No Longer Human ( PDFDrive )

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kindness. They called me by my first name and bought
me drinks.
I gradually came to relax my vigilance towards
the world. I came to think that it was not such a
dreadful place. My feelings of panic had been molded
by the unholy fear aroused in me by such superstitions
of science as the hundreds of thousands of
whooping-cough germs borne by the spring breezes,
the hundreds of thousands of eye-destroying bacteria
which infest the public baths, the hundreds of thousands
of microbes in a barber shop which will cause
baldness, the swarms of scabious parasites infecting
the leather straps in the subway cars; or the tapeworm,
fluke and heaven knows what eggs that undoubtedly
lurk in raw fish and in undercooked beef and pork;
or the fact that if you walk barefoot a tiny sliver of
glass may penetrate the sole of your foot and after
circulating through your body reach the eye and
cause blindness. There is no disputing the accurate,
scientific fact that millions of germs are floating,
swimming, wriggling everywhere. At the same time,
however, if you ignore them completely they lose all
possible connection with yourself, and at once become
nothing more than vanishing "ghosts of science." This
too I came to understand. I had been so terrorized
by scientific statistics (if ten million people each leave
over three grains of rice from their lunch, how many