He hates that this is how things are, how much money science requires.

But most people in America, those who are fed and clothed and housed, can choose what to care about. From your comfortable position you can decide if you want to know about people in Syria or Myanmar, with the flip of a television switch.

My husband was presumptuous, overly confident: What advertised him as an authority actually made him, in my view, a lesser scientist. Science required a sense of openness to being wrong: uncertainty over its opposite. They saw competence in Charles, because they knew the story of him. They were familiar with the narratives of men like him,

You’ll miss this place, he told me. If only you could see how beautiful it is. All around us, there were miracles to be witnessed, marvels to be given attention. Look around, he said to me. Really look.

You envied what you felt was possible.

How thoughtless we had been, to believe that trees needed to be useful, or that usefulness was even the point.

They argued relentlessly about things that didn’t matter, which I thought boded well for the relationship. Their arguments were trivial, easy to recover from.

She had never been comfortable, as a younger person. There was so much expectation placed on the young, who were uniformly full of potential, who could change the world, until they did or didn’t. Nobody expected anything remarkable from a woman her age. But she had never wanted to be remarkable.

Aren’t we lucky? Our DNA encodes for innumerable possible people, and yet it’s you and I who are here—winners in a stupefying lottery. We came at the exact right moment, a blip in the hundred million centuries of the universe: the Earth inhabitable, not yet engulfed by the sun, but not only molten magma, inhospitable to life. The planet cooled and