The Anomaly

by Hervé Le Tellier

“Nothing. Nothing will change. We’ll wake up in the morning, we’ll go to work because we still have to pay the rent, we’ll eat and drink and make love just like before. We’ll carry on behaving as if we’re real. We’re blind to anything that could prove that we’re fooling ourselves. It’s only human. We’re not rational.”

Do you remember Pandora and her box?” “Yes,” the presenter replies, baffled. “I don’t see the connection.” “There is one. If you remember, Prometheus stole fire from heaven and Zeus, wanting revenge on him and all blaspheming mortals, sent Pandora to Prometheus’s brother Epimetheus. Zeus slipped a gift into her belongings, a mysterious box—except it was actually a jar—and he told her she must never open it. But she was too inquisitive and disobeyed him. All the evils of mankind that had been sealed inside it were then released: old age, disease, war, famine, madness, poverty…just one evil was too slow to escape, or perhaps it was obeying Zeus’s wishes. Do you remember what that evil was?” “No. Please explain, Victor.” “That evil was Elpis, the expectation of good—hope. It’s the most destructive of all evils. It is hope that stops us being proactive and hope that prolongs people’s suffering because, as they always say and in spite of all the evidence, ‘it will all come right in the end.’ What is not meant to be cannot be…The real question we should always ask is, ‘How does it benefit me to accept a received idea?’ ”

Nietzsche said: ‘Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions.’

The irony is that the very fact of being virtual may give us even more of a duty toward our fellow human beings and our planet. And most significantly, it’s a collective duty.” “Why’s that?” “Because—and a mathematician has already made this point—this test hasn’t been set for us as individuals. This simulation is thinking on the level of an ocean, it couldn’t care less about what each water molecule does. The simulation is waiting for a reaction from the entire human race. There won’t be a supreme savior. We need to save ourselves.”

you’ve read War and Peace more than once so you know what General Kutuzov knows—the two most powerful warriors are patience and time.

Another man will come along, another meeting of minds, another miracle. I’m sure of it. I’ll love again. At least love stops us constantly looking for some meaning to life.

Dear André (what else can I call you?), I’m writing to you from the Drôme. I’m going to stay here for a while, and you can stay in my apartment, your apartment, in Paris for as long as it takes. I’m attaching the complete email exchange with Lucie from when we returned from New York. If you read them, you’ll understand. I wrote a lot, she didn’t reply much. You see plenty of “I don’t want to hound you/pester you in vain,” which were all lies because I wrote again and again, pointlessly. And that last email, which goes on forever—Jesus, be brief—the one that ends with the pretentious thing about walking “the longest of possible paths, together.” I was by turns bombastic, insistent, tearful and plaintive, and even after she’d evicted me from her life, I still tried to get her to backtrack. I’m not your enemy or your rival, or even an ally. But I have my past in my mailbox, and if you don’t want it to be your future, do something.