As any truly grand person would do, they’ve forgiven me for making them supporting characters in this story. They’re important to me, each of them in his own way.
“I’m filled with the sadness that afflicted the Roman patricians of the fourth century: I feel irredeemable barbarism rising from the bowels of the earth. …I have always tried to live in an ivory tower, but a tide of shit is beating at its walls, threatening to undermine it.”
Gustave Flaubert | in a letter to Ivan Turgenev