I don’t naturally look like this. I have to feed in order to have the power to hold it.”“Feed on what exactly?” Please don’t say blood, please don’t say blood, she whispered in her mind.“Death,” Trajan answered. Anya didn’t know if that was better or worse.

What drove such people to their sinister occupations? Spite? Certainly, but also the desire for order. Because the desire for order tries to transform the human world into an inorganic reign in which everything goes well, everything functions as a subject of an impersonal will. The desire for order is at the same time a desire for death, because life is a perpetual violation of order. Or, inversely, the desire for order is a virtuous pretext by which man's hatred for man justifies its crimes.

He loved the sea for deep-seated reasons: the hardworking artist's need for repose, the desire to take shelter from the demanding diversity of phenomena in the bosom of boundless simplicity, a propensity—proscribed and diametrically opposed to his mission in life and for that very reason seductive—a propensity for the unarticulated, the immoderate, the eternal, for nothingness. To repose in perfection is the desire of all those who strive for excellence, and is not nothingness a form of perfection?

It is possible, however, that the artist is both thin-skinned and prophetic and, like the canary lowered into the mine shaft to test the air, has caught a whiff of something lethal.

The revolution is for the sake of life, not death.