Here [in London, history] ... seemed the very fabric of things, as if the city were a single growth of stone and brick, uncounted ...strata of message and meaning, age upon age, generated over the centuries to the dictates of some now all-but-unreadable DNA of commerce and empire.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is no accident that banks resemble temples, preferably Greek, and that the supplicants who come to perform the rites of deposit... and withdrawal instinctively lower their voices into the registers of awe. Even the most junior tellers acquire within weeks of their employment the officiousness of hierophants tending an eternal flame. I don't know how they become so quickly inducted into the presiding mysteries, or who instructs them in the finely articulated inflections of contempt for the laity, but somehow they learn to think of themselves as suppliers of the monetarized DNA that is the breath of life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We cannot cheat on DNA. We cannot get round photosynthesis. We cannot say I am not going to give a damn about phytoplankton. All t...hese tiny mechanisms provide the preconditions of our planetary life. To say we do not care is to say in the most literal sense that "we choose death."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »