Anstruther laughed good-naturedly. “Well, yes, of a kind. I shall take out half a dozen intelligent maistries from our Press and get them to give our villagers instruction when they begin work and when they are in the fields.”

After 119 years to the east of the International Date Line, they are shifting to the west so they can be on the same calendar day as their main economic partners, Australia and New Zealand.

Most Asafolk seem to have the attitude 'I found the gods, and I'm better off for it.'

Here Dostoevsky uses the biblical story of the Gadarene swine—a tale of unclean devils that, having been exorcised from a sick or mad man by Christ, enter a herd of swine that then rushes headlong down a steep bank into the sea (Mark 5:2-20)—to generate a series of analogies that suggest that Russia is a sick or mad man possessed by devils and that the swine that the devils enter upon being exorcised are the revolutionaries (Devils, 647–48). In The Master of Petersburg, however, Coetzee applies the story of the Gadarene swine not only to Russia and the phenomenon of revolutionary nihilism but also to the character Dostoevsky himself.