Good stuff, Douglas, as usual.

While I have you, I thought of your work on recognition this afternoon as I'm reading a wonderful spiritual/metaphysical fiction, One by Richard Bach. The book follows the husband and wife protagonists as they find themselves hopping from one alternate reality to the next, either encountering versions of themselves who have made or have yet to have made certain choices, or other incarnations of their souls. In the scene I'm about to quote, Richard and Leslie have met and spent and evening talking to Russian versions of themselves during the Cold War:

"'In any conflict,' said Leslie, 'we can defend ourselves, or we can learn. Defense has made the world unlivable. What would happen if we chose to learn instead? Instead of saying you frighten me, what if we said you interest me?'

'We think our world is very slowly turning to give that a try,' I said.

What had we come to learn from them, I wondered. Them is Us? Americans are Soviets are Chinese are Africans are Arabs are Asians are Scandinavians are Indians? Different expressions of the same spirit from different choices, different turns on the infinite pattern of life in spacetime?

Our evening raced past midnight as we talked about what we liked and what we didn't like about the two superpowers that a grip on our lives. We sat close together, old friends, feeling we had loved these two all our lives.

What a difference it made to know them. After this night, we'd no more choose to launch a war on Tatiana and Ivan Kirilov than we'd fire-bomb ourselves. When they changed from Evil Empire cutouts into living human equals, into people trying as hard as we were to make sense of the world, whatever fear of them we might have had vanished. For the four of us, the treadmill had stopped."