Word: soots
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...most dazzling new sight in Paris is-Paris. For decades, the face of the city was as grey as its ubiquitous cats. But since 1959, squads of yellow-slickered workmen have scrambled up metal scaffoldings to hose down and sand-rub buildings and monuments encrusted with the industrial soot of the 20th century. The grime fighters have now cleaned more than a third of Paris' buildings, and visitors to Paris are discovering a beauteous city they never saw before, the city that De Balzac called the color of cream...
...building distinction. Says Bernard Vitry, who directed the cleaning of the Madeleine: "I love stone too much not to wish to see it." Malraux says that art is "the presence in our lives of what should belong to death," and holds that classic buildings cloaked in mantles of soot are deadened, if not dead. To look on beauty bare, as it is emerging in Paris, is to see what is agelessly and vibrantly alive, what T. S. Eliot called "the present moment of the past...
...smoke and fumes escape into the air. These measures did some good. For one thing, they changed the color and character of the smog. Los Angeles smog is still maddeningly irritating to the eyes, but now, at least it is "clean," a glaring whitish color with practically no soot or smoke particles...
...spite of the banishment of smoke and soot, Los Angeles smog has grown progressively worse, and the same kind of air pollution has appeared in other parts of California. Chemist Philip A. Leighton of Stanford University believes that unless something drastic is done, smog will soon shroud most of the inhabited parts of the state. Other even gloomier prophets foresee a California unfit for human life...
...like the interlacing illuminations in the Irish Book of Kells. Set on a rusticated granite base, the moated turret echoes ancient Celtic round castles scattered across the green countryside, recalls the Martello towers built to defend Ireland's coasts during Napoleonic times. Johansen even made studies of how soot streaks the concrete so that the walls would weather with character...