Kindle Notes & Highlights
The Yanks were all for that sort of thing, carving up the world and recycling it as atmosphere.
Importantly, it was ambience rather than atmosphere. You may find ‘atmosphere’ in fast-food restaurants, thick enough to cut with a plastic knife and obedient to the strictest laws, being the necessary by-product of gingham curtains and sepia-tinted photographs, tables shaped like kegs and lithographs of the Three Little Pigs. Atmosphere is an American commodity. And that is why the citizens of the Golden City covet it. They want to breathe deep-fried oxygen, they want to be part of the Space Age. Europeans prefer ambience, which cannot be pumped in overnight or sprayed on with an aerosol, but
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Chiasmus – I cannot dig, to beg I am ashamed.
She seemed smaller, now that her contents were properly secured.
The late edition of your newspaper of 10 May asks: ‘How real is the threat of Muslin fundamentalism?’ In my view, it threatens the very fabric of society.
Absolute zinger
bag ladies and gentlemen, the collectors of old iron and empties, the perpetual window-shoppers, pushing their stolen trolleys through the streets as if the city were no more than a vast parking lot for supermarkets. These scavengers had turned the trolley into a symbol of want rather than plenty. Had I become one of them? I barely recognized myself.
Words without spines, the flabby offspring of a population of milksops. ‘Telly’ was bad enough on its own, but squatting on ‘fun’ like a slug on a cowpat, it was repulsive.
‘You’re so dry, I could write on you.’ ‘Dermatographic, you mean?’ Always wanted to drop that into a conversation. ‘You need moisturizing,’ she said, and produced from her bag a bottle of Vaseline Intensive Care.
The dust had hardly settled in Germany before the rubble of the Berlin Wall was up for sale.
Perhaps our first language was a dialogue with the earth in prints of hoof and paw? It is always affecting when a part of one’s own body becomes a measure of the world. The inch assumes its proper importance in the length of a thumb joint. The measures that matter most are not metres or yards, but hands and feet.
