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As (Ulrich) looked down at the dark surge of bodies beneath the window, thoughts of his own days in the army made him say to himself: "It would take only one company to make a clean sweep of the square." He could imagine all those gaping mouths turning into a single frothing maw suddenly succumbing to panic, growing slack and drooping at the edges, lips slowly sinking over teeth; his imagination transformed the menacing black crowd into a flock of hens scattering before a dog rushing into their midst. All his anger had contracted again into a hard knot, but the old satisfaction in watching moral man retreat before brute violent man was, as always, a two-edged feeling. "Are you alright?" Count Leinsdorf was asking. He had been pacing the floor behind Ulrich and had actually received the impression from some odd movement of Ulrich's that he had cut himself, though there was no sharp-edged object anywhere in the vicinity.

I do not believe in Mazu, but neither am I entirely sure what belief in Mazu might look like. To take a religion seriously is to act as though its deities exist and have power (Chau, 2019). In the case of Mazu, and many other Chinese deities, however, there is nothing like the Judeo-Christian God’s insistence on exclusive devotion in the absence of clear evidence, the Kirkegaardian leap of faith toward the unknowable (Climacus, 1846). Mazu simply is, and if you do not care about her, she is unlikely to care about you. ... On this and subsequent visits to the Main Hall (of the Nansha Tianhou Temple in Guangzhou), I am surprised at the lack of devotion. Some people pray briefly, and some even kneel before the central statue, but this seems more perfunctory than the prayer rituals I have observed elsewhere. Furthermore, I never see any religious professionals such as monks or oracle interpreters in or outside the temple, and there is a complete absence of the usually ubiquitous incense and divination tools such as fortune sticks kau cim 求籤. Although it is true that I am visiting the temple on an ordinary weekday, the absence of the paraphernalia of devotion seems to affect visitors’ interactions with the goddess. These exclusions are likely intentional: I assume the temple administrators are emphasising its status as a scenic spot and reducing its potential for hosting folk religious activities, prioritising cultural heritage over engagement with the sacred. Most visitors treat the temple as a leisure park, as a nice place to go for the day—and yet this leisure activity is not precisely disconnected from Mazu. Although I witness little in the way of intensive prayer, nearly all visitors at least briefly step inside the Main Hall, and most subtly bow to the statue. Mazu is not receiving many supplications, but she is not just there for decoration; she is being greeted and acknowledged.

His face counted only as an aggregate of officially describable features—it seemed to him that he had never before pondered the fact that his eyes were gray eyes, one of the four officially recognized kinds of eyes, one pair among millions; his hair was blond, his build tall, his face oval, and his distinguishing marks none, although he had his own opinion on that point. His own feeling was that he was tall and broad-shouldered, with a chest curving like a filled sail on the mast, and joints fastening his muscles like small links of steel whenever he was angry or fighting or when Bonadea was clinging to him; but that he was slender, fine-boned, dark, and as soft as a jellyfish floating in the water whenever he was reading a book that moved him or felt touched by a breath of that great homeless love whose presence in the world he had never been able to understand. So he could, even at such a moment as this, himself appreciate this statistical demystification of his person and feel inspired by the quantitative and descriptive procedures applied to him by the police apparatus as if it were a love lyric invented by Satan.