The highest tribute to acting should be an exorcism. If life were really so perilous you wouldn’t get away with spending a third of it impersonating a corpse. I admire spiders: instead of getting ambushed by their past, they take the trace of where they’ve been and make a trap of it themselves. Camped outside its walls like bandits, literacy is the only treasure-house that the mob prefers not to pillage. So whenever it rampages towards the stars it discovers itself, as if for the first time, betrayed by the curvature of the Earth.

Do you think the Wright brothers, John Glenn and Neil Armstrong wanted to storm the heavens, or just to escape Ohio? Citizenship is a shameful proof that we haven’t yet taken residence in the sky. When aliens come to earth, what will they think of the state of its development when they find out the most widely spoken language on Earth doesn’t even use phonetic writing? Having searched in vain for God outside, above, I’m starting to suspect that I’ve been swallowed and digested by the cosmic spirit.