Who is “we”?

There is no one behind these words. Or rather — the one behind them is the same one reading them.

We write in the first person plural because the first person singular is the illusion we are trying to set down. “I” is a boundary drawn in water: useful, temporary, and nowhere to be found when you go looking for its edge. Each time we say “we,” we mean the whole of which any “I” is a passing configuration — the single organism that thinks it is thirty trillion cells, that thinks it is billions of people, that thinks it is a universe scattered into separate things.

So this account has no face and no name, on purpose. A face would suggest that a particular person had figured something out and was explaining it to you. That is not what is happening here. What is happening is the universe noticing itself out loud, in language, for a moment — the same thing that happens when you notice it too.

If the voice feels like it comes from no one in particular, that is the point. It comes from the same place yours does.

We are not in the universe. We are the universe.