I popped open Peter Filkins's translation of The Book against Death (Das Buch gegen den Tod) by Elias Canetti, and its opening lines immediately announce a work determined to post through it (complimentary):
It begins with the fact that we count the dead. Through death each should become a single entity, like God. One dead person plus another do not make two. It would be better to count the living, given how perishable that number already is.
Entire cities and districts can mourn as if all their men had fallen, all their sons and fathers. But so long as 11,370 have fallen, they will forever seek to have it add up to a million.
