J.M.G. Le Clézio wrote an appraisal of Lévi-Strauss in the Herald Tribune: “Mr. Lévi-Strauss was — and would have liked to be remembered as — a simple witness to the course of modern time. He was never sure that what he had put to light would even survive the present, an inevitable and bitterly lucid truth elucidated in “Tristes Tropiques,” one of his most famous books: “The world began without the human race and will certainly end without it.”

A beautiful quote and an important footnote to the dictatorship of self-preservation.