The finest people, as people go, cannot help but betray a fair portion of fear and insecurity, even full-blown panic.

What makes a nightmare nightmarish is the sense that something is happening that should not be. While nightmares are the most convenient reference point for this sense of the impossible, the unthinkable, as something that is actually happening, it is not restricted to our sleeping hours.

This, then, is the ultimate, that is only, consolation: simply that someone shares some of your own feelings and has made of these a work of art which you have the insight, sensitivity, and — like it or not — peculiar set of experiences to appreciate. Amazing thing to say, the consolation of horror in art is that it actually intensifies our panic, loudens it on the sounding-board of our horror-hollowed hearts, turns terror up full blast, all the while reaching for that perfect and deafening amplitude at which we may dance to the bizarre music of our own misery.

And the worst possible thing we could know — worse than knowing of our descent from a mass of microorganisms — is that we are nobodies not somebodies, puppets not people.

The only value of this world lay in its power - at certain times - to suggest another world.

What we do, as a conscious species, is set markers for ourselves. Once we reach one marker, we advance to the next.

Madness, mayhem, erotic vandalism, devastation of innumerable souls - while we scream and perish, History licks a finger and turns the page.