"How to establish the exact moment in which a story begins?  Everything has already begun before, the first line of the first page of every novel refers to something that has already happened outside the book.  Or else the real story is the one that begins ten or a hundred pages further on, and everything that precedes it is only a prologue." —Italo Calvino, If On a Winter's Night a Traveler  (We need not mention how wonderful this book is.)