Yet there are real-life precedents here, too.
Shakespeare's Forest of Arden had several real-life precedents: the Ardennes forest on mainland Europe was one, but another was the ancient Forest of Arden in Warwickshire, near the town where Shakespeare was born, in Stratford-on-Avon.
They conjure Surrealism and Pop Art and are much tamer than their real-life precedents: for example, the actual functioning oil pumps that you drive past in the middle of Los Angeles, fouling the air with dust and fumes on the southern end of La Cienega Boulevard, one of the city's art gallery arteries.
It may seem trivializing -- even obscene -- to talk about movies in the same breath as this week's tragedy, but the fact that so many people did was a symptom of our inability to get our minds around this disaster, our inability to find real-life precedents, real-life analogies for what happened in the morning hours of Sept. 11.
In other words, it was a global reorganization of life without precedent.
Protecting life takes precedent over respecting a will that is not free but distorted by mental and often genetic, chemical or other malfunctions.
Logically, the right to life takes precedent because all other rights are contingent on the right to life being respected -- while respecting other rights does not secure the right to life.
Unearthing primal folk music and giving it new life has countless precedents.
But as he scrapped, sued, and screamed in pursuit of a world in which pornography and outrageous language are accepted as facts of life, Flynt helped create precedents that are still with us.
Yet life insurance is a precedent of sorts.
"The life of law is precedent," Mr. Summers said at a dinner honoring him when he became a professor emeritus.
