No Man’s Land

These misfortunes always begin under the pretext of a joke.

The right had wanted to take its left a minute, “to see”—“it would be so funny.” Thence resulted that entanglement of slopes and spirals which nothing could undo and whence arise new disorders every day. Disorders to which the very simple explanations given for them add a factitious obscurity a thousand times more dangerous than night. It would be necessary, for the disappearance of innumerable news briefs without apparent tie and from the same source, that birds’ hands undo a trap set by the caprice of an abstraction, the first victim of its lightness.

Jean Cocteau