Bunkers are so low class. The new luxury is to be with the people.
Nevertheless, the zeitgeist is enraptured with visions of tech billionaires retreating for survival in lux caverns in New Zealand or a tricked out fallout shelter in Montana.
OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever reportedly declared in a 2023 meeting, "We're definitely going to build a bunker before we release AGI."
The bunker is not a practical response to nuclear fears, nor to rogue super-intelligence.
It’s more of a philosophical statement, declaring: The world is broken, the masses are vulgar, and rather than use my immense wealth to fix it, I’ll simply lock it out and save myself for a few more years.
The underground bunker construction market is valued at $27 billion (2025). It serves an elite class whose fortunes, and mental state, have become detached from the realities of the average citizen.
Billionaire wealth reached a record
What’s top of mind for the billionaires whose collective wealth reached $18.3 trillion in 2025...? When does the chaos of the real world become an intolerable nuisance?
Media theorist Douglas Rushkoff was summoned by five billionaires to advise them on surviving societal collapse, and he noted their primary concern was maintaining control over their security details after money becomes worthless.
Long before Silicon Valley elites began prepping for a future where humanity has become an adversary…
A French civil servant named Joris-Karl Huysmans wrote the definitive blueprint for the doomsday bunker of the mind.
Against Nature (À rebours) landed on the literary establishment of 1884 like the bomb, and they had no reinforced cement shelter to protect them.
Oscar Wilde said, “This last book by Huysmans is one of the best I have ever seen.” And then he gave it to Dorian Gray in his most famous novel, proclaiming…
"It was a poisonous book. The heavy odour of incense seemed to cling about its pages and to trouble the brain. The mere cadence of the sentences, the subtle monotony of their music, so full as it was of complex refrains and movements elaborately repeated, produced in the mind of the lad, as he passed from chapter to chapter, a form of reverie, a malady of dreaming, that made him unconscious of the falling day and creeping shadows."
This week, Ink & Time untangles the twisted mind of our illustrious anti-hero, Duc Jean des Esseintes, and brings you choice episodes from this darkly comedic, Decadent trendsetting, determinedly un-woke classic of a book.
It’s mostly unknown in today. One needs an attention span to absorb it. One needs to be a bit intellectually hardcore to really get the jokes.
We are proud to release the latest Time Warp Editions version of Against Nature with a wholly new translation from the original French, which importantly restores the scandalous Chapter VI, noted below, and the full Chapter IX catwalk of des Esseints’ bizarre love interests, which was censored from most English translations.
A Decadent Parable for the Would-be Escapees
Click to order your copy of Against Nature, by Time Warp Editions (2026)
Duc Jean des Esseintes is the original billionaire “prepper,” and the only real character in the book. He is on a mission to escape.
Possessing immense wealth and a profound pessimism about humanity, he suffers from a violent allergy to normalcy. Disgusted by the 19th-century hustle and the low level of intellectual aptitude that he observes in others, and finding himself at the end of his dopamine rope, he purchases a secluded house in Fontenay, seals it off from the outside world, and attempts to replace nature entirely with human artifice.
His bunker was not in response to a future threat, but rather a personal retreat from banal existence altogether. Is it ever possible?
His contempt for humanity grew. He understood at last that the world is, in the main, composed of scoundrels and imbeciles. It was clear: he had no hope of discovering in anyone else the same aspirations and the same hatreds, no hope of coupling with an intelligence that delighted, as his did, in a studious decrepitude, no hope of attaching a mind as sharp and as finely contoured as his own to that of any writer or man of letters.
Astute readers will also recognize des Esseintes’ hermetic lockdown as some distant progenitor of modern digital isolation. Fontenay functions as a primitive virtual reality, where he controls the atmosphere, the smells, the stimulants, the ideological "feed," and so much more.
He is obsessive to the point of absurdity.
To simulate a sea voyage without interacting with sailors, he constructs a room within a room, viewing the outside world through a porthole separated by an aquarium filled with mechanical fish, while the scent of tar is pumped in, and the colors intricately designed to simulate a rocking motion.
He constructs a “mouth organ” of exotic liqueurs which play symphonies on the tongue, and creates olfactory landscapes from combinations of perfumes procured from distant lands. Who needs to travel, really?
His thesis is engineered: Reality is a poor substitute for a well-funded hallucination.
The Architect of isolation is bound to fail
Yet, Huysmans' genius lies in exposing the trap of this hyper-aesthetic bunker, the fundamental failure of an architecture of isolation.
Des Esseintes falls victim to the entropy of pleasure. The more he refines his tastes, the higher his tolerance becomes, leading inevitably to sensory exhaustion, and physical breakdown, the revolt of his own human nature.
At the pinnacle of his aesthetic madness, he rejects artificial flowers because they are too common, opting instead for real flowers bred to look diseased and artificial.
"These plants are quite simply stupefying," he said to himself; then he stepped back and took in the whole mass at a single glance: his aim was achieved; not one of them seemed real; cloth, paper, porcelain, metal, appeared to have been lent by man to nature to allow her to create her monsters. When she had been unable to imitate human handiwork, she had been reduced to copying the internal membranes of animals, to borrowing the vivid tints of their putrefying flesh, the magnificent hideousness of their gangrene.
"…it is true that most of the time nature is, on her own, incapable of engendering species so unwholesome and so perverse; she furnishes the raw material, the germ and the soil, the nourishing matrix and the elements of the plant, which man then raises, models, paints, sculpts to suit his will.”
