THE BEST AMONG US ARE OUTCASTS

This post has tHREE parts. CLICK HERE FOR THE FIRST PART, “SUPERHUMBLE”. Click here for the THIRD PART part, “OLD MEN”.
1. Guy de Maupassant, “Le Horla” (1886–7), in Guy de Maupassant’s Selected Works, ed. Robert Lethbridge, trans. Sandra Smith (New York: W. W. Norton, 2017), p. 182.

2. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651; Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 2014), p. 97.

3. Joseph Conrad’s word: see “Author’s Note to Typhoon and Other Stories” (1919), in The Nigger of the “Narcissus” / Typhoon / and Other Stories (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1981), p. 148.

“Do we ever see a hundred thousandth of what actually exists? [...] Take the wind, for example, which is the greatest force of nature: it knocks men over, tears down buildings, uproots trees, lifts the sea to form mountains of water, destroys cliffs and forces ships onto the reefs; the wind kills, it whistles, it groans and howls, but have you ever seen it? Could you ever see it? And yet it exists.”¹Hereby it is manifest, that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war is of every man against every man. For War consisteth not in battle only[.]²

II
STORM-PIECE^{3

Coming soon}