Some questions arrive late at night and in bad shape. This one came out roughly as: if the universe began at all, why did it begin with anything left to happen? It sounds like the kind of thing one says after the second glass, and I was ready to drop it. Then I found that physicists ask a sharper version of it in print, and that the sharper version is still open. …
In One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez stages one of literature’s strangest domestic visits. Death arrives at Amaranta Buendía’s door not as a specter or a car crash but as a courteous woman with a specific piece of information: Amaranta will die the day she finishes weaving her own shroud. Amaranta does not panic. She weaves by day and unravels her work by night, buying herself time not out of fear but to settle her affairs, and when the cloth is finally allowed to be finished, she bathes, dresses in it, lies down, and dies without drama. The scene is often read as magic for its own sake. It is closer to a thought experiment: what happens to the fear of death when the one variable we assume drives that fear — not knowing when — is removed. …