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Every few years there is a night that feels like the hinge of history. A wall comes down, a dictator flies out of the capital, a vote is counted and the crowd in the square starts singing. In the summer of 1989, a few months before the Berlin Wall fell, Francis Fukuyama published an essay asking whether we had reached “the end of history”: not the end of events, but the end of the argument about how people should be governed. The question mark was dropped in the book three years later. …

First, the torch. It burns pine, it smokes, and it never holds still, so the wall never holds still either. The chamber is deep in a limestone cliff above the Ardèche gorge, in the south of France, and the wall bulges and folds like a hide. On it, in charcoal, a pride of lions moves from left to right. Their heads overlap, one behind another, as if the same animal had been caught at several points of a turn. Nearby a horse has too many legs. A bison has eight. …

In Borges’s story “The Theologians”, collected in The Aleph in 1949, two churchmen of the early Middle Ages spend their lives refuting heresies. Aurelian, coadjutor of Aquileia, writes against a sect that believes history repeats in cycles. His rival, John of Pannonia, writes against the same sect more briefly and more brilliantly, and Aurelian never forgives him. Years later, when a new heresy appears, Aurelian recognizes in its doctrine a sentence John once wrote in good faith. He reports it. John is burned at the stake. Aurelian dies some time later in a fire set by lightning, and in paradise he learns that, for the unfathomable divinity, he and John of Pannonia formed a single person. …

In the schoolbooks I grew up with, Simón Bolívar was not a man. He was a sequence. He swore an oath on the Monte Sacro in Rome, crossed the Andes with a ragged army in 1819, won at Boyacá, freed five nations, and died betrayed. Every town had a plaza with his name and a bronze version of him on a horse. He had no body except the statue, and no doubts except the ones history had already resolved in his favor. …

I pick up the phone to check one thing, the weather or the time of a train. When I look up, forty minutes have passed. Nothing dramatic happened in them. There was a notification, then a video someone had shared, then the next video, then a headline, then a small red number that needed to go away. No single moment felt like a loss of freedom. The hour was made of ordinary moments, and none of them was mine. …

It is late, and a question arrives the way they usually do, sideways, from something half-read: what is the difference between a virus and a viroid? I don’t open a browser with its eleven tabs, or one of the large hosted models. I type the question into a window on my own machine, and a few seconds later an answer appears. A viroid is a bare loop of RNA, no protein coat, no genes for making proteins, a parasite reduced almost to a single gesture. The answer is not brilliant. It is adequate, it is immediate, and it never left the room. …

Two people meet in a doorway. “So good to see you,” one says, and means it, or believes she does. Her shoulders, meanwhile, stay angled toward the hall she came from, and her weight never quite leaves the back foot. The other answers warmly, the conversation lasts four minutes, and both walk away with a conclusion neither could quote. Nothing false was said. Something was communicated anyway. We talk about communication as if it were one activity called language. It is at least three. The body speaks in posture, rhythm, distance, and gaze. The voice speaks in sound and sequence. The hand speaks in marks that survive the speaker’s absence. The three overlap, translate badly into one another, and disagree most often when the message matters most. …

Somewhere in most houses there is a frame with a document in it. It has a seal, a signature, a name spelled correctly at last, and a phrase in a dead or ceremonial language certifying that the bearer has completed a course of study. Nobody looks at it. It was not made to be looked at. It was made to be shown once, to an employer or a relative, and then to hang as proof that something happened during those years, something the frame calls education. …

The lamp is off and the room is almost asleep when the whine arrives at the left ear: thin, rising, gone. A slap in the dark lands on your own cheek. Then stillness, and the stillness is no longer rest. It is surveillance. Ten minutes later you are standing on the mattress with the light on, scanning the ceiling for a speck the size of a comma, more alert than you were at any point during the working day. The insect weighs about two and a half milligrams. It has just reorganized the night of an animal some thirty million times its mass. …

Most people who grew up on the Disney Cinderella believe they know how the story ends: midnight, the glass slipper, the wedding. That belief is not wrong so much as it is late. It arrives already several centuries and several continents downstream of where the story starts, and the version that feels most original is usually just the version we happened to receive first. Underneath a great many familiar characters sits an older, stranger engine — one the polished surface was built to manage rather than replace. …