Creation Lake

by Rachel Kushner

Murder is understandable when you think about it. It’s human to want to annihilate your enemy, or to demonstrate to the world: this is how angry I am right now, even if you might later regret killing a person. But to spray-paint an inscrutable sloppy symbol on the outside of a building? Why?

his accidental use of 24-point font, or a repeated resend of the same message or a blank message, such glitches were perhaps by-products of Bruno Lacombe’s freedom from what enslaved most people. At the same time, he was an old person trying to use email.

The world ruled by capital would not be dismantled. Instead, it had to be left behind.

People might claim to believe in this or that, but in the four a.m. version of themselves, most possess no fixed idea on how society should be organized.

In my own salt, my own core, this is what I knew: Life goes on a while. Then it ends. There is no fairness. Bad people are honored, and good ones are punished. The reverse is also true. Good people are honored, and bad people are punished, and some will call this grace, or the hand of God, instead of luck. But deep down, even if they lack the courage to admit it, inside each person, they know that the world is lawless and chaotic and random.

The ideas that I developed are in fact one idea, he said: Children will choose love over brutality, if given the chance. Adults will do the same, if given the chance. All acts of savagery originate with authority, he wrote. The work to be done, he told them, is a refusal of savagery.