Every period and every people has its patriarchs to point a way to a new world. For our nineteenth-century ancestors, it was Oscar Wilde and Friedrich Nietzsche who spied the trail out of the wilderness. Wilde fashioned that golden image of the Pleasure that Abideth but a Moment, still worshipped as an idol today. Nietzsche sent Zarathustra down from the mountain to destroy the image and replace it with the tables of the Sorrow that Endureth Forever. He also announced that God was dead -- news that made very little difference in the grand scheme of things, as most people were too busy trying to figure out what God has said thousands of years earlier to even notice. Like the brothers Aaron and Moses, both men glimpsed the land we would inherit. And died just on the edge of it.