— Something’s always lost though. Even in the end of the Cold War.

— Nothing good was lost! Really, was it?

He thought about it. — Something crabbed and cobwebby and disenchanted. I hated that crabbed thing in my father. Yet it was also very ambitious, very purely intellectual. We may come to think that those dissident Central European cultures were the last to keep a classical ideal alive, an ideal of disenchantment.