"No need to collect a mass of facts. We have just considered societies which are ignorant: the first, of our conception of fate; the second, of our conception of birth; the third, of our conception of exchange; the last, of our conception of death. That's enough.

"Between the men we have just mentioned, and the Greek, or the Gothic man—or anybody else—and ourselves, what is there in common?"

Lowering his lizard-skin eyelids slightly, [Möllberg] paused for a moment, to give more weight to what he was going to say:

"Whether we are talking of God in the religious civilizations, or the link with the cosmos in the preceding civilizations, every mental structure considers as absolute and unassailable any particular sign which directs life, and without which man could neither think nor act. (A sign which does not necessarily guarantee a better life for man, which can equally well, of course, contribute to his destruction!) It is to man what the aquarium is to the fish swimming inside it. It does not enter his mind. It has nothing to do with the search for truth. It seizes and possesses man, while he never possesses it entirely. So much so, in fact—and now I come back to Mr. Vincent Berger's argument—that men are, perhaps, more thoroughly defined and classified by their form of fatalism than by anything else."

"Which is ours?" my father asked.

"it's not easy for a fish to see its own aquarium. . . . First and foremost, one's country, don't yo think?"

Walter raised his hand with the same conductor's gesture as before and said with a kind of bitterness:

"There is a truth, gentlemen, to which we do in fact submit, in the same way as those kinds who appear on the fringe, if I may say so, of the most distant past used to submit to the stars . . . without which neither the idea of country, nor that of race, nor that of social distinction, would be what it is. We live in it, as the religious civilizations lived in God. Without it, not one of us—I merely say: 'not one'—would be able to think. It's our only realm: it's history."

"And behind history," Möllberg went on, "perhaps there's something which is to history what history is to the country, to revolution. Perhaps our consciousness of time—"

from The Walnut Trees of Altenburg, André Malraux, tr. A. W. Fielding