People are like piles of charcoal in the woods. Only when young people have stopped glowing, and carbonized, as charcoal does, do they become useful. As long as they smolder and smoke they are perhaps more interesting, but useless, and all too often troublesome. Mankind unsparingly uses every individual as material to heat its great machines; but what good are the machines when all individuals (that is, mankind) serve only to keep them going? Machines that are their own end – is that the umana commedia?
