When God died, a lot of other characters died with him, or at least they never felt quite themselves again. One was Social Authoritarianism, a tedious old patriarch in a top hat who spoke bigly and carried a soft stick. Another was Tradition, a whiskery old fogey who had forever, as long as anyone could remember, been telling people that things would always be the way they were because they had always been that way. Another was known as the Sublime, and lived on a mountaintop in the fading glow of perpetual sunsets, listening out for awestruck oohs and ahs. And another, a cousin of all of these, for whom most people felt a secret fondness which they rarely owned up to for fear of the odium they'd incur, used to whisper to anyone who'd listen that poetry should be in structures of symmetry and repetition, from stanzas to rhyme (because in all things, from the human body to the alternation of night and day, there was pattern); and so on. This last fellow was generally agreed to be a well-meaning bore, nice but hopelessly out of touch.

In the end it became possible to write like this: