Beautiful World, Where Are You

“While they spoke, Eileen laughed a lot and looked animated, touching her mouth, leaning forward in her seat. After she got home that night Aidan sent her a message reading: you are such a good listener! wow!”

Eileen’s behavior feels appropriately flirty for a date, but Aidan does not match her efforts, giving her the impression that the interest is not mutual. He either doesn’t notice, or refuses to read, her nonverbal cues, and the date feels very one-sided. This prior relationship’s demise is partially what amplifies Eileen’s fears of unreciprocated love dooming future relationships.

“Each new day has now become a new and unique informational unit interrupting and replacing the informational world of the day before […] The present has become discontinuous […] There is no longer a neutral setting. There is only the timeline.”

Here, the “timeline” refers to both historical temporality and also the instant news and advertising feeds that flood social media. The sheer scope of tragedies and exploitative capitalism is so overwhelming in an advanced society that every day feels identically inescapable. Without a continuous timeline and coherent historical narrative, people (and their moral quandaries) find themselves adrift with little direction and ability to improve society.

“The unbearable thing is that when first inscribed, those markings meant something, to the people who wrote and read them, and then for thousands of years they meant nothing, nothing, nothing—because the link was broken, history had stopped. And then the twentieth century shook the watch and made history happen again.”

Thinking about the erasure of Linear B from recorded history, Alice ponders impending civilizational collapse. She is struck by the tragedy of a generation cut off from its global history because human society rises and falls in cyclical patterns. This passage underscores Alice’s persistent existential anxiety, as she fears the latest crest of a contemporary cultural cycle is perhaps so intensely resource-heavy and commercially exploitative that societal collapse may come sooner rather than later.