Owen arrived in his new village as a mysteriously comfortable stranger, who had filched a little fortune from the early stages of an increasingly less exotic business. He was superstitiously viewed as a kind of alchemist, but he knew that the alchemy of Babbage and Turing, Eckert and Mauchly and Von Neumann had long since become mere chemistry, a province of dronelike quantifiers and disagreeable smells. For a time he pecked away at his customized, power-boosted iMac, hoping to come upon another next thing, perhaps a form of browser program with a few corners ingeniously cut, while knowing in his heart that he was amusing himself; the room for individual invention had been squeezed from an egregiously “mature” and vulgarized field of exploitation, a practically infinite sprawl of e-mail, pornography, spam, half-baked data, digital photos and videos, pirated music—all the importunate demotic trash that in Owen’s youth had been mostly confined to the print medium, to bales of recyclable newspapers, magazines, catalogues, and flyers. So-called cyberspace was being stifled by the lowly appetites to which capitalism must cater. In engineering as in the arts, the dawn time, before all but a few are still asleep to the possibilities, is the time for leaps of creation. The computer’s engineering marvels, like those of the automobile earlier in the departed century, are buried in a landslide of common use: any bank teller can summon up currency quotations from Hong Kong, just as any auto driver can push on the pedal for more gas. And, just as platform countries have stolen the auto and textile industries from the American worker, so software is more and more outsourced to India, Russia, China, the Philippines. It is too sad. But progress is sad, change is sad, natural selection is very sad. Small wonder that Owen, in his old age, now that the last of his and Julia’s combined six children are out of the house, has taken up painting—its silence, its long association with the sacred, its odor of patiently purified essences and minerals.