It would be convenient to say that your parents’ generation sees death everywhere, while the following generation sees “life” everywhere, but the term does not carry the same meaning in the two camps. Those who consider themselves the only beings endowed with consciousness amid inert things regard as living beings only themselves, their cats, their dogs, their geraniums, and perhaps even the park where they go for a walk after throwing Gregor into the trash at the end of the story. But foryou, who have undergone the metamorphosis, “living” applies not only to the termites but also to the termite mound, in the sense that without termites that heap of mud would not be structured in that way, rising like a mountain in the middle of a landscape (and the same can be said of the aforementioned mountain and the aforementioned landscape…). Conversely, let us not forget that termites would not survive a single instant outside the termite mound, which is to their survival what the city is to urban dwellers. I need a term that indicates how, on Earth, “everything is living,” if by living one means both the frenzied body of the termites and the rigid body of the termite mound; the crowds pressing onto the Charles Bridge and the Charles Bridge itself; the fox and the fox fur; the beaver and the dam it builds; bacteria and plants and the oxygen they emit. Bioclastic? Biogenic? In any case, artificial—in the somewhat unusual sense in which invention and freedom are always inseparable, a source of continual surprise.