The cold body of the fish

“The amount of stuff - unorganized brute material – that the more active principle of drama has to wade through, under the circumstances, slows it down to the pace at which, inevitably, the sluggish tide of the author’s bric-a-brac passes the observer, at the saluting post, or in this case the reader. It is a suffocating, moeotic expanse of objects, all of them lifeless, the sewage of a Past twenty years old, all neatly arranged in a meticulous sequence.” - Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, Book I, ch. XVI, p. 91.