Should we never be heard of more, you may conclude that we have been eaten.
 
—Thomas Stamford Raffles, in a letter to the Duchess of Somerset written before his departure to Sumatra, quoted in Paul Johnson, The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815-1830

He gestured to a waiter, who stepped over the body, carrying a huge tray, and began serving a table a few feet away. Fallow looked at the faces at the tables all around. They stared at the appalling spectacle, but they did nothing. A large old man was lying on the floor in very bad condition. Perhaps he was dying. Certainly any of them who managed to get a look at his face could tell that much. At first they had been curious. Is he going to die right in front of us? At first there had been the titillation of Someone Else's Disaster. But now the drama was dragging on too long. The conversational roar had died down. The old man looked repulsive, with his pants unzipped and his big gross bare belly bulging out. He had become a problem of protocol. If an old man was dying on the carpet a few feet from your table, what was the proper thing to do? Offer your services? But there was already a traffic jam there in the aisle between the rows of tables. Clear the area and give him air and come back later to complete the meal? But how would empty tables help the man? Stop eating until the drama had played itself out and the old man was out of sight? But the orders were in, and the food had begun to arrive, and there was no sign of any halt—and this meal was costing about $150 per person, once you added in the cost of the wine, and it was no mean trick getting a seat in a restaurant like this in the first place. Avert your eyes? Well, perhaps that was the only solution. So they averted their eyes and returned to their picturesque dishes . . . but there was something damned depressing about it all, because it was hard for your eyes not to wander every few seconds to see if, f'r chrissake, they hadn't moved the stricken hulk. A man dying! O mortality! Probably a heart attack, too! That deep fear lodged in the bosom of practically every man in the room. The old arteries were clogging up micromillimeter by micromillimeter, day by day, month by month, from all the succulent meats and sauces and fluffy breads and wines and soufflés and coffee . . . And was that the way it would look? Would you be lying on the floor in some public place with a blue circle around your mouth and cloudy eyes that were half open and a hundred percent dead? It was a damned unappetizing spectacle. It made you queasy. It prevented you from relishing these expensive morsels arranged in such pretty pictures on your plate. So curiosity had turned to discomfort, which now turned to resentment—an emotion that had been picked up by the restauranteurs and doubled and then doubled again.

—Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities (ellipses in the original)