From our childhood comes a dull hum, trickling through our bodies as kindling feeds a bonfire. We think it signals something cosmic but evidence does not exist. Radiators tick. Vehicle ignitions sneeze. University crackpots continue their insatiable gravitation toward untenured plutocracy. Lights blink. Attentions fail to span even the slimmest distractions. You endure conversations with neighbors and remote relatives, establishing transient connections across your legendary centuries. They ask questions that you are unavailable to answer — questions of sobriety and turmoil, of hunger and abatement, of insidious contentment. You do have answers but who does not? We answer grandiosities with common complaint, humor with chaotic dismissal, indifference with utter destruction. I read volumes of contorted explanations, fleetly ingesting social and political dismay, before rebounding from God’s ingenious evaporation. You read other tomes, underlining words and highlighting what you thought were memorable phrases only to revisit your annotations and find you had chosen insipid prattle. You barely recognize yourself in papyral violations committed years ago, those urgently self-important touchups serving only to prove that you were there. We closed those books, handing them to the silent past where they slumber upright in hourless rectitude. The shelves have fallen and the books grown stale as revelations mount. Hammer meets nail. Scalpel hollows skull. One by one the sorted come asunder, confused by the singularity of something so complex as a planet’s billions of lives, promising to never again squander the serenity of fairness.