IVIV (2) skeletons

[Doug Millison]

"The development stretched into the haze and the soft smell of the fog  
component of smog, and of desert beneath the pavement--model units  
nearer the road, finished homes farther in, and just visible beyond  
them the skeletons of new construction, expanding into the  
unincorporated wastes." (IV 20)

"The desert creeps in on a man's land. … Is the desert's attack too  
powerful for any boy , or wall, or dead father and mother? … And now  
the house begins to fill with desert, like the lower half of an  
hourglass which will never be inverted again. … 'the city is only the  
desert in disguise.' "
--V. ch3 section v; pp. 70-71  Bantam/Windstone paperback


alice quotes a magnificent passage:

Now, amid the green, life-restless loom of that Arsacidean wood, the  
great,
white, worshipped skeleton lay lounging --a gigantic idler! Yet, as
the ever-woven verdant warp and woof intermixed and hummed around him,
the mighty idler seemed the cunning weaver; himself all woven over
with the vines; every month assuming greener, fresher verdure; but
himself a skeleton. Life folded Death; Death trellised Life; the grim
god wived with youthful Life, and begat him curly-headed glories

http://www.princeton.edu/~batke/moby/moby_102.html