Aside from being an evocative phrase, “This Is How You Lose The Time War” is a book. It became this week’s reading material on recommendation from a friend with readerly and writerly practices and aspirations similar to mine.
I read it in two ways:
- The way that I read when I was a kid on the couch with Boxcar Children, Hardy Boys, Cam Jansen, and Matt Christopher novels; letting the language flow over and through me (I allowed myself to define “post-singularity” and “technotopia”).
- The way that I read as an adult retraining himself on the practice of serial reading; stopping before I reach saturation, anticipating the next chance to read.
Once I let go of the need to understand every reference, metaphor, and word, I landed in a love story, set at the intersection of two worldviews.
I’m not going to review the book because that really just doesn’t feel like what I want to do, but below, I will drop a few of the questions that it invited me to think about.
- To what extent can we reform our human political systems with technology, without sacrificing the best of what makes them human?
- How do we celebrate the essentialness of human inefficiency and fallibility, without unduly accepting mediocrity?
- What kinds of practices best support me to express my understanding of love?
- How might I act differently if I understood time as a braid? My place within it to be merely within one strand?
- To what extent are we bound up in energy that we can’t quite grasp?
It also invited me to be:
- A relaxed reader.
- Immersed in a different world.
- Curious about my assumptions.
- Surprised.
- Curious.
- Baffled and confused.
Adam Fearnall 