(2020) Let's return to that question you've asked as if you were asking again for the first time: the one about the paradox in which you think returning to the supposed origin of an event could alter or avert the accident— For instance, stop the encounter between the archduke and his wife and the man who shot them at point-blank range; return all the bats and pangolins chafing in their cages at the seafood market to the wild. If you had stayed in your old life instead of chasing the dream of finding a way to break the cycle of one way streets and dead ends, would your children be happier than they are now? But if you could travel back in time faster than the speed at which you wake and sleep, sleep and wake to the dailiness of the present, you'd meet yourself without recognition, so that whatever has happened will happen anyway. Even if you're not the one the Terminator winds up helping, the future already exists. Sometimes—like when you lose yourself in the rapture produced by music or the stillness after sex, or coming to the satisfying finish of a poem or novel, it's as if you've slipped into a wormhole whose end is the beginning. The fragment of an hour can stretch the horizon's belt, or move the way a hummingbird's rapidly beating wings transform it into a jeweled ornament as if unmoving, fixed in space. You tell yourself someday you'll look back at this terrible year and wonder how anyone both lived through and endured all it brought.