[b]Jonathan Safran Foer
We could imagine all sorts of universes unlike this one, but this is the one that happened.[/b]
Unless of course it’s even more mysterious than that.
And so it was when anyone tried to speak: their minds would become tangled in remembrance. Words became floods of thought with no beginning or end, and would drown the speaker before he could reach the life raft of the point he was trying to make. It was impossible to remember what one meant, what, after all of the words, was intended.
No, this really can happen.
Children confront us with our paradoxes and hypocrisies, and we are exposed. You need to find an answer for every why — Why do we do this? Why don’t we do that? — and often there isn’t a good one. So you say, simply, because.
Right, like that will actually work.
Well, anyway, it didn’t work for me.
We spent our lives making livings.
Clearly, some better than others. Of course, it’s all rigged though isn’t it?
Isn’t it strange how upset people get about a few dozen baseball players taking growth hormones, when we’re doing what were doing to our food animals and feeding them to our children?
That will never catch on, right?
And here I am, instead of there. I’m sitting in this library, thousands of miles from my life, writing another letter I know I won’t be able to send, no matter how hard I try and how much I want to. How did that boy making love behind that shed become this man writing this letter at this table?
And this is all before the part about falling over into the abyss that is oblivion.