Il tempo materiale Quotes

“We must invent our enemy. If he doesn't exist, we must create him.'

'But that's crazy,' said Radius. 'It'd be like choosing to have hallucinations--seeing something that doesn't exist and saying that it does.'

'Comrade Radius,' said Flight, 'listen. There's no such thing as a perfect enemy. A real enemy is always imperfect: never perfectly evil and never perfectly invincible. He has mild, even gentle characteristics. He's vulnerable. The perfect enemy is the one you create yourself.'

'But why can't we have an imperfect enemy?' Radius persisted. 'If evil is imperfect, if it's so weak and helpless, why should we force things and give it a perfection it doesn't possess?'

'Because *we* have to be perfect,' said Flight.”
― Giorgio Vasta, Il tempo materiale

“And yet for the three of us, who could perceive it, there was a ferment, an excitement, a need to be ravenous, for something to pick us up and sweep us along, for something to concentrate on. The struggle, for example. Because that was the heart of it. The word struggle contained sex, anger, and dream. We tried to say it under our breath, brazenly, and link it to an action. But at that point opaqueness resumed--the frosting that separated purpose from its fulfillment.”
― Giorgio Vasta, Il tempo materiale

“Who were we fighting, and who was fighting us? Like Flight, I felt a need to be persecuted, and yearned for a constant and devoted--yes, devoted--enemy who would satisfy my needs by persecuting me. But I didn't have such an enemy. Nobody was persecuting me.”
― Giorgio Vasta, Il tempo materiale

“. . . his innate repulsiveness, his constant and total marginality, prevented us, without our realizing it, from mobbing and destroying him in that way. Like when a pack of animals isolated a dying member yet respects him: it isolates him because he's dying, but respects him because, by the very act of dying, he's a millimeter away from discovery.”
― Giorgio Vasta, Il tempo materiale