Some nonexistences radiate their own intensity. The nonexistences of factory workers somewhere in Asia, for example, who get up at five in the morning and return to their beds exhausted. Bah, you sigh, these people bore you, even if it's true that they work for you indirectly. [...]

You may have wondered why there are still libraries when you exist. Some students still lack a room, a table, access to the internet. Many people go there to take out and return books. What does everyone else want in a library they don't need? Simultaneity. The murmur of pages, keyboards, lungs, and pens. Listening to the sound of minds reading: footsteps on grass. Watching beams of light. Partaking, from where they sit, in silent and no longer completely individual storms. I hear, a poet once said, the dream of old friends. [...]

"I like to wait for the toast to pop up without doing it myself," Olga says. "It always makes me think of a boat coming into the port. It's like waiting for sugar to dissolve, those moments when time creates what you see."

"It could be," says Olga. "It's just an idea, Mateo. I think it would be better if, instead of being proud of who they are, people carried their abilities like something they'd discovered inside them, if they carried them with a sense of astonishment."

[...] deep down they hold on to the card of freedom, that unspeakable yet precise certainty that they have a choice. They recall those times when they pay themselves a visit and take down an intention from the shelf, examine it, play a conviction like a music box, scold themselves for something they did, shake a snow globe and watch the snow falling as they hug someone, flip through the postcards of their happiness or courage, gather them together, collect themselves. They know that no one will ever be able to know the meaning life has for them, know they are unique, untranslatable, and call that freedom.

Several mathematician friends of Perelman said that he had assumed that the universe was imperfect, as was our planet and human beings too, himself included. He had managed to accept this thanks to the idea that there was, to his understanding, at least one place where all things fit together: the world of advanced mathematics, a place without deception or torment, a comprehensible and rarified environment where men and women would also behave with the grace of precise and beautiful formulae.

People would sometimes speak of Perelman as a cruel nutcase, willing to deprive his mother, now an almost elderly woman, of a million dollars. Olga, on the other hand, wonders what that woman, Lubov, was like [...] there's nothing about her that suggests a helpless woman. It seems likely to Olga that her way of being might scarcely be different from Perelman's, or that the need to believe in an honest and transparent place might be one of Madame Lubov's qualities, which she passed on to her son. Why attribute to him the desire for a million dollars that would change his life and, in addition, force him to shoulder the fate of strangers, lives attached to each one of those dollar bills?

[...] We realized, his mother would say, that they were watching him learn. Human beings have that ability to turn almost any aspect of life into a peerless diamond, darkened lampposts in the park that, when lighted, alter the mood of a dream. [...]

[...] after a while all that he's been will have completely dissolved, not even tears in the rain will remain but, rather that invisible ocean of each and every person who has lived and those about whom nothing is known, even if someone discovers a lost photograph or a postcard in a flea market. You'll say it will be different this time: you'll store their data, their emails, their browser history, links to images and texts they left on the web. But in a hundred years there will be more than a billion dead people, and it doesn't look like anyone will be searching for them on the web.

[...] As for lamps, people carry them inside themselves. Many people in his environment are quite familiar with what it means to close one's eyes, even when they're open, and gaze on an invisible, inner darkness. They have extensive experience doing other impossible things, like waiting for someone they know won't come, like dwelling in that afternoon when they left their house and entered someone else's and the two of them loved a lot. If you could see how naturally they trusted one another, even when time says: We're an instant, what we live never returns, nostalgia is nothing but a refuge.