Fifty-five crystal spheres geared to God’s crankshaft is my idea of a satisfying universe. I can’t think of anything more trivial than quarks, quasar… - Tom Stoppard

Now for a handful of guilders I happen to have a private and uncut performance of the rape of the Sabine Women - or rather woman, or rather Alfred -Get your skirt on Alfred!

Fantasy flows in where fact leaves a vacuum.

Independence isn't all it's cracked up to be, you know. What country could be more independent than Russia? And in Russia now there isn't a squeak or a pinpoint of light. I have nowhere to publish. The Contemporary has stuck its head up out of harm's way. So I've stopped quarrelling with the world. I sat in this chair the first morning I woke up in this house ... and for the first time ... for a long time, there was silence. I didn't have to talk or think or move, nothing was expected of me, I knew nobody and nobody knew where i was, everything was behind me, all the moving from place to place, the quarrels and celebrations, the desperate concerns of health and happiness, love, death, printer's errors, picnics ruined by rain, the endless tumult of life ... and I just sat quiet and alone all day, looking at the tops of trees on Primrose Hill through the mist.