What if, a thousand years from now, we’ve long since got past this compulsive skating about on the surface of things, this primitive infatuation with taking things apart to try to figure out how they work.

Who knows what ways of knowing may be dominant in such a world? Clearly those future humans will look back on us and our artifacts with the same tender bemusement that we feel when looking at tribal masks, Byzantine mosaics, and paleolithic drawings.

They will study our best, cleverest surface-skaters with the same fascinated noblesse oblige that we affect when considering Aristotle or Patanjali.

Einstein, Newton, Darwin and other ancient masters of surface reality will be known but consigned to small dark corners of libraries where they’ll be studied only by the most specialized, reclusive scholars.

Because of the inherent dimensional ambiguity of all graphic art, no doubt many of the same works that we revere will still be revered, though the worlds implied to our distant children by the likes of Turner, Caravaggio, and Moore will no doubt be vastly different from those we think to descry in them.

The really shocking punchline to this little thought experiment—if one allows one’s thought free rein—comes in literature.

How many of our vaunted prize-winners’ books will, if they survive at all, lie amoldering and unopened in archives of antiquity because, for all their much-praised clevernesses, they—at a distance of a thousand years—are finally seen as only so many variations on surface: "So this," our distant descendants may mutter, "in Dickens, Tolstoi, Proust, Joyce is how the world seems—and was celebrated—when consciousness confines itself to the five obvious animal senses and refuses to look with equal cleverness either truly beyond or truly within."

But, but, but. Possibly one genre of literature will survive and be read and treasured—as we read and treasure the god-littered worlds of the old Greeks and Hindus—because it, better and more purely than any other writing, encapsulates, presents, represents, glories in the culture of surface.

What genre would that be that so skillfully depicts us as trapped in linear, three-dimensional, five-sensed "reality" and so cleverly, wittily, and entertainingly tells story after story about our struggles to find meaning and—yes—justice in such a world? What tales spun by writer’s in total thrall to narrative could survive for a thousand years?

Yes, it could be that our children’s children unto the nth generation will have forgotten Joyce and Mann and Shakespeare and Balzac and Goethe and Dante but will remember and read and re-read (you ready?) Poe, Doyle, Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Robert Parker, John D. MacDonald, Stan Cutler, Laurence Shames, Robert Crais, James Burke, and all the rest. There surely our wrong-headed, blindered take on the highly seductive surface of things is displayed and celebrated with a degree of purity that at times approaches the perfection of total blindness.

Pure immersion in surface reality, indeed celebration of surface reality, yielding stories with the seductive power of the great myth and fairy tales, stripped of pretense, with the best and brightest idols of the age strutting proudly across page after page of unashamed story-telling.

They, these distant children of ours, will read, and wonder, and try to think: "Yes, no doubt, we came from them. But how? How?" And there will be Spenser and Dave Robicheaux and Elvis Cole and Joey Goldman—as brave as Krishna, as blindered as Oedipus—shining their good-scout flashlights forever into the two-dimensional darkness, content always to seek out the occasional bad guy but caring not a whit for the opinion of a possibly wiser posterity.