Preface In The Form of a Quotation
There are some societies in which natural deaths almost never occur, so diabolical and curious are their customs. Indeed, so touching is the belief in the supremacy of their own obsessions that, armed to the teeth, they defend themselves lovingly against everyone and everything...
They interrogate everything as if it were an oracle… and out of every oracle came a splendid means for their survival, gold for their revenge and poison for their pleasure. Knowledge, hunger and transparency were their major games, played with all the fierceness of their ancestors. But death, as we know it… death, for them, was never a natural occurrence, only the direct result of what they called: “the misfortune of an improper move.”
There are rumors that many of them did, indeed, escape death entirely, even though we are positive that such things do exist, to a certain degree (death, for example, or transparency…) whatever their value, whatever the extent of our belief in them...
Transparency, like death, enabled them to move in a much more enchanted fashion, and aided them in their assault on the mystery of existence. Movement was everything, and became, with practice, literally maddened and delirious… it was as if their movements took place in another dimension, thereby seeming to project the aura of transparency, which eventually became a real condition. Whether death was actually avoided, or took place somewhere else, was always a matter of contention. Nevertheless, within those specific societies large numbers of people would often vanish without a trace…
From an anonymous early 19th Century anthropological
manuscript considered by most experts to be a hoax.