The religious and the modernist impulse seem to spring from the same engulfing moment of self-consciousness and doubt. “My God, where are we?,” then a space of ten or twenty thousand years to give us time to wander out into the shallows, gathering shells and stuff exactly like we’re not supposed to do, before the secondary wave brings in the terrible apprehension once again. It seems so hard to know what we are really doing—what it all comes down to, finally. I remember an exhibition of modernist objects at the Dallas Museum of Art a number of years ago—for the most part just the commonest sorts of things we’re used to living with, but emerged from this terrific redesign, this reappraisal toward first principles as if, to our surprise, such thoughtless accidental things could have first principles or even be adjusted to suggest the possibility. Is this what we’ve been doing all this time, it made one think, when we thought we were only sitting down or making tea or listening to the radio? Is this what we’ve been doing? How extraordinary, beautiful, uncomfortable and strange our lives have been. And maybe risky too, somehow.