Crash Early, Crash Often (Ribbonfarm Roughs Book 3)

by Venkatesh G. Rao

To pretend to be immortal is to approach your limited two-minute glimpse of the movie as though you’ve been watching all along, and as though you might stick around to see how it all ends. You will have to manufacture unverifiable memories and unfalsifiable foreshadowings. You will have to devote some of your limited time whispering to your neighbors, and perhaps surreptitiously looking up reviews with spoilers on your cellphone. But at least you’ll walk out with a satisfying story, even if not the story. So long as you walk away feeling like you’ve just enjoyed an entire movie, it doesn’t matter. To do this at the level of an entire life is to spend much of your time having one-way conversations with the dead and the unborn, through books read and written. You inhabit a world of ghosts while walking among the living.