SunRa
On Jupiter the skies are always blue,
from palest blue to deepest darkest hue
A model of the future. So then what might an achievable image of the future look like ? After to many years of SF and terrifying utopian novels. Only Tarkvovski’s Solaris and these paragraphs from Peter Handke get even close…
Part of it was that the rivers and their characteristic surroundings were increasingly shaping everyday life, were gradually permeating it almost to the exclusion of everything else. In the market stalls you could still see all the varieties of salt-water fish laid out. But the point was that these were laid out, dead or half-dead, whereas the freshwater fish cavorted in glass tanks nearby; even if there were not quite as many varieties; each individual exemplar was almost a species unto itself, and not only because it was palpably alive, leaping about amid the throng of other fishes. For many years out of style, they were now increasingly prized, purchased, and prepared according to old recipes, and even more according to new ones, were a component of the daily regional culture (regional having become no less important than national).
Similarly the old orchards and the other vegetable gardens or fields or terraces along both rivers, which had been long left fallow, now, wherever they had not been turned into building sites, were experiencing a second spring-summer-fall. The varieties once planted there were being supplemented and enriched by imported varieties or varieties moving on there own into an area as a result of the abrupt warming of the climate all over the continent. Of course exotic fruits, as well as olives wine grapes, pistachios, and such, continued to be imported into the north-western region. But in the meantime it had become customary-this to part of the new way of living – that once locally grown crops had been sold, used up, consumed, no substitutes were flown in from another hemisphere. No more fresh cherries or blueberries from Chile in the winter. No more early fall apples from New Zealand, in the spring. No more Cepes from South Africa with lamb at Eastertime. And in her two river city, the ripening of the local fruits, rather than being accelerated was actually held back… courtesy of Handke
