at night , listening to the wind in the trees , the clockmaker dreamed , as his creator dreamed , as the earth itself dreamed , of the joy of energy and rhythm , the bursting forth of fire from a volcano , the back and forth dance of the tides , the tenderness of new trees growing up from the ashes of the old , the tension and release and beauty of compressing rough substances like wood and coal into gemstones hidden in the body of the earth , bursting into brilliance in the atmosphere , and oh the pain , the pain of those extractions , the painful friction of earthquakes , the dull enervating drain of parasites living in and upon the earth , in its fluids and hard and soft substances , filling its arteries with what can not thrive therein , sickening it , the earth , sickening it , so that it could no longer sustain its own life and that of the parasites , the human beings who sucked more from the earth than the earth gave freely , killing it slowly until it had to fight back , rid itself of these greedy parasites .