Displaced Person’s Song If you see a train this evening, Far away, against the sky, Lie down in your woolen blanket, Sleep and let the train go by. … - Thomas Pynchon

What sort of an age is this where a man becomes one's enemy only when his back is turned?

"You remember those twin statues of the Buddha that I told you about? Carved out of a mountain in Afghanistan, that got dynamited by the Taliban back in the spring? Notice anything familiar?"

"Twin Buddhas, twin towers, interesting coincidence, so what."

"The Trade Center towers were religious too. They stood for what this country worships above everything else, the market, always the holy fucking market."

"A religious beef, you're saying?"

"It's not a religion? These are people who believe the Invisible Hand of the Market runs everything. They fight holy wars against competing religions like Marxism. Against all evidence that the world is finite, this blind faith that resources will never run out, profits will go on increasing forever, just like the world's populations — more cheap labor, more addicted consumers."

Laboring through a world every day more stultified, which expected salvation in codes and governments, ever more willing to settle for suburban narratives and diminished payoffs — what were the chances of finding anyone else seeking to transcend that, and not even particularly aware of it?