“I’ve come to some of the last human communities swallowed by Leviathan, and I find them resisting the beast already before it reaches them. How do these people already know what they are up against? Is it possible that the beast is not one but many, that Ur is not in Sumer but wherever people gather, that Leviathan is as natural to human beings as hives to bees? Anything is possible, but the admission of such a possibility is cynically misanthropic and it precludes envisioning any exit from the trap. Such a possibility cannot be admitted into a song of freedom, because its admission is a prognostication of Earth’s doom.”

“Life is no more than a continual search for something to cling to. One gets up in the morning to find oneself in bed a mere matter of hours later, a sad commuter between lack of desire and fatigue. Time passes, spurring us less and less. Social obligations no longer seem to break our backs as we have got used to spreading the weight. We obey without even taking the trouble to say yes. Death is expiated by living, wrote the poet from another trench.”