The cooling of the body’s outer surface inexorably brings weakness, followed by a progressive numbness. Once this stage is reached, some readers return to life and hasten to close the book. Another portion succumbs to oblivion, and a final group falls into a particularly feverish and exalted state, highly dangerous, which may last a long time and during which the afflicted speak to themselves with a frenzy bordering on madness. Everyone knows that at the beginning of an epidemic all the so-called proven remedies remain ineffective. Especially when confronted with the appearance of a kind of new illness born from mere words. At the end of such an epidemic, the most varied treatments and medicines produce a few miracles. This means that, once declared, the illness follows its fatal course and carries away, in one manner or another, despite every medical intervention however rational it may be, more than half of those struck by it… and sometimes many more still… Thus disappear the readers.
Report of the fifth day by the special envoy Ulysses to our Grand Inspector of Readings and Beliefs
— Gradually, my skin had begun to burn. It was not merely an inward sensation; my own eyes left me no choice in how to interpret it. I was burning. From that moment onward, I had only one solution: I threw myself into the water, hoping by this gesture to put an end to those unbearable flames. I was aware of the ambiguity of what I was doing. I do not know whether I sought to end my suffering or my life. Naturally, today it is easier for me to attempt to bring some order to the entanglement of my thoughts and actions, but at the time both my gestures and my mind were more than disordered. Fortunately, it did not last… I swam for a long time and, without having planned it, I found myself like a castaway upon another island, much smaller than the previous one. My skin had cooled. I was exhausted, yet I had the pleasant sensation of returning to life.
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