Note for a Fantastic Story In Wisconsin or Texas or Alabama some boys are playing war, and the two sides are the North and the South. I know (everyone knows) that defeat has a dignity which noisy victory does not deserve, but I also know how to imagine that this game, which spans more than a century and a continent, will one day discover the divine art of undoing time or, as Pietro Damiano said, of altering the past. If that should come to pass, if in the course of the lengthy game the South humbles the North, today will fall backward against yesterday and Lee's men will be victorious at Gettysburg in the first days of July of 1863 and the hand of Donne will be able to complete his poem on the transmigrations of a soul and the old nobleman Alonso Quijano will know the love of Dulcinea and the eight thousand Saxons at Hastings will defeat the Normans, as before they defeated the Norsemen, and Pythagoras will not recognize in a portico at Argos the shield he used when he was Euphorbus.