This Is How You Lose The Time War

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:

1. 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”).
2. 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.