"In dreams, he could perceive the vast spider’s web of souls, the wool ball of existences interleaved in time, and he could follow a single life as one might pull on a thread, jump from one moment to another and, from the infinite heavens, even observe the forces that cause the stars to move, immense dark flows like streams of nothingness." -- from 'The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers' Guild' by Mathias Énard, trans. by Frank Wynne