Hitherto I had been innocent of Auster's prolific, sententious output, his self-inflated stature as a windy oracle bearing witness to the long swan dive of the West: "I don't keep saying that Britain is dead because I want to make British people and others despair of themselves and the future; I say it because (a) it is something I'm seeing; and (b) if the British are dead, the only hope for them is that they realize that they are dead and turn again toward life." I rather doubt that the mood and plight of the British people are so frail and contingent upon the approval of obscure bloggers like Auster that his words have the power to plunge them into deeper despair or awaken them from their waxy deathsleep. His blog, what little of it I could stand, has the sonority of someone whose loquacity has so dulled his other faculties that he has ascended into a higher realm of dimwit.