If we have largely forgotten the physical discomforts of the itching, oppressive garments of the past ... then we have mercifully ...forgotten, too, the smells of the past, the domestic odours--ill-washed flesh; infrequently changed underwear; chamber-pots; slop-pails; inadequately plumbed privies; rotting food; unattended teeth; and the streets are no fresher than indoors, the omnipresent acridity of horse piss and dung, drains, the sudden stench of old death from butchers' shops, the amniotic horror of the fishmonger.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The ocean, whose tides respond, like women's menses, to the pull of the moon, the ocean which corresponds to the amniotic fluid in... which human life begins, the ocean on whose surface vessels (personified as female) can ride but in whose depth sailors meet their death and monsters conceal themselves ... it is unstable and threatening as the earth is not; it spawns new life daily, yet swallows up lives; it is changeable like the moon, unregulated, yet indestructible and eternal.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »