"Our age," I thought, "is nothing more than a monstrous organism that digests gold, oil, politics and wars, and secretes pleasure for some, death for others. A gigantic stomach that churns up and blends together things that, in our shame and hipocrisy, we keep separate." … … I do not begin to understand this grotesque organism, for there is nothing to understand.
Excerpt from Requiem for the East, by Andreï Makine.