We are the only animals that tell stories to understand the world we live in. - Salman Rushdie

It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity.

This is who we are as a species: We contain within ourselves both the possibility of murdering an old stranger for almost no reason — the capacity in Shakespeare’s Iago which Coleridge called “motiveless Malignity” — and we also contain the antidote to that disease — courage, selflessness, the willingness to risk oneself to help that old stranger lying on the ground.

Between shame and shamelessness lies the axis upon which we turn; meteorological conditions at both these poles are of the most extreme, ferocious type. Shamelessness, shame: the roots of violence.