That’s a beautiful sonnet, and quite pertinent. And it fits into one of those odd synchronicities: Today, for some reason (probably a summer reading list), I sold a lot of copies of The Hound of the Baskervilles.

I was reminded of the eighth line of this sonnet:

“221B”

Here dwell together still two men of note
Who never lived and so can never die:
How very near they seem, yet how remote
That age before the world went all awry.
But still the game’s afoot for those with ears
Attuned to catch the distant view-halloo:
England is England yet, for all our fears –
Only those things the heart believes are true.

A yellow fog swirls past the window-pane
As night descends upon this fabled street:
A lonely hansom splashes through the rain,
The ghostly gas lamps fail at twenty feet.
Here, though the world explode, these two survive,
And it is always eighteen ninety-five.
    –Vincent Starrett, 1942

And that’s a good point. THe phrase didn’t quite feel right to me either. I’ll fix it in a rewrite.

The only trouble I had was with the phrase “precise reversals of the truth”, which doesn’t fit a man telling a story to a young girl. “The exact opposite of the truth”, perhaps?

Is this a standard midrash, or one you made up?

It makes me think of “The Sixty” from Asimov’s Pebble in the Sky, where the Earth is radioactive and can’t support too many people, so everyone is killed at 60. (Infanticide would be more logical.)