On Multiverse Narratives — And Our Urgent Need For The Present
New Yorker
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10/31/22
“The garden of forking paths cannot continue to fork forever, if we are to find meaning there. Multiverses speak to the part of us that wants every option to be open, that wants the journey to go on and on. Of course, no journey really does—and at the end of many multiversal stories the tangle of time lines resolves into one, or a traveller finally arrives at the right version of history and decides to stay. Such endings seem to invite us to return to our one life, on our one planet, with some added spark of hope or curiosity or resolve. They speak to the part of us that wants, like Evelyn and Lyra and so many versions of Spider-Man, to go home.”