So much overtook them now, so many channels of looking and hearing, the young people filming themselves, good god, always more young people, always younger people, and younger people, all of them growing and aging as they themselves were doing, but bringing with them the accoutrements of a technical mastery unseen before in history, that sped up their lives even as they pined to slow down, the video blog and the self-produced music, all of these younger ones so much happier with the new technics than they; and, yes, all of them self-aware, not a whit less intelligent but more so, more intelligent and beautiful and serene, more cunning and ambitious and active. It made them pine for an age they could almost believe they had experienced in fact, when beauty was felt as a soft breeze upon the body. But the wisest of them believed that that salad age, that dew-touched morning and mystic dawn had less real youth to it than present yearning, less remembered greatness than current ambition. It was their unassuaged lust turned backward, made to wear a period costume. And the very wisest looked upon the new wonders with the greatest skepticism.