I have come here from across that great sea of words, whose spumy surface is a history of all our travels.

Why have I come?

Across those seas I sat and watched from my window, back there in a land now lost, while on those streets, cobbled, where a score of nations and a hundred generations had freely peddled their wares---newly minted expressives, qualifiers, actions and exotic abstractions; while on those very streets where I had first traded in simple phrases of common usage and then slowly acquired the gift of transformation, spinning chapters and verse as a spider her silken web; while on those streets, those same streets that saw the appearance of the twenty-six, and then twenty-ninth, and finally the thirty-seventh letter; while on those same streets the Removers came and I watched, for days, unmoving, the entrance latched thrice and a beloved bookshelf toppled against the frame of the door, as they arrived, three-by-three, their opalescent banners artificially rigid in the windless air --- I, who had mastered the One-Thousand Metaphors, who had been awarded the Spectral Ring of the Second Adam, watched for days on end and did nothing.

I recall how when the Removers first arrived, the people imagined the old prophesies to have come true, and tossed paper wreaths before the marchers, in expectation of Single Point Time, and the infinite in a word, as the first Tellers had written. I can still see before me, in memories clearer than I would have them be, how at first the Removers, their uniforms trimmed in white quills, gave all the signs, fulfilled the prescribed order of symbols, metamorphosed old, graying words, long shaded into meaninglessness, into pure and guilded denoters---and the people, so long befuddled by connotations more numerous than the twilight stars, rejoiced at the sharpness of these words, bereft of the nuance and ambiguity that had, so they, so we all, believed, crippled our progress.

And so the Removers, three-by-three through the cheer-lined streets, marched with the impunity of the wizened lexicographers, even, for some, with the presumptive grace of the original Tellers. And when the speed of our days increased, unfettered by secondary meanings and codicils and connotations, no one spoke up as the old myths, the poems of our most elemental joys and sorrows, were slowly stripped of power, words replaced or suppressed, whole lines even. And when the Removers revoked the thirty-seventh letter, and then more and more, until only the base ten letters remained, most everyone merely shrugged, and accepted the now almost telegraphic mode of writing and speech as the logical, and even the theological, next step in our evolution.

Of course, there were a few who did disbelieve, a few who saw those that understood the ultimate infinite in a word to be literally true as deluded. But by then it was too late. Those of us who had remained too long in our rooms, ensconced within our old books, throwing up innocuous shields of words bearing all the old letters, could only fail, and failing, were faced with either obeisance to the Removers, or flight.

And yet, here I am, across that great spumy sea, crafting my gray phrases, attempting to account, to tally, to, finally, do just battle against the sharp, delineated world of diminished words I have fled. I am not confident in the rightness of my choices, but these nuanced words are all I have left, and should I, too, be left, at the end, failed, neglected, a tattered emblem of a spectral land, panhandling for letters, do not jeer at me....