“But civilization, you know…”
He trailed off, unable to describe the change inherent in that featureless noun, the death of romance and the lingering of its sterile, carnal revenant, a world living on the forced respiration of glitter and ceremony; the geometric steps of make-believe courtship during the Sowing Night Coil that had replaced the truer, madder, scribble-scrabble of love which he could only intuit dimly; hollow grandeur in place of true passions which might once have built kingdoms and sustained them.”