conventional accounts of world history often fail us completely, and human intuition often leads one astray, but it does take one somewhere, and doesn't desert one. hence the traditional report of the seven wonders of the world has always been accompanied by a rumor that there was also an eighth, and of this eighth there were various possibly contradictory accounts, their uncertainty being accounted for by references to the dim and distant past.

                                                                                                                    franz kafka, the lost writings