Not an absence but a presence,
dense as any mineral, certain as sour wood.
We move through it like termites
tunneling dim passages beneath the visible,
miners seeking a way forward with faulty lamps,
brief lights in the blackness, the match-strike
of consciousness enacting its doomed insurgency
against the dark mountain.
What has made it impossible for us to live in time like fish in water, like birds in air, like children? It is the fault of Empire! Empire has created the time of history. Empire has located its existence not in the smooth recurrent spinning time of the cycle of the seasons but in the jagged time of rise and fall, of beginning and end, of catastrophe. Empire dooms itself to live in history and plot against history. One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire: how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era.
—J. M. COETZEE, Waiting for the Barbarians