“You can’t compare gas to moonlight, it’s something more . . . it’s this wan greenish thing that stupefies you . . . floors you . . . you see strange things . . . people not quite dead, not quite alive, not quite anything . . . At the time these weird greenish creatures gave me hallucinations . . . there were so many of them!”

—Louis-Ferdinand C’line, Fable For Another Time, 1952, translated by Mary Hudson, 2003.