This war with neither soul nor songs, which had never created a popular mentality, which in each man discreetly murmured I and never we, imprisoning only the private universe, disoriented the country infinitely less than the city, for here it did not function contrary to the mind’s habits: the egoistic, short-run calculation, and the resigned, somewhat magical frequentation of a future evasive by nature.

Julien Gracq, Balcony in the Forest, loc. 274