EXCERPT Was it because they rent the veil of illusion, made plain that, if a man lost his links with people, he’d lose his links with himself: that if he lost others, he’d lose his own self, which would come to lack all point?…Was he weeping because his sad father’s muwwals somehow captured the nature of their strange life in the eternal desert, where nothing else seemed to exist in the world? —Ibrahim al-Koni Sixth principle: rending. We encounter our sixth megalomaniac approaching the limit of the non-obsequious, a figure who ‘lacks all point’ and has ‘lost links’ to both people and self. That ‘nothing else seemed to exist’ is the key to understanding this megalomaniacal dimension, for it is a feeling initially spurred on by the choice of a perfect locus where none can give chase (the desert): to exist where no one else will exist; to exist where no one else can exist.…