the normal floods of 1892 were kept in check. Above Srinagar the question of repairing embankments is complicated by the presence of the city, the safety of which must not be endangered. It is unfortunate that Srinagar should have been built on its present site. It is not only exposed to constant danger from floods, but is itself the cause of floods, because it checks the drainage of the country. The old Hindus were wise for they chose high land for their cities, and ancient Srinagar stood on ground secure from floods. Akbar, the first of the Mughal rulers, selected the slopes of the Hari-Parbat for his city Nagar, but his successors, without thought for the future, closed the Dal lake to the floods of the Jhelum, and thereby robbed the river of one of the escapes for its flood-water. Later the Pathans built their palace on the left bank of the Jhelum and prevented the river from escaping to the west, and now all the flood-water from the south of the valley must pass through the narrow waterway of Srinagar. There the channel of the river is narrowed by stone embankments, by the piles of encroaching city magnates, and the flow is further
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Anonymous