Cities are ... distinguished by the catastrophic forms they presuppose and which are a vital part of their essential charm. New Yo...rk is King Kong, or the blackout, or vertical bombardment: Towering Inferno. Los Angeles is the horizontal fault, California breaking off and sliding into the Pacific: Earthquake.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Give me the keys. I feel for the common chord again, Sliding by semi-tones till I sink to a minor,--yes,... And I blunt it into a ninth, and I stand on alien ground, Surveying a while the heights I rolled from into the deep; Which, hark, I have dared and done, for my resting-place is found, The C Major of this life: so, now I will try to sleep.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
FROM his shoulder Hiawatha Took the camera of rosewood,... Made of sliding, folding rosewood; Neatly put it all together. In its case it lay compactly, Folded into nearly nothing; But he opened out the hinges, Pushed and pulled the joints and hinges, Till it looked all squares and oblongs, Like a complicated figure In the second book of Euclid. This he perched upon a tripod-- Crouched beneath its dusky cover-- Stretched his hand, enforcing silence-- Said "Be motionless, I beg you!" Mystic, awful was the process. All the family in order Sat before him for their pictures: Each in turn as he was taken, Volunteered his own suggestions, His ingenious suggestions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What opium is instilled into all disaster? It shows formidable as we approach it, but there is at last no rough rasping friction, ...but the most slippery sliding surfaces. We fall soft on a thought.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The consciousness in each man is a sliding scale, which identifies him now with the First Cause, and now with the flesh of his bod...y; life above life, in infinite degrees.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Heaven has a Sea of Glass on which angels go sliding every afternoon. There are many golden streets, but the principal thoroughfar...es are Amen Street and Hallelujah Avenue, which intersect in front of the Throne. These streets play tunes when walked on, and all shoes have songs in them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I was lucky enough to see with my own eyes the recent stock- market crash, where they lost several million dollars, a rabble of de...ad money that went sliding off into the sea. Never as then, amid suicides, hysteria, and groups of fainting people, have I felt the sensation of real death, death without hope, death that is nothing but rottenness, for the spectacle was terrifying but devoid of greatness.... I felt something like a divine urge to bombard that whole canyon of shadow, where ambulances collected suicides whose hands were full of rings.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Initially, between the trees, he caught sight of whirling, jumping bodies. Heya-hey-heya. Someone climbing. Rocks pitched after a ...board; and on the river, tilting patches of reflection. Heya-fulla-heya-heya. Boys were sliding down the bank on their buttocks, roughing the scaly sand. They sailed a can lid on the water where at first it turned, floating, then sank, burning like a mirror. Hiyah-smilah. Hee-mee? Coltch. Skirts rose slowly, slowly subsided. A parasol flew open with a snap. Or-rawk. Gah. Houf. Half buried in the shingle, a deep red brick was then awash. Yo-yo giggy. Teetoo Sheek? Num! Lissa-lissa. A willow leaned out, trailing its leaves in the water.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
America's two most important intellectual forebears are conceivably Franklin and Emerson. Franklin, however, makes us a little une...asy. Poor Richard is at once too goody-goody and too worldly. He argues the prudential approach to life almost too well: he blends copybook morality with eighteenth-century realism; his is the philosophy of the main chance without the cushioning of the noble motive. The special quality in Franklin is that he foreshadowed, with his philistine counsel, what America was to become, while indicating, through his unflinching worldliness, what it would cease to be. The better, the more central, the more congenial spokesman was Emerson, whose gift for giving a special emphasis and elevation to words has offered us a method for sliding over or circumventing things; whose fine aphorisms are the ancestors, at times even the blood brothers, of our trademarks and slogans; whose own transcendental visions coagulated or curdled into a great variety of mystical con-games; and whose deep concern for ideas could be made a kind of evasion of realities. Unlike Poor Richard, Emerson doesn't show us up--nor for that matter, pin us down. He is genuinely great without being uncomfortably specific.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »