The secret affinity between gambling and the desert: the intensity of gambling reinforced by the presence of the desert all around... the town. The air-conditioned freshness of the gaming rooms, as against the radiant heat outside. The challenge of all the artificial lights to the violence of the sun's rays. Night of gambling sunlit on all sides; the glittering darkness of these rooms in the middle of the desert. Gambling itself is a desert form, inhuman, uncultured, initiatory, a challenge to the natural economy of value, a crazed activity on the fringes of exchange. But it too has a strict limit and stops abruptly; its boundaries are exact, its passion knows no confusion. Neither the desert nor gambling are open areas; their spaces are finite and concentric, increasing in intensity toward the interior, toward a central point, be it the spirit of gambling or the heart of the desert--a privileged, immemorial space, where things lose their shadow, where money loses its value, and where the extreme rarity of traces of what signals to us there leads men to seek the instantaneity of wealth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Old men who never cheated, never doubted, Communicated monthly, sit and stare... At the new suburb stretched beyond the run-way Where a young man lands hatless from the air.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
That air would disappear from the whole earth in time, perhaps; but long after his day. He did not know just when it had become so... necessary to him, but he had come back to die in exile for the sake of it. Something soft and wild and free, something that whispered to the ear on the pillow, lightened the heart, softly, softly picked the lock, slid the bolts, and released the prisoned spirit of man into the wind, into the blue and gold, into the morning, into the morning!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Wild air, world-mothering air, Nestling me everywhere,... That each eyelash or hair Girdles; goes home betwixt The fleeciest, frailest-fixed Snowflake; that's fairly mixed With, riddles, and is rife In every least thing's life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The head withdraws into its hatch (a boy's), The engines rise to their blind laboring roar,... And the green, made beasts run home to air. Now in each aspect death is pure.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »