A new refutation of time
... I read Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman on the first plane. Someone (my father?) got me a signed copy when it came out in 1993, and I'd read it then, but I didn't appreciate it so much at the time. Now I think it's absolutely wonderful. Some portions are extremely Borges (down to Lightman and Borges imagining similar scenarios); in fact, a few of the chapters would have been entirely at home in any Borges short story collection.
One of the themes which persists through the whole book is an admonition to love and take advantage of life and change. The sad characters in the dreams are repeatedly those who shrink from adventure and experience -- although the exact consequences of doing so depend a great deal on the particular world in which they find themselves.
One of the dreams had a Sliding Doors-style sequence in which three different histories befall the same man at once. This and other material in the book serves to make it clear that something like whether you have read The Lord of the Rings or not could actually determine how long you live, and how, and with whom.
As Malcolm X says on that old Printers Inc. bookmark, "People don't realize how a man's whole life can be changed by one book".
