by Daniel Behrman ; Harper's Magazine Press, 1973
Reviewer's disclaimer : The following quotes were taken from the above book and are shown here without permission of the author or publisher.
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Small wonder that the organism of man the hunter races wildy; all that energy intake is going wild, Achilles' heel is on the accelerator, his toes is on the brake. Small wonder that the energy bursts out elsewhere; perhaps it erupts into carcinomas that strike us down willy-nilly like the plague in Defoe's London, you're here today, you're gone tomorrow. It cloaks us, too, with unhealthy tissue, a refuse head of quivering grease that we must tote with us when we jelly out of our wheelchairs, our hearts pumping like a schoolgirl's at the sight of her first swain, our chests heaving, our lungs panting.
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What we do know is that no human beings until now have ever commanded so much artificial energy while using so little of their own.
The calories pour into the gut; the gasoline that goes into the tank is converted into motion, but not the calories in the gut. The power has to be used up, it has to go somewhere. Smoking is one way. I do not know the physiology, all I do know is that I was a lot more tired when I smoked. I did much less, I needed sleep more that I do now. Tobacco can use up the excess energy. Yet it, too, seems to spoil the balancing act. For a while, we can do anything, smoke, drive, eat, drink. Not forever, though; the furnace stops drawing, we keep shoveling the stuff in but it doesn't go away. Cut down on sweets, try cyclamates instead; no, back to sccharine again; anything that will save the sweet sensation of fuel going down the gut without forcing us to convert it to work. Try the drinking man's diet, try the driving man's diet.
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So we are bound hand and foot to our sport cars, we seal ourselves in, we drop into the box, we have all the mobility of a letter except that it can go first-class. We go fourth-class, junk mail, containerized bulk shipments. We can't even go to the toilet, no stopping except at designated rest areas. We have true mobility, eternal mobility, we are condemned like the wandering Jew to wander from one rest area to another, to beat like the Flying Dutchman around the Hawthorne Circle or he Bagnolet interchange.
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.... the car is a semi-permanent environment. It influences the way we apprehend things. Not only does it cut the physical activity, but it filters and inhibits sensory stimuli. We do not touch, see, and smell the way we did. Has this changed the way we interpret the world? It might be a good subject for researchers, the same sort of scientists as the ones I read about recently who were putting kittens into a room where they only has horizontal stripes before their eyes. When they grew into big cats, they could not recognize vertical stripes, these were not part of their store of references. What are the references for the car children? Are they blind, perhaps, to everything that moves at less than forty miles per hour?
Since this energy is not ours, we feel no need to conserve it, we throw it away. Perhaps the throwaway car was the start of throwaway living.
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The car cannot last because, like the moonship, it consumes itself as it consumes energy. Sooner or later, it consumes us, mentally as well as physically. The car bestows power without responsibility.
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The old European drive for living space has been siblimated into a push for parking space. The Parisians are becoming bolder. In 1939, they said they weren't going to die for Danzig, today they die for a place to park, screaming and fistfighting and kicking until one of the two adversaries is felled by this infarctus.
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Still she didn't come down. What was left of her pate was getting warm, soon the waitress would bring out the roast pork and it would be getting cold.
I got up from the table, crossed the road, and walked up the steps of the bridge. She was not at the railing, she was on all fours in the middle of the plank walk, her rear in the air, the little stumpo of her ponytail jutting up like a tuft of tough grass.
"It's terrible!" she called out ot me. "Come look! Quick!" I got down on all fours next to her and put my eye up against a crevice between two planks. Nothing, just the green Marne. I started to get up, the position was already straining my joints, but she said: "No, stay there! A barge is coming!" I creaked back down on the boards, hoping that anybody passing by on the bridge would think we were Moslems at prayer and not call the wagon. The barge came up, I looked down at it through the lens of the crevice.
It was terrible. The colors of the barge, black bow, tan sand, red and blue laundry, cream roof, green funnel, black stern, flashed by under my eyes like a film, one color jammed against the other, flicking on and off the screen bounded by the edges of my lens until there was only the turmoil of the barge's wake in the Marne, white turning back into green.
Another barge was just nosing around the bend downstream. I put my head down and watched the scene again, seeing for the first time the way the photographer sees all the time. I would like to get a movie camera on that footbridge at Bry-sur-Marne, I am curious to learn if a machine can see the way she taugh me to see.
He becomes afraid in the city. He fears the wide lifeless avenues where he has destroyed all life. He locks up his car when he drives through the city. He locks himself up; his car is a social compartment, a cell isolated from other cells.