I have two favorite stories. This in itself unremarkable fact would have remained hanging around in the back of my mind if I had not accidentally re-read one story first, then remembered the second, then thought about how similar they are and why this happened, etc. These stories - “Tlön, Ukbar, Orbis Tertius” by Borges and “Ultima Thule” by Nabokov - talk about many different things, but in many ways about the same thing.

Waiting room. Queue at the clinic or at the traffic police regiment. Subway car. There are enough places and situations in life when we are forced to live a certain period of time together with other, usually strangers. At the same time, we do not have a common occupation or a common goal with them, which makes this very “compulsion” become especially obvious.

Most of us do not look several billion years ahead, just as we do not look several million years or even a thousand years. We have more pressing concerns: How will I pay for higher education for my child in ten years? Will I get a promotion in a year? Will the stock market go up next week? What to cook for lunch? In this context, we need not worry. Barring an unforeseen catastrophe, our planet will remain almost unchanged in a year or ten years.