But atrocity is nothing new, not to humans, not to animals.  The difference is that in our time it is uniquely well organized, carried out with pens, train carriages, ledgers, barbed wire, work camps, gas.  And this late contribution, the absence of bodies.  No bodies were visible, except the falling ones, on the day America's ticker stopped.  Marketable stories of all kinds had thickened around the injured coast of our city, but the depiction of the dead bodies was forbidden.  It would have been upsetting to have it otherwise.  I moved on with the commuters through the pen.

--Teju Cole, Open City

If the work felt uncanny, it was because it was mortgaged; it was borrowing from future accomplishments as much as pointing to it.

   
     I stood, I made myself stand, in front of the early portrait of his mother.  It yielded nothing.  The woman, in profile, is half-asleep; her head is leaning forward and her eyes are closed.  Pastel on paper.  1896.  He was what, fifteen?  A freak of nature.  I could convince myself I saw space curling around the figure or areas where space flattened suddenly, but I did not see this.  Maybe I did see, however, the self-assurance of a painter who assumed his juvenilia would one day be scoured for the seeds of genius, embarrassing phrase.  If the work felt uncanny, it was because it was mortgaged; it was borrowing from future accomplishments as much as pointing to it.  It had started to rain a little; I could hear it falling on the skylight.

--Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station