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