A world: what belongs to us, our habitat, mental or physical; what's out there, beyond the mind and the self, the profusion of things we haven't dreamed or invented; other people; an order, a coherence, a realm, or a shape drawn on the face of chaos. It's also ... what we talk about when we are getting above ourselves. A world: most of us are lucky if we have a street or a block or a patch of garden where we know our way around; if we know where our house is situated.

-- Michael Wood, in the New York Review of Books, 14 July 1994.