It is thus that the few rare lucid well-disposed people who have had to struggle on the earth find themselves at certain hours of ...the day or night in the depth of certain authentic and waking nightmare states, surrounded by the formidable suction, the formidable tentacular oppression of a kind of civic magic which will soon be seen appearing openly in social behavior.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Neither the historian nor the cartographer can ever reproduce the reality they are trying to communicate to the reader of books or... maps; they can but give a plan, a series of indications, of this reality. There are contrasting schemes for choosing from enormous numbers of geographic details. You may have a map in which every feature that can be named, every hill, brook, crossroads, is crowded in; or you may have a map in which many details are omitted in the effort to show the reader the lay of the land, the shape of the mountain systems, the relations of drainage, relief, communications, and so on. Both kinds are useful, depending on the needs of the user.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One may decide that the nipple most nearly resembles a newly ripened raspberry (never, be it noted, the plonk of water on a pond a...t the commencement of a drizzle, a simple bladder nozzle built on the suction principal gum bubble, mole, or birth ward, bumpy metal button, or the painful red eruption of a swelling), but does one care to see his breakfast fruit as a sweetened milky bowl of snipped nips? no.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is the place where all the aspirations of the Western World meet to form one vast master aspiration, as powerful as the suction... of a steam dredge. It is the icing on the pie called Christian civilization.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You with the goo on the suction cup. You with your wires and electrodes... fastened at my ankle and wrist, sucking up the biological breast.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have misplaced the Van Allen belt the sewers and the drainage,... the urban renewal and the suburban centers. I have forgotten the names of the literary critics.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In your Salvation shelter I saw poverty, misery, cold and hunger. You gave them bread and treacle and dreams of heaven. I give fro...m thirty shillings a week to twelve thousand a year. They find their own dreams; but I look after the drainage.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If you would see how interwoven it is in the warp and woof of civilization ... go at night-fall to the top of one of the down-town... steel giants and you may see how in the image of material man, at once his glory and his menace, is this thing we call a city. There beneath you is the monster, stretching acre upon acre into the far distance. High over head hangs the stagnant pall of its fetid breath, reddened with light from myriad eyes endlessly, everywhere blinking. Thousands of acres of cellular tissue, the city's flesh outspreads layer upon layer, enmeshed by an intricate network of veins and arteries radiating into the gloom, and in them, with muffled, persistent roar, circulating as the blood circulates in your veins, is the almost ceaseless beat of the activity to whose necessities it all conforms. The poisonous waste is drawn from the system of this gigantic creature by infinitely ramifying, thread-like ducts, gathering at their sensitive terminals matter destructive of its life, hurrying it to millions of small intestines to be collected in turn by larger, flowing to the great sewers, on to the drainage canal, and finally to the ocean.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »