skeleton with layers

Monte Davis monte.davis at verizon.net
Fri Oct 27 11:41:43 CDT 2006


> doesn't GR contain a passage or passages that make(s)
> this explicit? Squeeze a dinosaur you get Oil, and the
> War the Never Ends.
 
It's there passim as you say, but especially well polymerized in:
 
Rathenau to Smaragd, pp. 166-167 (Viking/Penguin):
 

Imagine coal, down in the earth, dead black, no light, the very substance of
death. Death ancient, prehistoric, species we will never see again. Growing
older, blacker, deeper, in layers of perpetual night... The persistence,
then, of structures favoring death. Death converted into more death.
Perfecting its reign, just as the buried coal grows denser, and overlaid
with more strata-epoch on top of epoch, city on top of ruined city. This is
the sign of Death the impersonator.

and Tchitcherine's father at Tsushima, p. 350:

...on the last day of his life, with Japanese iron whistling down on him
from ships that are too far off in the haze for him even to see, he will
think of the slowly carbonizing faces of men he thought he knew, men turning
to coal, ancient coal that glistened, each crystal, in the hoarse sputter of
the Jablochkov candles, each flake struck perfect . . . a conspiracy of
carbon, though he never phrased it as "carbon," it was power he walked away
from, the feeling of too much meaningless power, flowing wrong . . . he
could smell Death in it. 

and just before Tyrone's dissolution, p. 720:

This is the World just before men. Too violently pitched alive in constant
flow ever to be seen by men directly. They are meant only to look at it
dead, in still strata, transputrefied to oil or coal.

 


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