There is also a bejeweled tortoise who makes a brief cameo as a living decoration in the artificial bunker.
The turtle gets a lot of attention in the conventional book reviews, but he is in reality a sad, passing side show, and just one example of the catalogue of ornamentation constructed by des Essientes.
Cruelty is no joke but dark satire can provoke change
When a person with infinite wealth treats the entire world merely as an aesthetic playground, other human beings become reduced to something like raw materials.
Des Esseintes’ casual cruelty is certainly disturbing, but also surreptitiously amusing, if you dare to let yourself laugh at such inhumane behaviour. In one chilling scene, he calculates the destruction of a teenager, introducing him to illicit luxuries he cannot afford, with the aim to manufacture a murderer, one who would lash out at a corrupt and failing society.
It is the ultimate act of privileged sadism. It also appeared to be a formative memory that triggers a change of heart, both in des Esseintes and in Huysmans. From his 1903 Preface, published 19 years after the first edition he admits:
“As for the terrible Chapter VI — whose numeral corresponds, without premeditated intention, to that of the Commandment of God it offends — and for certain portions of Chapter IX that may be joined to it, I would obviously no longer write them in the same way. They should at least have been explained in a more studious fashion, by that diabolical perversity which insinuates itself, in matters of lust especially, into the exhausted brains of certain people. It seems, indeed, that nervous diseases, that neuroses, open fissures in the soul through which the Spirit of Evil penetrates.”
Sadism is a loaded word, and indeed the book is sadistic. Late in the book in Chapter 12, Huysmans actually provides a detailed dissection of the term as a theological rather than a sexual, category. It fits the narrative, and opens the door to redemption.
“…and then appeared sadism, that bastard of Catholicism which this religion has, in all its forms, pursued with its exorcisms and its stakes for centuries.…it consists above all in a sacrilegious practice, in a moral rebellion, in a spiritual debauch, in an aberration wholly ideal, wholly Christian; it resides also in a joy tempered by fear, in a joy analogous to that wicked satisfaction of children who disobey and play with forbidden things, for the sole reason that their parents have expressly prohibited them.”
The tension between extreme wealth and societal decay is palpable. Then, as now.
A February 2026 Gallup poll found American optimism slumped to a record low, with only 59.2 percent expecting a high-quality life in five years.
A 2023 survey found that roughly one-third of American adults are prepping for doomsday scenarios.
Perversion is rife in the digital sphere and pervasive through society. Is it natural, or is it against nature?
Read into the mind of des Esseintes and you may identify some familiar tendencies. 1884 France was not that far away. The relative wealth of des Esseintes is not that extreme compared to the mass affluent of today.
Society is in collective retreat. Hope is an elusive savior.
Yet, for all its toxicity, Against Nature is profoundly, darkly funny. And there are moral reflections in store for the patient, resilient reader.
Des Esseintes desperately wants to live as a pure, floating intellect, a god of his own curated universe. Yet, he is constantly dragged down by his failing biology.
He bottoms out when his body can no longer digest solid food, and he is forced to rely on a meat-extract enema apparatus. His body can only tolerate the abstract idea of food, a perfect, pathetic metaphor for his entire existence.
And, yes he celebrates the enema as a more perfect form of feeding. If you can stomach it out of context, his reaction at being prescribed an enema instead of meals is in a word, delicious:
“…he was at last both stupefied and satisfied at not being encumbered with drugs and phials, and a pale smile stirred his lips when the servant brought him a nourishing enema of peptone and informed him that this exercise would be repeated three times in twenty-four hours.
The operation succeeded, and des Esseintes could not prevent himself from addressing tacit congratulations to himself on this event, which crowned, in a manner of speaking, the existence he had fashioned for himself; his bent toward the artificial had now — and without his even having willed it — attained the supreme fulfillment; one could go no further; nourishment thus absorbed was, assuredly, the last deviation one could commit.
— It would be delicious, he said to himself, if one could, once restored to full health, continue this simple regimen. What an economy of time, what a radical deliverance from the aversion that meat inspires in those without appetite! What a definitive riddance from the weariness that flows inevitably from the necessarily restricted choice of dishes! What an energetic protestation against the base sin of gluttony! And finally, what a decisive insult hurled in the face of that old Nature whose uniform demands would be extinguished forever!
To be human is to engage with others
Ultimately, the proverbial bunker collapses, in totality. The aesthetic experiment fails. Wealth and intellectual hubris cannot cure the soul.
Des Esseintes is forced by his doctors to abandon his sanctuary and return to the Paris he loathes, or face imminent death. No spoilers about how he reacts and the secret redemption in his musings that many readers may miss.
Today, as billionaires build physical bunkers to escape the unwashed masses, and the rest of us hide behind digital screens to avoid the hard work of dealing with others…
Against Nature stands as a brilliant, mildly toxic, but extremely enriching warning shot.
No matter how much material wealth one accumulates, no matter how long the limitless scroll continues in darkness, no one cannot curate themself out of the human condition, and cannot live apart from other people. You cannot fight against nature.
Withdrawal, and the architecture of isolation, are in the end, always a prison.
We invite you to grab your copy and cozy up with Mr. des Esseintes, crawl inside his mind, and be willing to see if there is something a little bit like yourself in there.
You don’t have to tell anyone.
Click here to order Against Nature, from Time Warp Editions, 2026.
Ink & Time works to excavate long lost works of literature and make them fresh and relevant for a modern audience. Sometimes it means going deep into dark, unexpected domains. Get reading. Share this with others who are hungry for new perspectives.