alright... i'm cheating, here. (cal, where are you?) i'm on chapter 3 and just read a breathtaking passage that i'm gonna reproduce below. (as i can't figure out how to italicize, i'm leaving out certain sentences with German words, but you'll read it on your own.)
"Their view; it is cosmic. Not of a man here, a child there, but an abstraction: race, land. Volk. Land. ...It is their sense of space and time. They see through the here, the now, into the vast black deep beyond, the unchanging. And that is fatal to life. Because eventually there will be no life; there was once only the dust particles in space, the hot hydrogen gases, nothing more, and it will come again. This is an interval, ein Augenblick. The cosmic process is hurrying on, crushing life back into granite and methane; the wheel turns for all life. It is all temporary. And they - these madmen - respond to the granite, the dust, the longing of the inanimate; they want to aid Natur.... And, he thought, I know why. They want to be agents, not the victims, of history."
"Their view; it is cosmic. Not of a man here, a child there, but an abstraction: race, land. Volk. Land. ...It is their sense of space and time. They see through the here, the now, into the vast black deep beyond, the unchanging. And that is fatal to life. Because eventually there will be no life; there was once only the dust particles in space, the hot hydrogen gases, nothing more, and it will come again. This is an interval, ein Augenblick. The cosmic process is hurrying on, crushing life back into granite and methane; the wheel turns for all life. It is all temporary. And they - these madmen - respond to the granite, the dust, the longing of the inanimate; they want to aid Natur.... And, he thought, I know why. They want to be agents, not the victims, of history."