Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation page 10

By the end of 1986...I left Nigeria, in body if not in spirit. But the thought of the attacks launched on the Nigerian people never left me. Thus, the desire to restudy "the transition to capitalism" has been with me since my return. I had read the Nigerian events through the prism of 16th-century Europe. In the United States, it was the Nigerian proletariat that brought me back to the struggles over the commons and the capitalist disciplining of women, in and out of Europe. Upon my return, I also began to teach in an interdisciplinary program for undergraduates where I confronted a different type of "enclosure": the enclosure of knowledge, that is, the increasing loss, among the new generations, of the historical sense of our common past. This is why in Caliban and the Witch I reconstruct the anti-feudal struggles of the Middle Ages and the struggles by which the European proletariat resisted the advent of capitalism. My goal in doing so is not only to make available to non-specialists the evidence on which my analysis relies, but to revive among younger generations the memory of a long history of resistance that today is in danger of being erased. Saving this historical memory is crucial if we are to find an alternative to capitalism. For this possibility will depend on our capacity to hear the voices of those who have walked similar paths.

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow page 614

One village in Mecklenburg has been taken over by army dogs, Dobermans and Shepherds, each one conditioned to kill on sight any human except the one who trained him. But the trainers are dead men now, or lost. The dogs have gone out in packs, ganged cows in the fields and brought the carcasses miles overland, back to the others. They've broken into supply depots Rin-Tin-Tin style and looted K-rations, frozen hamburger, cartons of candy bars. Bodies of neighboring villagers and eager sociologists litter all the approaches to the Hund-Stadt. Nobody can get near it. One expeditionary force came armed with rifles and grenades, but the dogs all scattered into the night, slender as wolves, and no one could bring himself to destroy the houses and shops. No one wanted to occupy the village, either. So they went away. And the dogs came back. If there are lines of power among themselves, loves, loyalties, jealousies, no one knows. Someday G-5 might send in troops. But the dogs may not know of this, may have no German anxieties about encirclement--may be living entirely in the light of the one man-installed reflex: Kill The Stranger. There may be no way of distinguishing it from the other given quantities of their lives--from hunger or thirst or sex. For all they know, kill-the-stranger was born in them. If any have remembered the blows, the electric shocks, the rolled-up newspapers no one read, the boots and prods, their pain is knotted in now with the Stranger, the hated. If there are heresiarchs among the dogs, they are careful about suggesting out loud any extra-canine source for these sudden eruptions of lust to kill that take them over, even the pensive heretics themselves, at any first scent of the Stranger. But in private they point to the remembered image of one human, who has visited only at intervals, but in whose presence they were tranquil and affectionate--from whom came nourishment, kind scratches and strokings, games of fetch-the-stick. Where is he now? Why is he different for some and not for others?

A.E. van Vogt, The World of Null-A, in the Triad omnibus page 39

Fear must derive from the very colloids of a substance. A flower closing its petals for the night was showing fear of the dark, but it had no nervous system to transmit the impulse and no thalamus to receive and translate the electric message into an emotion. A human being was a physico-chemical structure whose awareness of life was derived from an intricate nervous system. After death, the body disintegrated; the personality survived as a series of distorted impulse-memories in other people's nervous systems. As the years flew by, those memories would grow dimmer. At most, Gilbert Gosseyn would survive as a nerve impulse in other human beings for half a century; as an emulsion on a film negative for several score years; as an electronic pattern in a series of cathode-ray cells for perhaps two centuries. None of the potentialities diminished even fractionally the flow of perspiration from his body in that hot, almost airless room.

"I'm as good as dead," he thought in agony. "I'm going to die. I'm going to die."

Clifford D. Simak, A Choice of Gods page 138

And what had she done, she wondered. What had happened to her? Trying to recall it, she could discover only fragments of it and she was sure that when it had happened there had been no fragmentation and that the fragments she could recall were no more than broken pieces of the whole. The world had opened out and so had the universe, or what she since had thought must have been the universe, lying all spread out before her, with every nook revealed, with all the knowledge, all the reasons there--a universe in which time and space had been ruled out because time and space were only put there, in the first place, to make it impossible for anyone to grasp the universe.

Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 page 69

She could, at this stage of things, recognize signals like that, as the epileptic is said to--an odor, color, pure piercing grace note announcing his seizure. Afterward it is only this signal, really dross, this secular announcement, and never what is revealed during the attack, that he remembers. Oedipa wondered whether, at the end of this (if it were supposed to end), she too might not be left with only compiled memories of clues, announcements, intimations, but never the central truth itself, which must somehow each time be too bright for her memory to hold; which must always blaze out, destroying its own message irreversibly, leaving an overexposed blank when the ordinary world came back. In the space of a sip of dandelion wine it came to her that she would never know how many times such a seizure may already have visited, or how to grasp it should it visit again. Perhaps even in this last second--but there was no way to tell.