This is every writer's nightmare - the sudden breakdown of meaning in the language that sustains and supports us.

Life is brutal that way ... the loss of irrecoverable moments amid trivia and distraction.

Most of us do know we have no immortality. And when you've found a genius, someone who has already purchased his immortality in musical or literary terms, it's maddening.

How could anyone stay sane with entire lifetimes stored in one human mind?

As for the depiction of the Catholic church, it's not meant to be a prediction

Gass once wrote: "Language serves not only to express thought but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it." Here is the essence of mankind's creative genius: not the edifices of civilization nor the bang-flash weapons which can end it, but the words which fertilize new concepts like spermatozoa attacking an ovum. It might be argued that the Siamese twin infants of word/idea are the only contribution the human species can, will, or should make to the raveling cosmos.

Speaking as a novelist myself, I know that members of our profession live in our imaginations as much or more as we inhabit what people call 'the real world.