Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

by Gabrielle Zevin

Time, Sam thought, was a mystery. But with a second’s reflection, he thought better of such sentiment. Time was mathematically explicable; it was the heart—the part of the brain represented by the heart—that was the mystery.

“SADIE MIRANDA GREEN! YOU HAVE DIED OF DYSENTERY!”

This is what time travel is. It’s looking at a person, and seeing them in the present and the past, concurrently.

To allow yourself to play with another person is no small risk. It means allowing yourself to be open, to be exposed, to be hurt. It is the human equivalent of the dog rolling on its back—I know you won’t hurt me, even though you can. It is the dog putting its mouth around your hand and never biting down. To play requires trust and love.

“Always remember, mine Sadie: life is very long, unless it is not.” Sadie knew this to be a tautology, but it also happened to be true.

Sadie the gamer found this scene sexist and strange. At the same time, Sadie the world builder accepted that the game was made by one of the most creative minds in gaming. And in those days, girls like Sadie were conditioned to ignore the sexist generally, not just in gaming—it wasn’t cool to point such things out. If you wanted to play with the boys, they couldn’t be afraid of saying things around you. If someone said the sound effect in your game sounded like a queef, it was your job to laugh.

her basic laugh was untouched, aside from an inevitable, slight change of key. She had, he thought, one of the world’s great laughs. The kind of laugh where a person didn’t feel that he was being laughed at. The kind of laugh that was an invitation: I cordially invite you to join in this matter that I find amusing.

They had the rare kind of friendship that allowed for a great deal of privacy within it.

in medias res,

It is worth noting that greatness for Sam and Sadie meant different things. To oversimplify: For Sam, greatness meant popular. For Sadie, art.

When Sam had described the relationship between Marx and his father, he had said it was fraught, that Watanabe-san was demanding and sometimes even demeaning to Marx. Sadie saw no evidence of that. She found Marx’s father to be bright, interesting, and engaged. Other people’s parents are often a delight.

Whenever he was in her room, he found Sadie’s art comforting, an extension of Sadie herself: the Hokusai wave, the Duane Hanson “Tourists,” the Sam Masur maze.

they found themselves drawn to Japanese references over and over: the deceptively innocent paintings of Yoshitomo Nara; Miyazaki anime like Kiki’s Delivery Service and Princess Mononoke; other, more adult anime like Akira and Ghost in the Shell, both of which Sam had loved; and of course, Hokusai’s Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji series, the first of which is The Great Wave.

There was bubbly Korean writing on all the storefronts, more Korean writing than English. If you didn’t read hangul, you were basically a K-town illiterate.

and thick paperback volumes of fluorescent and pastel-colored manhwa.

how quickly the world could shift. How your sense of self could change depending on your location. As Sadie would put it in an interview with Wired, “The game character, like the self, is contextual.”

was Marx who turned them on to Takashi Murakami and Tsuguharu Foujita. It was Marx, with his love of avant-garde instrumental music, who played Brian Eno, John Cage, Terry Riley, Miles Davis, and Philip Glass on his CD player while Sadie and Sam worked. It was Marx who suggested they reread The Odyssey and The Call of the Wild and Call It Courage. He also had them read the story structure book The Hero’s Journey, and a book about children and verbal development, The Language Instinct.

A decade later, Zoe would win a Pulitzer Prize for an operatic adaptation of Antigone she had written using only female voices.

There was a pleasant Weltschmerz that came over him. It was the nostalgia one experienced when visiting an old school and finding that the desks were so much smaller than in one’s memory.

board was empty aside from a hazy pastel palimpsest to remind them of the work they had done.

The universe, he felt, was just—or if not just, fair enough. It might take your mother, but it might give you someone else in return. As he rounded Kennedy Street, he began to chant to himself a poem that he had heard once, he wasn’t sure where. “That love is all there is; is all we know of love. It is enough; the freight should be proportioned to the groove.”

She might have continued in this speculative ouroboros forever, if another Anna Lee had not fallen from the sky.

somewhere deep inside himself, he felt a recognition and then a reckoning: this was death, and he would die, and his mother would die, and everyone you ever met and ever loved would die, and maybe it would happen when you or they were old, but maybe not. To know this was unbearable: it was a fact too large for a nine-year-old avatar to contain.

he knew her well enough to know why she lied. When he lied, it was for the same reason: to protect her from that which she could not handle.

He was tired of his body, of his unreliable foot, which couldn’t even handle the slightest expression of joy.

Sam directed his team to make Mapletown time and seasonally responsive—it was dark if you played at night, and light if you played in the morning. There would be leaves in the fall, and snow in the winter, and cherry blossoms in the spring.

He knew what he was experiencing was a basic error in programming, and he wished he could open up his brain and delete the bad code. Unfortunately, the human brain is every bit as closed a system as a Mac.

He felt that it was too meta, too clever, if Myre Landing was a game, and that it would cause an unnecessary ludic dissonance in the gamer.

naval architect Thomas Andrews Jr.”

Noh had been Watanabe-san’s idea—it was the kind of thing Japanese brought their esteemed gaijin visitors to do.

“I’m feeling Torschlusspanik,”

‘Zweisamkeit’ is the feeling of being alone even when you’re with other people.”

Verschlimmbesserung boondoggle,”

Memory, you realized long ago, is a game that a healthy-brained person can play all the time, and the game of memory is won or lost on one criterion: Do you leave the formation of memories to happenstance, or do you decide to remember?

(You used to joke that if you ever wrote a memoir, the title would be All Titles Are Tentative.)

It’s a Japanese custom called senbazuru. If you make one thousand paper cranes, you can restore someone to good health.

Soon, you will not be you. You, like all of us, are a deictic case.

It’s not Macbeth. It’s not ‘A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.’

we-shall-carry-on St. Crispin’s Day type of speech

The DJ played “Everybody’s Free (to Wear Sunscreen),” that oddball 1999 Baz Luhrmann spoken-word novelty track of the ungiven Kurt Vonnegut commencement address that turned out to not be by Kurt Vonnegut, but by a Chicago Tribune columnist named Mary Schmich.

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.

panem et caseum morsu.

Emily studied the dots. “Is that an upside-down ‘therefore’ symbol?” “When the dots are placed this way, they mean ‘because.’

“And what is love, in the end?” Alabaster said. “Except the irrational desire to put evolutionary competitiveness aside in order to ease someone else’s journey through life?”

Eidetic

The restaurant looked like a tree house—an enormous, Ent-like, Ficus sprung from the middle of it, and the tables were on tiered wooden platforms that surrounded the tree.

She had once read in a book about consciousness that over the years, the human brain makes an AI version of your loved ones. The brain collects data, and within your brain, you host a virtual version of that person. Upon the person’s death, your brain still believes the virtual person exists, because, in a sense, the person still does. After a while, though, the memory fades, and each year, you are left with an increasingly diminished version of the AI you had made when the person was alive.

The book about consciousness that Sadie mentions when she is talking about the brain having an AI version of deceased loved ones is I Am a Strange Loop, by Doug Hofstadter, a source suggested to me by Hans Canosa.

The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer The Animators by Kayla Rae Whitaker Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang Trust Exercise by Susan Choi The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa The Nix by Nathan Hill No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern