Ghostwritten

by David Mitchell

‘The one that plagues all men. The one that says a life without darkness and sex and mystery is only half a life. Why?

I knew their rare pleasures that burned out as quickly as they flared up, and of the memories that kept them from freezing.

Now I live like this, losing the battle against a battery of deadlines – especially financial ones – but at least they are deadlines of my own choosing, there because I’ve plunged myself into something again. It’s not always an easy way to live. Independence and insecurity hobble along together in my three-legged race. Jim – my foster dad – tells me this is a choice I made, and that I shouldn’t ask for sympathy. And that’s true. But why did I make that choice? That’s what I wonder about. Because I am me, is the answer. But that just postpones the question. Why am I me?

When I was younger, I thought that kids were an inevitable part of getting old. I thought you’d wake up one morning and there they’d be, nappies bulging. But no, you actually have to make up your mind to do them, like making up your mind to buy a house, cut a CD or stage a coup d’etat. What if I never make my mind up? What if ?

Italians give their cities sexes, and they all agree that the sex for a particular city is quite correct, but none of them can explain why. I love that. London’s middle-aged and male, respectably married but secretly gay.

The world runs on strangers coping.

Wigner maintains that human consciousness collapses one lucky universe into being from all of the possible ones. Had my mother’s universe now uncollapsed? Were cards flying back across the baize back into the dealer’s pack?

But you can no more measure the speed of time than you can bottle days. Clocks measure arbitrary meters of time, but not its speed. Nobody knows if time is speeding up, or slowing down. Nobody knows what it is. How much time is there in a day? Not how many hours, minutes, seconds: how much time do we have? This day?

Dr Frankenstein did a runner, and that was his crime. He left his technology at the mercy of people who did what ignorant humans habitually do: throw stones and scream. If the good Doctor had shown his brainchild how to survive, adapt, and protect itself, all that gothic gore could have been saved, and transplant technology jumpstarted two centuries early.