Life is now a matter of selling oneself to slave-work, building roads or la
bouring in quarries or mines or on the railways, purposeless, meaningless,
real slave-work, each integer doing his [and/or her] mere labour, and all f
or no purpose, except to have money, and to get: away from the old system.
(...) It is as if the whole social form were breaking down, and the human e
lement swarmed within the disintegration, like maggots in cheese. The roads
, the railways are built, the mines and quarries are excavated but the whol
e organism of life, the social organism, is slowly crumbling and caving in,
in a kind of process of dry rot, most terrifying to see. (D. H. Lawrence,
Twilight in Italy, 1997, Penguin Edition: 223/4).