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By Root 1110 0

remember anything, nor be remembered by anything, which is one reason why you won't be able to believe so much as a word of what I am about to tell you. Tough arguments to knock down, I admit. All I can tell you is that, the moment there was something, there being nothing else, that something was the universe, and since it hadn't been there before, there was a before when it wasn't and an afterwards when it was, from that moment on, I'm saying, time began, and with time memory, and with memory someone who remembered, that is to say myself, or that something that later I would understand was myself. Let's get this straight: it's not that I remembered how I was when there was nothing, because there was no time then, and there was no me; but I realized now that, even if I didn't know I was there, still I had a place I could have been, I mean the universe; whereas before, even had I wanted to, I wouldn't have known where to put myself, and that's a pretty big difference, and it was precisely this difference between the before and the after that I remembered. In short, you must recognize that my reasoning is logical too, and what's more doesn't err on the side of the simplistic like your own.

So let me explain. One can't even say for sure that what there was then, really was: the particles, or rather the ingredients with which the particles would later be made, existed in the virtual sense: that kind of existence where if you're there you're there, and if you're not there you can begin to count on being there and then see what happens. We felt this was a fine thing, and indeed it was, because it's only if you begin to exist in the virtual sense, to fluctuate in a field of probability, to borrow and return charges of energy still entirely hypothetical, that sooner or later you may find yourself existing in reality, wrapping around yourself, that is, a scrap, be it ever so small, of space-time, as happened to an ever increasing number of I-don't-know-whats - let's call them neutrinos because it's a nice name, though at the time no one had ever even dreamed of them — bobbing one on top of another in a torrid soup of infinite heat, thick as a glue of infinite density, that swelled up in a time so infinitely brief that it had nothing to do with time at all - since of course time hadn't yet had the time to show what it would later become — and as it swelled it produced space where no one had ever known what space was. Thus the universe, from being an infinitesimal pimple in the smoothness of nothing expanded in a flash to the size of a proton, then an atom, then a pinpoint, then a pinhead, then a teaspoon, then a hat, then an umbrella…

No, I'm going too fast; or too slow, I don't know: because this expansion of the universe was infinitely fast yet started out from a beginning so deeply buried in nothing that to push its way out and peep over the threshold of space and time required a wrench of such violence as not to be measurable in terms of space and time. Let's say that to tell everything that happened in the first second of the history of the universe, I should have to put together an account so long that the whole subsequent duration of the universe with its millions of centuries past and future would not be enough; whereas everything that came afterwards I could polish off in five minutes.

Naturally enough our belonging to a universe without precedent or terms of comparison very soon became a cause of pride, boasting, infatuation. The split-second yawning of unimaginable distances, the profusion of corpuscles squirting all over the place — hadrons, baryons, mesons, a quark or two — the reckless speed of time, taken all together these things gave us a sense of invincibility, of power, of pride, and at the same time of conceit, as if all this was no more than our due. The only comparison we could draw was with the nothing that had come before: and we put the thought behind us, as of something petty and wretched, deserving only of commiseration, or scorn. Every thought we had embraced the whole, disdained the parts; the whole