We All Have Appointments With The Past.

The Noonday Demon Explores The Subterranean Realms Of An Illness Which Is On The Point Of Becoming Endemic, And Which More Than Anything Else Mirrors The Present State Of Our Civilization And Its Profound Discontents. As Wide-ranging As It Is Incisive, This Astonishing Work Is A Testimony Both To The Muted Suffering Of Millions And To The Great Courage It Must Have Taken The Author To Set His Mind Against It.

Everything Our Civilization Has Produced Is Entombed.

How Far, In Any Case, Must One Go Back To Find The Beginning?

I Felt That The Decrepit State Of These Once Magnificent Buildings, With Their Broken Gutters, Walls Blackened By Rainwater, Crumbling Plaster Revealing The Coarse Masonry Beneath It, Windows Boarded Up Or Clad With Corrugated Iron, Precisely Reflected My Own State Of Mind.

This Then, I Thought, As I Looked Round About Me, Is The Representation Of History. It Requires A Falsification Of Perspective. We, The Survivors, See Everything From Above, See Everything At Once, And Still We Do Not Know How It Was.