How had this happened? Everyone in the world knew more than us, about everything, and this I hated then found hugely comforting.

I went to public school all my life and all through college and I liked it.

It was called the Middle Ages, the Dark Ages. If not for the monks, everything the world had ever learned would have been lost. Well, we live in a similar time, when we're losing the vast majority of what we do and see and learn. But it doesn't have to be that way.

We have advantages. We have a cushion to fall back on. This is abundance. A luxury of place and time. Something rare and wonderful. It's almost historically unprecedented. We must do extraordinary things. We have to. It would be absurd not to.

We have no choice. We need the communion of souls and only here are they awake.

I went to Saudi Arabia in 2010, and spent most of my time in Jeddah and the King Abdullah Economic City.

She needs a new journal. The one she has is problematic. To get to the present, she needs to page through the past, and when she does, she remembers things, and her new journal entries become, for the most part, reactions to the days she regrets, wants to correct, rewrite.