"There is no real escape from this vortex. The only way to become immune to the plague is to expose oneself to its contagion. But this inevitably means becoming prey to it in an endless cycle. The plague generates itself, reproducing tirelessly, despite and precisely because of attempts to eradicate it—in reality, hiding it, crushing it against the fragile wall of oblivion and repression. Humanity is nothing more than that thin strip of land that stretches between one wave of the plague and another – emerging into the open only when the tide recedes, before rising again and submerging us once more. That in some seasons the plague – this plague in man and of man – disappears, recedes, vanishes, is our impression. It has always been there, lurking, waiting to return and explode stronger than before, like the dark shadow that stretched across the burning heart of Western civilization in the 1930s."