Now and at the hour part I and II (Amen)

Abstract

This is a Swift-like text, which may never end (but it does with the arrival of the General), about technical-scientific committees, languages, professors, the dead and the ways of enumerating them (are there many or few of them?): «The pages turned quickly but noiselessly, and the deaths were counted no more. They counted less». It is a piece of black humour – that black humour which pleased Breton and disturbed Queneau, because its practice is essentially reactionary – on the activity of this gloomy Academy of Laputa. The first part of the text, composed in May 2020, was accidentally attended by the publication of the historic New York Times front page of 24 May 2020, which listed the coronavirus deaths in six columns and whose subtitle was: «They were not simply names on a list. They were us».