On a walk last night under an impossibly dark sky (the kind you would be tempted to call velvet) and with an impossibly bright moon, and a lacework of clouds, thin and flying on a high, fast wind, I thought how we are built on histories and poets that will disappear. Herodotus still means something to us, also Edna St. Vincent Millay, but give them another handful of hundred years, and who will read them? They'll be such ancient history, they'll be lucky for a one-line mention. Once a foundation, now so far below the earth. Everyday more people are writing books and telling stories based on a line of thinking whose beginning is dead even in academic memory.