The Whole Earth Slanted

 

The sun struck, on steel, on bronze, on stone, on glass, on the grey water far beneath them, on the turret tops and the flashing windshields of crawling cars, on the incredible highways, stretching and snarling and turning for mile upon mile, on the houses, square and high, low and gabled, and on their howling antennae, on the sparse, weak trees, and on those towers, in the distance, of the city of New York.   

The plane titled, dropped and rose, and the whole earth slanted, now leaning against the windows of the plane, now dropping out of sight.  The sky was a hot, blank blue, and the static light invested in everything with its own lack of motion.  Only things could be seen from here, the work of people’s hands: but people did not exist.  The plane rose up, up, as though loath to descend from this high tranquillity; titled, and Yves looked down, hoping to see the Statue of Liberty, though he had been warned that it could not be seen from here; then the plane began, like a stone, to drop, the water rushed up at them, the motors groaned, the wings trembled, resisting the awful, downward pull.   

Then, when the water was at their feet, the white strip of the landing flashed into place beneath them.  The wheels struck the ground with a brief and heavy thud, and wires and light and towers went screaming by.  The hostess’ voice came over the speaker, congratulating them on their journey, and hoping to see them again soon.  The hostess was very pretty. He had intermittently flirted with her all night, delighted to discover how easy this was.  He was drunk and terribly weary, and filled with an excitement which was close to panic; in fact, he had burned his way to the outer edge of drunkenness and weariness, into a diamond-hard sobriety.  With the voice of the hostess, the people of this planet sprang out of the ground, pushing trucks and waving arms and crossing roads and vanishing into, or erupting out of buildings.  The voice of the hostess asked the passengers please to remain seated until the aircraft had come to a complete halt. 

Quotation from: Another Country by James Baldwin, Penguin Books 2001 

On the Shoulders of Giants

A 1907 article in the Nation ... 'Taking up what had become a topical theme, the article looked back to the 1870s, running off a list of the 'giants of the day' in thought, literature and science [25 names]

... and then it asked who from the present could be ranked alongside them. This trope of pygmies on the shoulders of giants is a constant discussion of this topic, though not, of course, of this topic alone.

 The article went onto consider the possibility that this apparent decline actually reflected the changed conditions of intellectual work.

Quotation from: Absent Minds by Stefan Collini. p.103

A Fabulous Place

It is a fabulous place: when the tide is in, a wave-churned basin, creamy with foam, whipped by the combers that roll in from the whistling buoy on the reef. But when the tide goes out the little water world becomes quiet and lovely. The sea is very clear and the bottom becomes fantastic with hurrying, fighting, feeding, breeding animals.

Crabs rush from frond to frond of the waving algae. Starfish squat over mussels and limpets, attach their million little suckers and then slowly lift with incredible power until the prey is broken form the rock. And then the starfish stomach comes out and envelops its food. Orange and speckled and fluted nudibranchs slide gracefully over the rocks, their skirts waving like the dresses of Spanish dancers. And black eels poke their heads out of crevices and wait for prey.

The snapping shrimps with their trigger claws pop loudly. The lovely, coloured world is glassed over. Hermit crabs like frantic children scamper on the bottom sand. And now one, finding an empty snail shell he likes better than his own, creeps out, exposing his soft body to the enemy for a moment, and then pops into the new shell. A wave breaks over the barrier, and churns the glassy water for a moment and mixes bubbles into the pool, and then it clears and is tranquil and lovely and murderous again. Here a crab tears a leg from his brother.

The anemones expand like soft and brilliant flowers, inviting any tired and perplexed animal to lie for a moment in their arms, and when some small crab or little tide-pool Johnnies accepts the green and purple invitation, the petals whip in, the stinging cells shoot tiny narcotic needles into the prey and it grows weak and perhaps sleepy while the searing caustic digestive acids melt its body down.

Quotation: Cannery Row John Steinbeck 1945