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.

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

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.

The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion.

More and more lower-middle-income families either live their lives in debt or leave the city altogether. The boom is strictly at the penthouse level.

I find so much writing colourless, small in its means, unwilling to take stylistic risks. Often it goes wrong; I am not the one to judge. Sometimes, I hope, it goes right.

To ask larger questions is to risk getting things wrong. Not to ask them at all is to constrain the life of understanding