The cold stars spun to the ancient rhythm, the august march of an everlasting symphony. They are old, the stars, and their memory is long.

There are those who labor in the darkness, that the rest of us might live in the light.

The minute we decide that one person doesn´t matter anymore, they´ve won.

But we fall only that we might rise, Alfred. All of us fall; all of us, as you say, screw up. Falling is not important. It is how we get up after the fall that's important.

The harder survival becomes, the more you want to pull together. And the more you want to pull together, the harder survival becomes.

Perhaps that is our doom, our human curse, to never really know one another. We erect edifices in our minds about the flimsy framework of word and deed, mere totems of the true person, who, like the gods to whom the temples were built, remains hidden. We understand our own construct; we know our own theory; we love our own fabrication. Still . . . does the artifice of our affection make our love any less real?

I'm not encouraged by the silence. I can think of no benign reason for it. I'm afraid we may expect something closer to Christopher Columbus's arrival in the Americas than a scene from Close Encounters, and we all know how that turned out for the Native Americans.