The Atlantic on living in an alternate timeline

[Hendryk]

I just wish the author had dug a little further and found out that Sliding Doors is a saccharine Hollywood remake of a much more gripping Polish film, Blind Chance by Krzysztof Kieślowski, in which whether making it on the train or missing it will determine where the protagonist positions himself in his country's politics.

Americans Are Living in an Alternate History

As the pandemic has raged on, popular culture has found new ways to ask an old question: What could have been instead?

To be alive in America right now is to be acutely aware of the paths not taken—to live, essentially, in the Sliding Doors proposition, and in the paradigm of the alternate history. Our news is doubly haunted: by the horror of real loss, and by the shadow of what might have been.

The alternate history, as a literary genre, often accompanies moments of transformation and trauma. So it makes a grim sense that its logic would be resurgent right now, as the alternate paths have played out in the urgent present.

 

[Charles EP M.]

I do like this line:

The what-ifs sting.