My whole life is waiting for the questions to which I have prepared answers. - Tom Stoppard

Alexander: How the world must have been changing while I was holding it still.

No, no, no... you've got it all wrong... you can't act death. The fact of it is nothing to do with seeing it happen — -it's not gasps and blood and falling about — -that isn't what makes it death. It's just a man failing to reappear, that's all — -now you see him, now you don't, that the only thing that's real: here one minute and gone the next and never coming back — -an exit, unobtrusive and unannounced, a disappearance gathering weight as it goes on, until, finally, it is heavy with death.

"A man breaking his journey between one place and another at a third place of no name, character, population or significance, sees a unicorn cross his path and disappear. That in itself is startling, but there are precedents for mystical encounters of various kinds, or to be less extreme, a choice of persuasions to put it down to fancy; until — "My God," says a second man, "I must be dreaming, I thought I saw a unicorn." At which point, a dimension is added that makes the experience as alarming as it will ever be. A third witness, you understand, adds no further dimension but only spreads it thinner, and a fourth thinner still, and the more witnesses there are the thinner it gets and the more reasonable it becomes until it is as thin as reality, the name we give to the common experience... "Look, look!" recites the crowd. "A horse with an arrow in its forehead! It must have been mistaken for a deer.