Gottfried, like any true dictator, liked to surround himself with bland obliging ciphers. — Robert Silverberg

I think we made love three times that final summer. Made love! Preposterous euphemism for fucking, almost as bad as the most grotesque of all, slept together. Whatever Sundara and I made, in those three pressings of flesh to flesh, love couldn’t have been the commodity; we made sweat, we made rumpled sheets, we made heavy breathing, we even made orgasms, but love? Love?

So it is with all the great leaders: the commodity they have to sell is personality. Mere ideas can be left to lesser men.

Thus does the unyielding, inescapable future ineluctably devour the present.