Look around you at the hurrying crowds. Rain whips like shrapnel past shop doorways; the shoppers hunch into the approaching Christmas as if it were shellfire stamping over the horizon. Each one of them knows that they are buying things that are not much wanted or appreciated for prices much higher than they need pay in a fortnight’s time.
Surely these people are possessed, or perhaps victims of some terrible and contagious infection of the mind? Looking at people as puppets of alien desires is easy and may be natural. Once, when I was giving up smoking, I saw cigarettes as things consuming the smokers, so that the smoke would pop out of their lungs for a look around the world and then return like a submarine to the controlling depths.
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