Jim’s Reviews > The Melancholy of Resistance > Status Update

[T]he whole of human history is no more than the histrionics of of a stupid, bloody, miserable outcast in an obscure corner of a vast stage, a kind of tortured confession of error, a slow acknowledgement of the painful fact that this creation was not necessarily a brilliant success.

Contrary to what anyone might think, it had not escaped Valuska's notice, the evidence being so readily available, that everyone he met was preoccupied by the notion of 'the collapse into anarchy,' a state that, in the general opinion, was no longer avoidable.

[P]eople were liable to detect traces of an equally passionate drift towards chaos, and —quite rightly—suspect that the powers unleashed, instead of protecting that which was irrecoverably dead and buried, would smash it to pieces in the good cause of replacing the featureless boredom of their selfish lives with 'the elevating passion of communal action.'