Barbarians, we call them, while all the while we timidly cling to our Web like Visigoths crouching in the ruins of Rome's faded glory and proclaim ourselves civilized.

Life doesn't retreat.

The pack of media brayed and bellowed outside the house for seven weeks. Sol realized then what he had known and forgotten about very small communities: they were frequently annoying, always parochial, sometimes prying on a one-to-one level, but never had they subscribed to the vicious legacy of the so-called "public's right to know".

The Victorians, they were like the Germans in World War II. They could not stop recording details about their lives and their age.

Wilkie Collins was a rival and competitor of Dickens. His novel Moonstone sold more copies at the time than Dickens' last two books. But that meant nothing in the long run. Right now, to be honest, Wilkie Collins is what he deserved to be back then: a footnote, an almost lost memory. And he knew he would become that.

Words bend our thinking to infinite paths of self-delusion, and the fact that we spend most of our mental lives in brain mansions built of words means that we lack the objectivity necessary to see the terrible distortion of reality which language brings.

There is no doubt that I have discovered the ultimate in stagnant human societies. The Bikura have realized the human dream of immortality and have paid for it with their humanity and their immortal souls.