This morning, we had CS Lewis's "...city of the Darkened World..." (see here)
Now, Frank Miller gives us:
"- - the darkness that seemed to fall across the entire city."
-The Dark Knight Returns, Book Four, The Dark Knight Falls, p. 27.
And this recalls:
"The city grew blacker than the sky, for more lights glimmered aloft than below."
-Poul Anderson, Genesis ( New York, 2001), PART ONE, VIII, p. 93.
Cities darken.
Good night.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
I checked the bit you quoted from Part One, Chapter VIII of GENESIS. It's from the chapter where we see two members of a human race slowly dying out in despair over the the luxurious, but futile existence it lived as the pampered pets of the Ecumenicon, as Gaia, the AI which actually controlled Earth, was then called. A fuller quote would be: "Occasional lights came to life, tiny at their distance, and far apart. The maintainors did not need any, only such humans as were left did."
The spectacle of a DARK human city at night with high technology was incongruous because it was dying as the human slowly died out. This chapter of GENESIS shows us a mix of subtle despair and decadence. A refusal to defy the Ecumenicon and seek and create new life.
Sean
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