In the beginning were the broad words. They were the size of sheets of slate, or of outcroppings, even so big as to be tectonic. These words were too much for even the anchored jaw muscles of our hominid ancestors, but inspired the development of pottery.

Next came the tall words, formed out of old growth forests. Animals ran through them like the horse in the zoetrope (it is this primordial memory we revive in moviehouses), and unlike their predecessors, they could be splintered and worked. Our ancestors drew themselves up to their full height in reply. In fact, this was the first reply, and from that moment language followed.

The epoch of tall words lasted for many centuries, and it is this epoch whose dying light we see in the Odyssey and Iliad, the stories of Gilgamesh, the Egyptian hieroglyphics, and it is their memory that inspired pyramids and ziggurats, colossuses and lighthouses, and even the legend of the Tower of Babel.

Nonetheless they were soon superseded by the round words, which hinted at worlds and systems of worth. Beads of sweat, city walls, echoes in the cyclorama all bear the congruent hallmark of these words, left to us only in the shape of coins.

One such coin was held aloft, and the obverse design bidden to slough off. Thus the new words, the hot words, were called into being. In the heat, anything that could be said was put through regimens of purification, boiling off and burning off consonants, deceits, and tongues. What tall words remained turned to shafts of light, the round words to equations, and the broad words were brought to void. It was a time of crucibles, sintering, and strife. Perhaps you remember.

Now our era is an era of quick, where words fly too fast to be heard. They lack shape, color, heft, and sense. They are known only by their wakes, their incoherent overpressures, and quick words disambiguate and disarticulate simultaneously. In their presence, everything looks as it would from a hundred angles and a hundred moments all at once, and everyone dies and comes back to life thousands of times a day. Only the moment of solitude can outrun them. And it does. And it does. And it does.