We once measured our height in books, my sister and I, the books stacked against the wall, and afterwards I attempted a headstand to see if it worked both ways. I didn't achieve the headstand, fell, brought the books down with me.

Which is more likely to occur in our lifetime, do you think: the death of the book or the death of the world? (They may coincide, of course.) If the book dies, plenty will hang around for years in closets, like skeletons, growing hair. People will just stop making new ones. Ditto, someday, with us.

Taking the long view, ought we to redirect the bomb money toward feeding hungry people or exploring outer space? Should we also, planners that we are, decide how many more generations we would like to produce and give some attention to what achievable goals we intend to score in the remaining time?

It might help to refresh the date-counter. 2001 is such a large, decrepit number. Maybe return to 0. Fresh slate. New document. We could call the era A.S.E. for After Sep Eleven.

Let's start over. Let's be friends. Let's do it one more time.

Which will we stop using first: the book or the wheel? My bet's on the book; people will always need dolly-carts. The book versus America though, or Iraq; that's tricky.

If the mothers of the world got together. If we still had a short story read to us at bedtime, all of us, in worldwide simultaneous translation, taking into account the time zones or not (I would go to sleep at 2 p.m. to do my part). We want a life of new things. We grow and die. We leaf and leaf and fall. We construct appropriate endings, wait for the rhyme.

I think that when we stop producing interesting books, it will be no matter.

Have you considered, by the way, that a "foregone conclusion" could be one that has occurred before, that is inevitable, or that we have chosen to go without?

Tom Howell conducted no interviews for this story. Okay?