Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

by Gabrielle Zevin

“There are people like you and like me. We have bad things happen to us, and we survive them. We are sturdy. But with people like your friend, you must be exceptionally gentle, or they may break.”

“Alternative Approaches to the Banach-Tarski Paradox…” The words of Anders Larsson came back to him: “To be good at something is not quite the same as loving it.”

“Go easy on me, Sammy. You may have noticed that I’ve been a little depressed.”

Herein, the difficulty. Sam and Sadie both knew what they liked in a game, and they could easily tell a good game from a bad game. For Sadie, that knowledge was not necessarily helpful. Her time with Dov and her years studying games in general had made her critical of everything. She could tell you exactly what was wrong with any game, but she didn’t necessarily know how to make a great game herself. There is a time for any fledgling artist where one’s taste exceeds one’s abilities. The only way to get through this period is to make things anyway. And it is possible that, without Sam (or someone like him) pushing her through this period, Sadie might not have become the game designer she became. She might not have become a designer at all.

“Why make anything if you don’t believe it could be great?”

anything was fixable if you took the time to figure out what was broken.

“Because we never say anything real to each other. We play games, and we talk about games, and we talk about making games, and we don’t know each other at all.”

“How do you get over a failure?” “I think you mean a public failure. Because we all fail in private. I failed with you, for example, but no one posted an online review about it, unless you did. I fail with my wife and with my son. I fail in my work every day, but I keep turning over the problems until I’m not failing anymore. But public failures are different, it’s true.” “So, what do I do?” she asked. “You go back to work. You take advantage of the quiet time that a failure allows you. You remind yourself that no one is paying any attention to you and it’s a perfect time for you to sit down in front of your computer and make another game. You try again. You fail better.” “I

But life was always arriving. There was always another gate to pass through. (Until, of course, there wasn’t.)

To be alive was to accept that you were fundamentally alone.”

love is both a constant and a variable at the same time.

The arrangement went largely unmentioned: Marx was Marx, so that Sam and Sadie could be Sam and Sadie. But Marx, of course, was no longer here.

“What is a game?” Marx said. “It’s tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. It’s the possibility of infinite rebirth, infinite redemption. The idea that if you keep playing, you could win. No loss is permanent, because nothing is permanent, ever.”