Novel Aspects of Insect-Plant Interactions Book

"America, long steeped in the thin sour wine of gnosticism, rejects its body, its matter, despises every luxury except cosmology. In these last hours before its inevitable abstraction into a more vigorous people, America reaches for and attains the false wisdom of the Stoa: nothing is except as it seems to us. No event possesses lineaments of its own, only the feel of it we fancy we perceive. Ample Saturn, lord of measure and definition, reeks unpleasantly of exactitude and long division, and is banished from the pantheon; bubbling expansive cancer-eaten Jupiter presides over the cosmological matinee. Gemutlichkeit our nearest approach to melancholy, sickness and death are cardboard jointed skeletons Blue-Crossed away. Nobody believes in them, nobody is afraid. Romeo clutches the putrified carcass of his Giulietta, resolute in hope. America, you have seen atherosclerosis enthroned in high places, you have watched senile President after senile President flap its lips and gibber on your screens of youth and health and destiny. America, you build your simplistic cosmologies, you erect your feigned realities as you put up this so-called Gateway of the West. They will stand as long, and mean as little: this empty arch, this celebration of vacuity and hollow promise, this great Behistun Rock on which our Darius has neglected to carve his message for all generations of men to come."