Lessons

by Ian McEwan

The stupid had their own routes to unhappiness.

network – its interlacing origins mostly forgotten – of invention

How easy it was to drift through an unchosen life, in a succession of reactions to events. He had never made an important decision.

Nearly everything that happens to you in life you forget.

Schrödinger’s cat. A cat concealed in a steel chamber is either killed or not by a randomly activated device. The cat’s state is not known until the chamber is opened. In Schrödinger’s account it is both alive and dead until that moment. In the good outcome, at the reveal, a wave function collapses, the live cat jumps into the arms of its owner, while its other version continues as dead in a universe inaccessible to the owner or her cat. By extension, the world divides at every conceivable moment into an infinitude of invisible possibilities.

Everything, especially life, fell apart. Order was a boulder to be rolled uphill.

Life is messy, everybody makes mistakes because we’re all fucking stupid