pg. 110889:

"On May 29th, 1913, The Rite Of Spring premiered. A groundbreaking ballet, it used polyrhythms, dissonance and violent anti-ballet to portray the story of a young girl dancing herself to death as part of a pagan human sacrifice. It is now considered a groundbreaking achievement, but on that day, May 29th 1913, it was so alien, so beyond what anyone had seen before, that its audience fell apart at the sight of it. Boos and jeers became fistfights and torrents of shouting. The crowd was reduced to chaos. While the music remains, the dance was never recorded - or rather, no records survive. One must wonder if this is accidental.

In 1923, a performance of the piece Hyperprism prompted half of the audience to flee.

In 1973, a performance of the minimalist work Four Organs caused, amongst other disorders, a woman to wander up to the stage and bang her head repeatedly on it, screaming "Stop, Stop, I confess."

The human mind is capable of reacting only on a cosmically small scale. And the cosmos is by no means cosmically small. Against the forces of stimuli beyond human expectation, the mind buckles and breaks, like a dry twig.

We are weak in the face of the forces, both large and small, which control the universe. Ultimately, when faced with something entirely comprehensible, the thin veneer of order snaps to reveal a universe which seems purely, vastly chaotic."