Look up, he commanded, in this email to Pascal Balmy and the group. The roof of the world is open. Let us count stars and live in their luminous gaze.

I knew plenty about him, and that he had a kind of mannered affection for old Paris, that he conceived of reality as stage-directed in black and white. The truth is that even when Jean-Luc Godard and people like that were making those movies in black and white, with actors in fedoras who talk like gangsters, they were already an affectation.

But a lesson in this curious hybrid skull, of Thal face and Rectus braincase and brain, seems somewhat obvious to me, he said. The lesson is that you cannot judge a book by its cover. Because just as this individual looked like a Neanderthal but could have thought like Rectus, there may be modern individuals with similar developmental disjunctures, with modern faces but the mind and instincts of an older ancestor. Even if someone looks like you, they may not think like you.

These people were always repeating a maxim about the end of the world, that it was “easier to imagine the end of the world than it was to imagine the end of capitalism.” The point of this maxim was that bringing down capitalism would require a more robust imagination. But just because something is harder to imagine does not mean it’s correct.