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" 'There is an anomaly about the Earth people,' Frank said. 'Though incapable of intelligence, they operate with frightening instinct. They are not able to think, but they are well able to act; and that is the danger to us. They have the unity and communication of the hive.

'They remind me of the fireflies on Mercator. You remember how the millions of those pseudoinsects would cluster on hillocks and trees and all pulsate with their light together? Those on one hill would answer the beacon flashes of those on another hill, and yet they were creatures so small that fifty of them could be heaped on the end of your finger--and blind. Ah, they spelled out derisive words with their pulsing light on the hillsides, but the individuals of them were ignorant of words and of concepts and of all else.

"The people of Earth are like that, which is why it is called the Haunted Planet. The Hive Ghost hovers over them invisible, and they feel it from one end of their communities to the other. We can handle Earth individuals s though they were furniture or stones, but we cannot handle the Hive Ghost that hangs over them...' "

--R A Lafferty, The Reefs of Earth (1968; 2017)

Ecpyrosis.

"Think not light poetry my life's chief care;
The Muse's mansion is at best but air;
But if more solid works my meaning forms,
Th' unfinish'd structures fall by Fortune's storms."

--Richard Savage

(via retro rockets on fb)