We call it the Dark Ages, but they had their fair share of illuminated periods: the Renaissance, when people started wondering if it wasn’t about time for something else. Then we arrived at modernity, which seemed to be the only way we could keep doing science and thinking about the universe; it would have been a lot easier if we had stayed in the Renaissance. But then, at least in terms of art and music, things started going out of their minds. People got the notion that the “best music” was all about repetition. Then they got that some music could be repeated forever and still be music, and they started listening to music that was made up entirely of nothing but repetition. Eventually people realized this was also true of words, so they started reading books of no words at all and started writing things that were just made up of repetition. And then they started listening to music and reading books where the words were also made up entirely of nothing but repetition.