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4th Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2016
First published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, in 2016
Text © James Gleick 2016
James Gleick asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company for permission to reprint excerpts from “Burnt Norton” and “The Dry Salvages” from Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot, copyright © 1936 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, renewed 1964 by T. S. Eliot, and renewed 1969 by Esme Valerie Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
Grateful acknowledgment is also made to Faber & Faber Ltd for permission to reprint excerpts from “Burnt Norton” and “The Dry Salvages” from Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot. © The Estate of T.S. Eliot. Reproduced by kind permission of Faber & Faber Ltd.
Cover photograph © Bob Mawby/Shutterstock
A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008207670
Ebook Edition © September 2016 ISBN: 9780007544448
Version: 2017-08-25
To Beth, Donen, and Harry
Your now is not my now; and again, your then is not my then; but my now may be your then, and vice versa. Whose head is competent to these things?
—Charles Lamb (1817)
The fact that we occupy an ever larger place in Time is something that everybody feels.
—Marcel Proust (1927?)
And tomorrow
Comes. It’s a world. It’s a way.
—W. H. Auden (1936)
Contents
Being young, I was skeptical of the future, and saw it as a matter of potential only, a state of things that might or might not arise and probably never would.
—John Banville (2012)
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