This is a book on reckless writing and careful reading, on invention and recognition. It's about how people find meaning and how we pass it on or lose it. The political expectations that drive it are inherited from religion; it tracks the chiliastic, digital divide between quality and quantity in the decades between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the receivership of democracy, venturing well beyond the author's stamping ground in poetry and translation, into philosophy, into linguistic and arithmetical pattern recognition, and into the merits and pitfalls of machine code as an aid to conversation. Mathematics and physics are admired from a distance, over the wall of algebra.