The Silence of Animals

two perfectly insignificant and incapable individuals, whose existence is only rendered possible through the high organization of civilized crowds. Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings. The courage, the composure, the confidence; the emotions and principles; every great and every insignificant thought belongs not to the individual but to the crowd: to the crowd that believes blindly in the irresistible force of its institutions and of its morals, in the power of the police and of its opinion. (Location 91)

Before the liberation we had fought and suffered in order not to die. Now we were fighting and suffering in order to live. There is a profound difference between fighting to avoid death and fighting in order to live. Men who fight to avoid death preserve their dignity and one and all – men, women and children – defend it jealously, tenaciously, fiercely … When men fight to avoid death they cling with a tenacity born of desperation to all that constitutes the living and eternal part of human life, the essence, the noblest and purest element of life: dignity, pride, freedom of conscience. They fight to save their souls. But after the liberation men had to fight in order to live … It is a humiliating, horrible thing, a shameful necessity, a fight for life. Only for life. Only to save one’s skin. Observing the struggle for life in the city, Malaparte watched as civilization gave way. The people the inhabitants had imagined themselves to be – shaped, however imperfectly, by ideas of right and wrong – disappeared. What were left were hungry animals, ready to (Location 237)

a wordless essence, a fragrance of eternity, a quiver of the arrow in the blue … I must have stood there for some minutes, entranced, with a wordless awareness that ‘this is perfect – perfect’, until I noticed some slight mental discomfort nagging at the back of my mind – some trivial circumstance that marred the perfection of the moment. Then I remembered the nature of that irrelevant annoyance; I was, of course, in prison and might be shot. But this was immediately answered by a feeling whose verbal translation would be: ‘So what? is that all? have you got nothing more serious to worry about?’ – an answer so spontaneous, fresh and amused as if the impending annoyance had been the loss of a collar-stud. Then I was floating on my back in a river of peace, under bridges of silence, it came from nowhere and flowed nowhere. Then there was no river and no ‘I’. The ‘I’ had ceased to exist. (Location 312)

‘Perhaps Hitler’s genius was not demagogy, not lying, but the fundamentally irrational approach to the masses, the appeal to the pre-logical, totemistic mentality.’ (Location 352)

Why is meaning so important? Why do humans need a reason to live? Is it because they could not endure life if they did not believe it contained hidden significance? Or does the demand for meaning come from attaching too much sense to language – from thinking that our lives are books we have not yet learnt to read? (Location 873)

Echoing the Christian faith in free will, humanists hold that human beings are – or may someday become – free to choose their lives. They forget that the self that does the choosing has not itself been chosen. (Location 911)

The end of psychoanalysis – an interminable process, Freud warned – is the acceptance of a personal fate. (Location 915)

The ideal of self-realization owes much to the Romantic movement. For the Romantics the supreme achievement was originality. In creating new forms the artist was godlike. (Location 1153)