“Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program… I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from.”

“I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, and I want goodness. I want sin.”

I find myself wondering too whether he has a private ritual of purification, carried out behind closed doors, to enable him to return and break bread with other men. Does he wash his hands very carefully, perhaps, or change all his clothes; or has the Bureau created new men who can pass without disquiet between the unclean and the clean?

To testify to a history of oppression is necessary, but it is not sufficient unless that history is redirected into intellectual process and universalized to include all sufferers. Yet too often testimony to oppression becomes only a justification for further cruelty and inhumanity,

is writing follows an unbreakable convention: to conceal any sign that the author or the intended reader is a human b eing. It gives the impression that, from the stated denitions, the desired results follow infallibly by a purely mechanical pro cedure. In fact, no computing ma- chine has ever b een built that could accept his denitions as inputs.