Creation Lake

by Rachel Kushner

He had been vaguely aware of a flaw in his thinking. But the logical “fix” was not an embrace of outcomes, to love the shiny driverless car headed toward extinction, and to presume that the technological prowess that had designed the car could design a viable future, solve the nihilism of progress with yet more progress. Was it Better Before? I honestly can’t say, he wrote. In looking back, what I really wanted was to know how we navigate with the knowledge we have. What future do we imagine for our present? When I reframe, he said, and think of Homo sapiens putting star maps on his cave ceilings, his attempt to imagine his own future, and of Neanderthals, with their handprints of the Milky Way, doing the same, my insistence on difference dissolves. These two iterations of human were both beset, and deeply, by a need to know, the same need that plagues me, now. No sailor-priest am I, he said. In fact, I have altogether forsaken the sky, and thus the future, in my attempts to sort the past. In my reassessments, he said, I have lost my bearings, and I will have to find new ones. With that, he signed off.