It's a strange world we're about to enter.
If I were the organizing type I would set up a "Heian Society." In flowing robes and court caps, we would compose pun-laden poems simultaneously lamenting and celebrating the transience of life and beauty. Wine would flow, inhibitions dissolve, talk grow heated. What would we talk about? Why — about the things that matter: the seasons, the moon. Which season is more conducive to poetry — spring or autumn? Which moon — the misty one of spring, or the clear one of autumn — does more justice to the music of flute and koto?
Heian Japan: a world that lasted nearly 400 years, from 794 to 1185, and yet "has disappeared from the face of the Earth far more completely than ancient Rome," as the cultural historian Ivan Morris remarked. Not even ruins remain, only a voluminous literature; and the thought and ethical standards it reveals are as extinct as child sacrifice, though certainly not as brutal.