[...] I remember Jakov saying, a bit irritably, “You’re making it sound as if he’s just adding things up, like he’s some kind of double-entry bookkeeper.”

“That’s exactly right,” I said, also irritably, “he is a double-entry bookkeeper!”

In the course of the next five minutes, we concluded that we would never agree on anything because I was a materialist, whereas he, Jakov, had a fundamentally religious view of history, and then we parted ways, Jakov to write about Babel’s replacement of old gods with a new mythology, and I to write about Babel as a bookkeeper.