Fischer does not merely outplay opponents; he leaves them bodily and mentally glutted. Fisher himself speaks of the exultant instant in which he feels the 'ego of the other player crumbling.'

To many men... the miasma of peace seems more suffocating than the bracing air of war.

The age of the book is almost gone.

If, in the Judaic perception, the language of the Adamic was that of love, the grammars of fallen man are those of the legal code.

Tragedy speaks not of secular dilemmas which may be resolved by rational innovation, but of the unalterable bias toward inhumanity and destruction in the drift of the world.

The new sound-sphere is global. It ripples at great speed across languages, ideologies, frontiers and races. The economics of this musical Esperanto is staggering. Rock and pop breed concentric worlds of fashion, setting and life-style. Popular music has brought with it sociologies of private and public manner, of group solidarity. The politics of Eden come loud.

It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past.