…Binned–a word which had come, over the millenia, to mean: carefully, lovingly recorded for posterity by the Elakhon and preserved against the ravages of time, war, and the children’s disrespect for history.

It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s the fragile illusion of invulnerability inherent in being just like everyone else. No–it’s Englishblokeman.

Life is beautiful and life is stupid.

The question has never even been: Do you understand object permanence, can you recognize yourself in the mirror, do you bury your dead, do you bond emotionally with your young?…

Elephants do all those things, and some humans definitely don’t. The only question is this: Do you have enough empathy and yearning and desperation to connect to others outside yourself and scream into the void in four-part harmony? Enough brainpower and fine motor control and aesthetic ideation to look at feathers and stones and stuff that comes out of a worm’s more unpleasant holes and see gowns, veils, platform heels? Enough sheer style and excess energy to do something that provides no direct, material benefit to your personal survival, that might even mark you out from the pack as shiny, glittery prey, to do it for no other than that it rocks?…Do you have enough goodness in your world to let the music play? Do you have a soul?

Only the uncool have the requisite alone time to advance their species.

You have already heard the First General Fact: Life is beautiful and life is stupid. It goes on to add: You can only ever fix one of these at a time, and wouldn’t it be nice if anyone could agree on which one is the bigger problem?

Neither Decibel nor Oort nor poor dead Mira ever imagined the power of the ordinary to gum up the works of the epic.

“Everyone’s always saying love is the element that binds the universe together, but that’s a load of bollocks; it’s convenience. All things, from evolution to municipal sanitation to marriage to the Big Bang to diplomacy to the distribution of shops in urban centers, trend toward the most convenient outcome for the greatest number of lazy bastards, because the inconvenient stuff ends up alone without any friends and a foot growing out of their head and who has the time?”

No one is ever really satisfied with what they’ve got, look at that skinny bastard Old Ruutu, he heated up his whole planet like a leftover takeaway, and he still wasn’t really that happy, if you ask me. People are mostly happiest when they think they’re just about to get the thing they most want. Before and after, they’re all monsters.

The key to a happy life, Capo devoutly believed, was never giving much of a damn what happened in any given day so long as you got in a nap, a kill, and a snuggle, and the snuggle was optional.