If we look at the large panorama of twentieth century history, with its tortures and devastations, its epidemics and destructions, its famines and depopulations, above all, its menace of horrors yet to come, we can see how trivial a thing in fate's eyes is personal life, how unimportant in them is personal emotion. What does fate, God, Nature, care about the little histories, the little loves, the little griefs of pullulating humans, who must appear in those same eyes as hardly more noteworthy than pullulating ants! There are millions--nay, billions--of these men and women who are so like each other in their basic natures and desires, that it does not make any difference to the planetary Mind or the protoplasmic Force whether some of them die or survive, mate or frustrate, are ecstatically happy or dully miserable, stay perfectly whole or limp hideously maimed.
-- Notebooks Category 11: The Negatives > Chapter 3 : Their Presence in The World > # 57
