The Yangtze Valley was the setting of a short-lived flowering of city-states during the Second Men’s prolonged physiological and cultural crisis. The civilization’s literature of despair outlasted its political moment, becoming a reminder to the later, more prosperous Second Men of the perceived horror underlying existence.

Setting and Historical Context

The city-states arose during a period when the Second Men were increasingly disorganized by the overgrowth of their brains relative to their bodies. Their cramped crania and increasingly vulnerable circulation were associated with rising congenital imbecility and acquired mental illness. For thousands of years, the species remained precarious, approaching extinction at some times and producing extravagant cultural achievements in regions where physical conditions happened to be favorable. The Yangtze Valley was the site of one such sudden, brief efflorescence.

The City-States and Their Legacy

The valley’s city-states were peopled by neurotics, geniuses, and people described as imbeciles. Their lasting achievement was a brilliant literature of despair, shaped by a sense of the gulf between what humanity and the universe actually were and what they might have been. The later Second Men, at the height of their civilization, returned in thought to this literature as a voice from their past. The valley thus remained significant not as the center of a durable political order, but as the source of a cultural inheritance through which the Second Men confronted the fragility and unrealized potential of existence.