Word: decayed
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...rate, Toynbee declared that the 21 civilizations he identified in recorded history had all followed certain patterns of growth and decay. According to what he called the law of "challenge and response," a specific challenge like the shortage of food in preclassical Greece might lead to varying responses (Spartan militarism or Athens' overseas empire), and after a "time of troubles" there would emerge a larger entity that would attempt to serve as a universal state (nurturing a universal church)-until it collapsed...
...best things in Pieces of the Frame are outside this comfortable sphere--an article about a lucrative quarterhorse race in New Mexico and one about the decay of Atlantic City. In both McPhee the educated family man on vaction fades away; he is not present at all in the racing article, and he takes on an unusual, ghostly Monopoly-playing persona in Atlantic City. The removal helps, because it gets rid of the chummy, comfortable tone that dominates the rest of the book. McPhee's writing works best when he is confronting the unfamiliar and making an effort to convey...
Hundreds of thousands of years from now, the most persistent signs of man's present civilization could be masses of well-preserved plastic bottles, containers, bags and wrappings. That is because plastics resist natural processes of decay almost indefinitely. To make the material go away when it is thrown away, scientists in Germany have developed a type of plastic that disintegrates when exposed to the ultraviolet rays in sunlight. But it has a hitch: the sun does not distinguish between unopened plastic containers and discards...
...through which the American conscience presently drifts, it is increasingly difficult to be outraged by anything anymore. The moral corpse of the American myth, that Cold War belief that the U.S. was the guardian of liberty" the world over, has had so many autopsies that the stench of its decay no longer offends our senses--we are deadened...
...desert that lap across each other here, where the march of flourescent poles has not yet reached. Catching our headlights in smoothflowing creaminess, the antlers pierce mutely our forward fall: motionless, steady in their chrome cage, at the fore of our seamless void, too strong, too immutable in their decay for our quick-lipped, easy spun gasp of time...