Human civilization has been no more than a strange luminescence growing more intense by the hour, of which no one can say when it will begin to wane and when it will fade away.

The capital amassed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through various forms of slave economy is still in circulation, said De Jong, still bearing interest, increasing many times over and continually burgeoning anew.

And so they are ever returning to us, the dead.

I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all... only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry[the geometric measurement of solid bodies], between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like, and the longer I think about it the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead.

We take almost all the decisive steps in our lives as a result of slight inner adjustments of which we are barely conscious.

How I wished during those sleepless hours that I belonged to a different nation, or better still, to none at all.

Everything our civilization has produced is entombed.