““Do your neighbors burn one another alive?” was how Fraa Orolo began his conversation with Artisan Flec.
“Do your shamans walk around on stilts?” Fraa Orolo asked, reading from a leaf that, judging by its brownness, was at least five centuries old. Then he looked up and added helpfully, “You might call them pastors or witch doctors.”
“When a child gets sick, do you pray? Sacrifice to a painted stick? Or blame it on an old lady?”
“Do you fancy you will see your dead dogs and cats in some sort of afterlife?””

— Neal Stephenson, book Anathem

Part 1, Provener; The questionnaire, in use for 1,100 years, is used once every ten years to determine if civilization outside the monastic compound is beginning to regress.
Anathem (2008)

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Neal Stephenson167

American science fiction writer 1959

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“Be modern
collectors, museums
if you have old paintings
do not despair
Retain your memories
but detourn them
so that they correspond with your era.
Why reject the old
if one can modernize it
with a few strokes of the brush.
This casts a bit of contemporaneity
on your old culture.
Be up to date
and distinguished
at the same time.
Painting is over
You might as well finish it off
Detourn (détournez)
Long live painting.”

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1959 - 1973, Various sources