The comfort of the multiverse
The parallel universes feel particularly close this year, don’t they? This whole thing was sparked by a series of random mutations and meetings, the still-fuzzy chain of connection between viruses and bats and animals and people and yet more people that shut down the world and has resulted in at least 1.5 million deaths so far. It’s easy to imagine a universe—many universes!—where that chain broke or swerved long before we became locked into the fate that befell us in this one. Experts will tell you that some kind of new pandemic disease has been inevitable for a long time, and they’re right. But it wasn’t inevitable that it would be this one, this year. It was random, contingent, precarious, right up until the moment it wasn’t.
The multiverse is an idea from particle physics that our universe is only one of an infinite collection of universes, all invisible to each other but all equally real. It’s apparently very clearly suggested by equations that accurately explain other deeply weird but true things about quantum mechanics and everything built on top of it, i.e. the known universe. Some physicists are convinced the multiverse is the literal truth about nature; other physicists think that those physicists and their untestable assertions are teetering dangerously close to leaving science behind altogether and entering the world of philosophy or religion.
I don’t necessarily believe in the multiverse, but I don’t not believe in it. (Which, I think, is what a lot of physicists between those two extremes would say, too.) It’s certainly fun to think about, and once you get beyond the initial veneer of weirdness, it feels rather comforting. It’s far more unsettling to think that you only get to live one version of your life. Wouldn’t you rather think that you have infinite lives in infinite universes, each taking a slightly different path? That no possibility went unexplored? That all your what-ifs, in some plane of existence or another, are answered?
But as real as parallel universes might or might not be, even the multiverse devotees among us will never get to see them. In a Dear Sugar column I particularly love, Cheryl Strayed calls the versions of your life you didn’t live “the ghost ship[s] that didn’t carry us.” Disasters, whether they happen in an instant or over the course months or years, send ghost ships sailing off in all directions. They create what the ancient Celts called a “thin place,” not only between life and death, but between different versions of your life. So many things could have happened in those startling, un-take-back-able moments that it’s easy to imagine that they all did happen, just not to this version of you.
For me, 2020 is one big thin place, where so many ghost ships feel almost close enough to touch. I felt it particularly keenly when I started writing my book under such limited and limiting circumstances. In another universe, I was buying plane tickets to visit archaeological sites all over the world. In this one, I was Zooming with scientists who didn’t know when they would ever excavate again. A research process that I expected to be full of excitement and possibilities now felt joyless and grim. But also in this universe, I was living through exactly the type of apocalypse I’m writing about. I could have either the plane tickets or the expanded imagination. I couldn’t have both, and I didn’t get to choose.
Imagining my alternate lives playing out in universes I can never inhabit helps me honor them but also let them go. There will be infinite versions of this book, in an infinite number of universes. All I can do is write the version that will exist in this one, and watch the others sail off into their own futures. As Strayed says, “There’s nothing to do but salute [them] from the shore.”