And in dispelling my fantasies of permanence, the library does more than save me the cost of a paperback — it provides me with a template for navigating the great sea of longing and disappointment that is life.
This year has been filled with so much violence and death, so much evil and grief as a consequence of it. Some days it was damn near unbearable. But I have changed—I’ve grown stronger in my convictions about the sanctity of life and the need to protect the most vulnerable, and I’ve seen my friend and teacher change in the same direction. I’ve been grateful for the possibility of learning French, for the little spaces of time each week where I can get on camera and fail at basic sentences and rant about the ridiculousness of so many words sounding the same. Because within all of that failure, in a year unlike any other, is the chance of becoming something new.
If Then reads as a kind of prehistory to Cambridge Analytica, the private consultancy that imploded in 2018 after revelations of its dubious use of Facebook data to elect Trump and win Brexit. Exhuming Simulmatics from the dustbin of history also recasts our own strange moment as a mystery story: Why did the company that “invented the future” fail? And why did we forget it ever existed?
Like the guilty son returning to the scene
Of the crime I came home, following my own
True north. The one-lane bridge.