“We fear another man’s existence the way we fear apparitions, and only very rarely, when people glimpse each other in the gloaming, do we say of them: They’re in love. No wonder lovers seek out a nighttime hour, the better to envision each other, an hour when ghosts are abroad. It is amusing that the most optimistic of all philosophers, Leibniz, could see only a world of discrete monads, of ontological solitudes, none of which has windows. If one tries to be more optimistic than the optimist and avow that souls have windows and the ability to open them, then those windows and that ability will turn out to be nailed shut and boarded up as in an abandoned house. People-monads, too, have a bad name: They are full of ghosts. The most frightening of these is man.”
— Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Autobiography of a Corpse