They . . . go. They vanish. People. Civilizations. Languages. Philosophies . . .
Works of art disappear, species are extinguished, books are lost, cities drown, things once thought immortal suddenly aren't there at all. Dunwich is drowned, Pompeii buried, Athena's statue gone from the Parthenon, Suetonius's Lives of the Great Whores gone the way of the Roman Empire. Whole libraries of knowledge, whole galleries of secrets. Gone. Whole worlds. Lost worlds.
Little things, too. Five Boys chocolate. Train compartments. Snuff, galoshes, smog. Your mother's perfume. Your father's tobacco. The way Paris used to smell. Dreams and innocence, keys and gods, wisdom and miracles: all lost. Our culture, our knowledge and all our lives are shadows cast by what went before. We are defined, not by what we have, but by what we have lost along the way. And so, 'Lost Worlds': a glossary of the missing, a cabinet of absent curiosities. No mere miscellany, it weaves a web of everything we no longer have. 'Lost Worlds': the book that falls open at every page.
