Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

by Patrick Süskind

Or this insanity about speed. What was the need for all these new roads being dug up everywhere, and these new bridges? What purpose did they serve? What was the advantage of being in Lyon within a week? Who set any store by that? Whom did it profit? Or crossing the Atlantic, racing to America in a month—as if people hadn’t got along without that continent for thousands of years. What had civilized man lost that he was looking for out there in jungles inhabited by Indians or Negroes. People even traveled to Lapland, up there in the north, with its eternal ice and savages who gorged themselves on raw fish. And now they hoped to discover yet another continent that was said to lie in the South Pacific, wherever that might be. And why all this insanity? Because the others were doing the same, the Spaniards, the damned English, the impertinent Dutch, whom you then had to go out and fight, which you couldn’t in the least afford. One of those battleships easily cost a good 300,000 livres, and a single cannon shot would sink it in five minutes, for good and all, paid for with our taxes.