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 »
The sky was as full of motion and change as the desert beneath it was monotonous and still,--and there was so much sky, more than ...at sea, more than anywhere else in the world. The plain was there, under one's feet, but what one saw when one looked about was that brilliant blue world of stinging air and moving cloud. Even the mountains were mere ant-hills under it. Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky. The landscape one longed for when one was away, the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It's alive and waiting for you. Ready to kill you if you go too far. The sun will get you, or the cold at night. A thousand ways t...he desert can kill.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In time the scouring of wind and rain will wear down the ranges and plane off the region until it has the drab monotony of the old...er deserts. In the meantime--a two-million-year meantime--travelers may enjoy the cruel beauties of a desert in its youth,....LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
They cannot scare me with their empty spaces Between stars--on stars where no human race is.... I have it in me so much nearer home To scare myself with my own desert places.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Now, you mummy's darlings, get a rift on them boots. Definitely shine 'em, my little curly-headed lambs, for in our mob, war or no... war, you die with clean boots on.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I--'ave--marched--six--weeks in 'Ell an' certify It--is--not--fire--devils, dark or anything,... But boots--boots--boots--boots--movin' up an' down again, An' there's no discharge in the war!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Boots Mulcahey: I'm not gonna make a speech. I just got something to say. Tomorrow our old pal, Doc, here's goin' out. He's bein' ...paid off after 30 years. I know most of you kids gotta long way to go before you find out what 30 years in the Navy means. It means service tough and good. It means serving your country in peace and in war. So let's raise our glasses. Radio announcer: We interrupt this program for an important announcement. This morning.... Boots Mulcahey: Aw, cut that thing off. So let's raise our glasses and drink with all the solemnity this occasion demands.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He sustained him in a desert land, in a howling wilderness waste; he shielded him, cared for him, guarded him as the apple of his ...eye.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »