As I set out to summit a pile of books that no one in my life thinks I should (or can) climb, I’m hoping I might be able to identify in them some of that foundational concern and care for others. I know there is no guarantee that I’ll get anything out of the endeavor. This is, after all, a self-improvement project begun in January. The odds are good that I’ll give it up the way I have every other. But maybe, just maybe, I’ll at least manage to clear out a few inches of closet space before I do.
But no matter how great your god complex, all the returns-on-investment occur ‘out there’ in space and time, and won’t make anyone rich in the here and now, in the direct manner of, say, asteroid mining. After 1,000 human lifespans, cosmic expansion will still be in its infancy. Don’t expect so much as a snapshot from the nearest large galaxy for at least 5 million years. This pulls us back to the central question. If every direct, tangible benefit is deferred to a weird kind of technological afterlife, why would anyone do it?
The real product of the early space programme was a taste of a new kind of purpose and meaning
Identical twins are always a source of fascination, and Jacqueline Roy’s novel charts the lives of a pair, Selina and Zora, who seem even closer than most. “We were joined at the hip – that’s not a metaphor,” insists Zora, in a striking first line; she claims to remember the operation that severed their tiny, conjoined bodies as babies. But separating herself emotionally from her sister in adulthood will prove more difficult.
In his expansive scholarly analysis, Recuber examines more than 2,000 digital texts, from blog posts by those who are terminally ill to online suicide notes and pre-prepared messages designed to be e-mailed to loved ones after someone has died. As he notes, “the digital data in this book are sad, to be sure, and they have often brought me to tears as I collected and analyzed them”. Yet, they are well worth delving into.