Double Flee A

Courtesy of Randy, an excerpt from Ray Bradbury's introduction to Jules Verne's "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea," translated by Anthony Bonner.

Consider America, first of all the new breed of nations.
Consider America, a nation, because of its newness, ardent in its blasphemy.
Set in motion by the cetrifuge of the great wheel of the Industrial Revolution, this people flung
themselves across sea praries to stand on New England rim-rock and flung themselves yet on across land praries. Shocking other ages, they blasphemed down the meadows and over hills as ancient as the memory of Jerusalem. Consider America, her fire-dragon locomotives huffing out vast devil bursts of fuming spark, setting the lion-grass afire as they went.
Come to a forest, cut it down. Come to a mountain, quarry it to pebbles. Skip the pebbles across God's lakes. Build new mountains, finally, upright, and ornamented with man's prideful crustations. Then run men up and down elevator shafts to a heaven no longer believed in from a hell much better ignored.
Consider the authors who lived in and with these men and wrote to channel this blasphemy, express it in symbols about which such men could enthuse like devil children. With a new nation being dreamt to life, set to rights with fabulous new toys, the uneasy dreamers cast about and came up with two most ardent blasphemers:
Herman Melville.
Jules Verne.
"American" authors, both.

posted by dale @ 2:39 PM