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582 pages, Paperback
First published April 7, 1972
Darkness begins on that day when History came to an end simultaneously with its object. The civilization whose progress it was there to record had ceased to exist.
‘Let’s say, if you like, that in my opinion any civilization needs a soul.’
‘And that soul is religion?’ He pulled a face as he said it. ‘Soul’ and ‘religion’ were two words he found distasteful…
‘In the present state of things, yes.’
‘You mean that this soul is constituted by the beliefs of the majority of those living in Malevil?’
‘Not only that. It is also the soul corresponding to our present level of civilization.’
In fact, things were a little more complicated than that. I was simplifying things in order to avoid shocking him. But I had shocked him nevertheless. He went a little red and began blinking. That meant he was about to counterattack.
‘But this ‘soul,’ as you call it, it could just as well be a philosophy of some sort. For example Marxism.’
I thought that was coming. ‘Except that Marxism was derived from a study of industrial society and was intended to apply to it. It has no purpose to serve in a primitive agrarian communism.’