quote

"The slowness of the masses found its pendant in the slowness of spirit: anything that was not the case at a particular moment had the character of a dream. The result was that history was to be found in books but scarcely anywhere outside othem- and what were books? Little things, seldom larger than a brick, but lighter, and almost irretrievable amid the myhriads of other things that covered the surface of the earth, and on their way to be coming more and more insignificant in the electronic world, which was rising faster and faster out of abstraction.

Everything was progressing, and everything that had hapened could just as well not have happened. Dreams were remembered for a few mintues after waking up- and a little later they had been forgotten. Where was the battle of Verdun now, except in barely traceable and in any case unread books, and in the memory of a handful of old men, who in twenty years time would also be dead and buried, with the nightmares and scars and all? Where was the battle of Stalingrad? The bombing of Dresden? Hiroshima? Auschwitz?"

-Harry Mulisch, "The Discovery of Heaven", p. 372