Danger's Over, Banana Breakfast Is Saved.

So The City Became The Material Expression Of A Particular Loss Of Innocence – Not Sexual Or Political Innocence But Somehow A Shared Dream Of What A City Might At Its Best Prove To Be – Its Inhabitants Became, And Have Remained, An Embittered And Amnesiac Race, Wounded But Unable To Connect Through Memory To The Moment Of Injury, Unable To Summon The Face Of Their Violator.

Some Typewriters In Whitehall, In The Pentagon, Killed More Civilians Than Our Little A4 Could Have Ever Hoped To.

In The Eighteenth Century It Was Often Convenient To Regard Man As A Clockwork Automaton. In The Nineteenth Century, With Newtonian Physics Pretty Well Assimilated And A Lot Of Work In Thermodynamics Going On, Man Was Looked On As A Heat Engine, About 40 Per Cent Efficient. Now In The Twentieth Century, With Nuclear And Subatomic Physics A Going Thing, Man Had Become Something Which Absorbs X-rays, Gamma Rays And Neutrons.

It Is A Curve Each Of Them Feels, Unmistakably. It Is The Parabola. They Must Have Guessed, Once Or Twice - Guessed And Refused To Believe - That Everything, Always, Collectively, Had Been Moving Toward That Purified Shape Latent In The Sky, That Shape Of No Surprise, No Second Chance, No Return. Yet They Do Move Forever Under It, Reserved For Its Own Black-and-white Bad News Certainly As If It Were The Rainbow, And They Its Children...

Length Is Usually Intensity. Not Time.