Victor Pelevin

The joy of shopping cannot conceal the unbearable awareness that our entire world is one huge ski shop standing in the middle of the Sahara desert. You don’t just have to buy the skis, you have to buy the imitation snow as well. Do you understand the metaphor?

‘Of course not! The English expend all their spiritual energy on hypocrisy. There’s none left over for intolerance.

What makes a man run after a fox in a situation like this? Of course, it’s not a matter of trying to recover the stolen property. When the fox undergoes the supraphysical transformation, her pursuers see something that demolishes all their ideas about the world. And then what they run after is no longer the stolen chicken, but that miracle. They are pursuing the glimmer of the impossible that has illuminated their dull lives for the first time. And that is exactly what makes it so difficult to get away from them.

Since the existence of things consists in their perceptibility, any transformation can occur by two routes - either through the perception of transformation or the transformation of perception.

But it’s one thing to pilot the B-29 flying towards Hiroshima, and quite another to watch it from the central square of the city.