From the day we’re born, there are two basic terrors that consume people, whatever their background. The first is terror prompted by a sense of our true aloneness, our isolation from one another. The second, or course, is the fear of death. Now matter how in particular, these fears touch each of our lives and are at least partly responsible for all crimes…Most people try to submerge the first of these fears—the terror of isolation—in a sense of identification within a group. Religious, political, ethnic, it doesn’t really matter—it’s even behind most of the mass marketing that’s done today and behind popular culture itself.
--Caleb Carr, in Killing
Time
