if your every breath had previously passed a million times through the consumptive lungs of peasants, Jews, coachmen, butchers and whores; hawked up from black larynxes, it returns to you again and again, filtered through their saliva and sputum, processed through their mould-infested, louse-infected, pus-incrusted bodies, coughed up by them, blown out through their noses, spewed up straight into your mouth, but you have to swallow it, you have to breathe it in, so breathe, breathe!