Dedication

To all those who stood with backs against the wall. To all who fell down manholes because they stared at the gleam of the morning against a skyscraper. To all who ran their eyes into the ground reading in dingy hole-in-wall cafes. To all with the sleep-crud of eternity in their eyes. To all whose imaginations were more than a thousand plaets. To all who bore the spirit of lightness through 80-hour weeks and dried tears and sweat of dread and despair. To all to whome rust on the bus indicated some redemption. To all who tried to understand the music of the spheres, or the music of the neural networks, or the music in perception, or the harmony in reflective equilibrium, or the music of crystals, or the fabled music of the spheres. To all who chanted when they should have discoursed. To all those who overcame themselves time and again, thinking it was for naught. To all the people of the margins: your stories are important because they've never been told. To the peripheral vision of the society of striving. To flies in the walls and flies in the kitchen in the most Gabriel Garcia Marquez sense of the word. To all the makers of hammocks, puffs, ottomans, beanbag chairs, hookas, pillows soft and hard, comforters, ticklers, plush towels, bath gels, childhood stuffed toys, playing cards, glass panes, sliding doors, eye drops, napkins and all the things that made sedentary moments comfortable. To the head chefs of the human soul who were not content to reframe a thousand and one times and reframe again. To the boatmen of the Orinoco delta: I imagine you when I read about Latin America. To those who built spires of ancient buildings, defiant against glass and privilege and cleanliness. To all the women who plated trees along my sidewalks (metaphorically speaking). To all the brilliant pot-bellied punks, stoic in outlook though not behaviour. To the interlocutors in tow-character plays on balconies and in parks and at bus stops. To all the people who will never have children. To all those who probably won't live to see thirty. To my greedy reductionists and my airy qualia freaks. To the lovers on the couches and the anonymous kitchn staff. To the homeless sages and the human beings gutted. I urge you to grow and change, but maintain your essences. Because without you--no book!

Consider: "Never say, and never take seriously anyone who says, "I cannot believe that so-and-so could have evolved by gradual selection". I have dubbed this kind of fallacy "the Argument from Personal Incredulity". Time and again, it has proven the prelude to an intellectual banana-skin experience."