Superstine

“When they made love
Geryon liked to touch in slow succession each of the bones of Herakles' back
as it arched away from him into who knows what dark dream of its own, running both hands all the way down
from the base of the neck
to the end of the spine which he can cause to shiver like a root in the rain.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse

“These lessons are not new; the history of epidemics and pandemics has been teaching them for centuries. That there seems to be no historical consciousness is frustrating, but not just because I am a historian. It is frustrating because it is wasteful and inefficient. It is also arrogant and naive - a lethal combination. It is naive to think that by simply learning lessons the future will be different and arrogant to suppose that those proffering the mea culpas are the enlightened ones finally seeing the mistakes of the past”
― Christian W. McMillen, Pandemics: A Very Short Introduction