there are more than a million. there are more even than an infinity.

it sounds simple, i know. but it’s not. listen, there are a million worlds you could make for yourself. everyone you know has a completely different one - the woman in 5G, that cab driver over there, you. sure, there are overlaps, but only in the details. some people make their worlds around what they think reality is like. they convince themselves that they had nothing to do with their worlds’ creations and continuations. some make their worlds without knowing it. their universes are just sesame seeds and three-day weekends and dial tones and skinned knees and physics and driftwood and emerald earrings and books dropped in bathtubs and holes in guitars and plastic and empathy and hardwood and heavy water and high black stockings and the history of the vikings and brass and obsolescence and burnt hair and collapsed soufflés and the impossibility of not falling in love in an art museum with the person standing next to you looking at the same painting and all the other things that just happen and are. but you want to make for yourself a world that is deliberately and meticulously personalized. a theater for your life, if I could put it like that. don’t live an accident. don’t call a knife a knife. live a life that has never been lived before, in which everything you experience is yours and only yours. make accidents on purpose. call a knife a name by which only you will recognize it. now i’m not a very smart man, but i’m not a dumb one, either. so listen: if you can manage what i’ve told you, as i was never able to, you will give your life meaning.

jonathan safran foer
a convergence of birds

(i'm reading about possible worlds again, and i'm always reading about agency of course, so i like to read this. but then it made me uncomfortable, too: i'm more and more skeptical all the time of what people call personal truths. i suspect that anything not common and available to us all might be something really good, but it isn't the truth.)