They had heroes for companions, beautiful youths todream of, rose-marble-fingeredWomen shed light down the great lines;But you have invoked the slime in the skull,The lymph in the vessels. They have shown men Godslike racial dreams, the woman's desire,The man's fear, the hawk-faced prophet's; but nothingHuman seems happy at the feet of yours.Therefore though not forgotten, not loved, in the gray oldyears in the evening leaningOver the gray stones of the tower-top,You shall be called heartless and blind.

The externalization of memory [via the use of external symbolic storage systems] has altered the actual memory architecture within which humans think, which is changing the role of biological memory, the way in which the human brain deploys its resources, and the form of modern culture.

Like most modern people, we no longer bothered to make the distinction between events in real life and the dramas of fictional worlds, and so the cliff-hanger that inevitably, reliably ended the hour held just as much or more importance to us as the newspaper that usually went from doorstep to garbage bin unread, and we speculated about the future lives of the characters that populated decayed mansions or desert isles as if they weren't inventions of other human minds.