Creation Lake

by Rachel Kushner

The trick of riding backward is to understand that this orientation of travel is time-honored and classical. It is like rowing a boat: you enter the future backward, while watching scenes of the past recede.

In a bunker, you cannot hear the human community in the earth, the deep cistern of voices, the lake of our creation.

Every human was a child of a child of a child of children of mysterious mothers who once lived, and whose secrets we carry. This was our genome, Bruno said. Science and technology are embattled terrain among those who reject capitalism, he acknowledged, but the new discoveries in the study of ancient DNA were stunning and consequential. They have to be dealt with, Bruno said. I am linked, he said, to ancient people not as a vague and baggy “idea” but as little pieces of string examined under an electron microscope. We have material proof, Bruno said, of transmigration, of the way in which everyone who came before us left a mark on our genome, adding to the story of our ancestry and evolution.

The French might have better novels (Balzac, Zola, and Flaubert) and they have better cheeses (Comté, Roquefort, Cabécou). But in the grand scheme that’s basically nothing.

How much of fishing was fishing and how much was something else, a way to empty the mind, to stop time.

The captain of the battleship comes on the radio, to command the little boat to move, a boat that he doesn’t understand is a lighthouse on a rock. The captain believes he is in a power struggle with the thing in his path and that the more forceful and arrogant he is, the more likely it will yield. He is not wrong that he is engaged in a struggle for dominance. He’s only wrong that he’ll win.

With GPS you can know your location without looking out the window, he had said. You can know your location without knowing your location. You can know things without knowing anything.