A Couple Of Thoughts On Manhood

From the book "Marauders of Gor" by John Norman.

On another world, lit by the same star, in another place, dawn, too, drew near. The distant light in the great cities, unknowing, soon to be occupied with the concerns of their days, piercing the haze of daily, customary poisons, first struck the heights of the lofty building, reflecting from the rectangular windows, like sheets of burnished copper reflecting the fire of the sun. Men would soon be up and about their duties, hurrying from one nothing to another, to compromises, to banal degradations, anxious lest they fail to be on time. They would not care for the blackened grass growing between the bricks; they would take no notes of the spider's architecture, nor marvel at the flight of a wren darting to its nest among the smoke-blackened, carved stones. There would be no time. There would be no time for them, no time for seeing, or feeling, or touching, or loving or finding out what it might be to be alive. Clouds would be strangers to them; rain an inconvenience; snow a nuisance; a tree an anachronism; a flower an oddity, cut and frozen in a florist's refrigerator. These were the men without meaning, so full and so empty, so crowded, so desolate, so busy, so needlessly occupied. These were the gray men, the hurrying men, the efficient, smug, tragic insects, noiseless on soft feet, in the billions iron hills of technology. How few of them gazed even on the stars. In grandeur so fearful that men must shield themselves from pettiness from its glory; do they not understand that in themselves, and in perhaps a thousand other intelligences, reality has opened its eyes upon its own immensity; do they shut their eyes lest they see gods?

David Fincher the director of Fight Club in an interview with Gavin Smith, "Inside Out," Film Comment, Sep/Oct 1999

We're designed to be hunters and we're in a society of shopping. There's nothing to kill anymore, there's nothing to fight, nothing to overcome, nothing to explore. In that societal emasculation this everyman is created.