Philip

“I think that there is a terrible possibility now, in the World. We may not brush it away, we must look at it. It is possible that They will not die. That it is now within the state of Their art to go on forever - though we, of course, will keep dying as we always have. Death has been the source of Their power. It was easy enough for us to see that. If we are here once, only once, then clearly we are here to take what we can while we may. If They have taken much more, and taken not only from Earth but also from us - well, why begrudge Them, when they’re just as doomed to die as we are? All in the same boat, all under the same shadow … yes … yes. But is that really true? Or is it the best, and the most carefully propagated, of all Their lies, known and unknown?

We have to carry on under the possibility that we die only because They want us to: because They need our terror for Their survival.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow