Excerpt: "...it surfaces the fanatical underbelly of belief. The part of you that clings to a worldview with the grip of someone hanging over a void, because letting go of the belief feels akin to letting go of all existence. It's the part that has been catastrophising about meaning itself: whether anything holds, whether the ground beneath the spiritual life is real or a dream you told yourself in pretty hymns and poems to survive the permeability. It is the part that awakens to suspect, in the wee small hours of the morning, that everything you have oriented your life around might be an avoidance of a terror you cannot face directly...."

Excerpt: "A frequency. A persistent sense of being slightly out of phase with whatever the present moment officially is. The conviction, since childhood, that the world you arrived into was already ending, and that the world coming next was somehow your responsibility, even though nobody had asked you to take it on..."

"Every civilisation begins with someone who burned the previous arrangement. The trick is knowing whether you are the fire or the fuel."