What, really, is wanted from a neighborhood? Convenience, certainly, an absence of major aggravation, to be sure. But perhaps most... of all, ideally, what is wanted is a comfortable background, a breathing space of intermission between the intensities of private life and the calculations of public life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Sir Walter Raleigh might well be studied, if only for the excellence of his style, for he is remarkable in the midst of so many ma...sters. There is a natural emphasis in his style, like a man's tread, and a breathing space between the sentences, which the best of modern writing does not furnish. His chapters are like English parks, or say rather like a Western forest, where the larger growth keeps down the underwood, and one may ride on horseback through the openings.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The age of the world is great enough for our imaginations, even according to the Mosaic account, without borrowing any years from ...the geologist. From Adam and Eve at one leap sheer down to the deluge, and then through the ancient monarchies, through Babylon and Thebes, Brahma and Abraham, to Greece and the Argonauts; whence we might start again with Orpheus, and the Trojan war, the Pyramids and the Olympic games, and Homer and Athens, for our stages; and after a breathing space at the building of Rome, continue our journey down through Odin and Christ to--MAmerica. It is a wearisome while. And yet the lives of but sixty old women, such as live under the hill, say of a century each, strung together, are sufficient to reach over the whole ground. Taking hold of hands they would span the interval from Eve to my own mother. A respectable tea-party merely,--whose gossip would be Universal History. The fourth old woman from myself suckled Columbus,--the ninth was nurse to the Norman Conqueror,--the nineteenth was the Virgin Mary--the twenty-fourth was the Cumæan Sibyl,--the thirtieth was at the Trojan war and Helen her name,--the thirty-eighth was Queen Semiramis,--the sixtieth was Eve, the mother of mankind. So much for the "Old woman that lives under the hill, And if she's not gone she lives there still." It will not take a very great-granddaughter of hers to be in at the death of Time.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Let fame, that all hunt after in their lives, Live registered upon our brazen tombs,... And then grace us in the disgrace of death; When spite of cormorant devouring Time, Th' endeavor of this present breath may buy That honor which shall bate his scythe's keen edge, And make us heirs of all eternity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
While enclosed shopping malls suspended space, time, and weather, Disneyland went one step further and suspended reality. Any geog...raphic, cultural, or mythical location, whether supplied by fictional texts (Tom Sawyer's Island), historical locations (New Orleans Square), or futuristic projections (Space Mountain), could be reconfigured as a setting for entertainment. Shopping malls easily adapted this appropriation of "place" in the creation of a specialized theme environment. In Scottsdale, the Borgata, an open-air shopping mall set down in the flat Arizona desert, reinterprets the medieval Tuscan hill town of San Gimignano with piazza and scaled-down towers (made of real Italian bricks).LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I know, it must have been my imagination, but it makes me realize how desperately alone the Earth is. Hanging in space like a spec...k of food floating in the ocean. Sooner or later to be swallowed up by some creature floating by.... Time will tell, Dr. Mason. We can only wait and wonder. Wonder how, wonder when.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Impressionists dissolved forms. They painted blurry "impressions" of objects modified by changing light and atmospheric condit...ions--drifts of fog, shimmering forest shadows, the glow of gas lamps on rainy streets. Cubists cracked the mirror of art. In their paintings objects open into surrounding space and none has an uninterrupted outline. Parts are broken off, colors bleed into neighboring objects, and translucent facets of space with multiple light sources cut shadows across bounding surfaces. They removed sections of faces and reassembled what remained to create grotesque open forms in defiance of natural appearance.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »