Sri Vikrama Maduro

Sri Vikrama Rajasinha’s captured throne

From about 1812 until 1815, members of the Kandyan nobility conspired with a foreign power, the United Kingdom, promising to acknowledge its suzerainty over their country in exchange for help in removing their king while confirming them in their titles and positions under a new regime. The parallel with what happened in Caracas on the third of January seems exact.
    There were hints of it before, but Marco Rubio’s remarks yesterday let the cat out of the bag. The US, he seemed to suggest, will accept whatever constitutional arrangements the remaining leaders of the old Maduro regime propose, leaving them in power and granting them impunity in exchange for acknowledgement of effective US sovereignty over Venezuela and a monopoly of the country’s natural and economic resources. The form of words to describe this arrangement remains to be worked out, but the practical meaning of it is that Venezuala becomes an economic colony of the United States and America takes over its oil industry.

    It seems obvious now how it was possible to find Maduro and capture him so easily. The arrangement with Rodriguez, Padrino et al. must have been agreed some time ago; since then, their agents have been keeping track of Maduro’s movements and informing the Americans. I wonder who the person was who made the approach and conducted negotiations from the US side. Who was the American equivalent of John D’Oyly?

    In the fall of Kandy and its incorporation into the British Empire, the Kandyan chieftains ended up being the biggest losers of all. They got what they demanded from the British all right, but soon realised how worthless it was under a new culture and economic dispensation that devalued their assets and rendered their privileges meaningless. The Venezuelan ‘nobility’ will discover, in their turn, that they have sold their country and their people out for fools’ gold.

    The people of Venezuela will realise it earlier. In Kandy, it took just two years before the Uva Rebellion erupted and almost succeeded in driving the British out of Kandy. In that rebellion, most of what remained of the Kandyan nobility was wiped out. I expect much the same fate to befall the Chavista elite of Venezuela.

A.G. Fraser, Missionary Imperialist

Fraser of Trinity & Achimota

by W.E.F. Ward

Alec Garden Fraser was a legendary headmaster at Trinity College, Kandy, an elite boy’s school run by the Church Mission Society in colonial Ceylon. Founded in 1872, it had fared poorly until Fraser was appointed head in 1904. He served there until 1924, though with many long absences in England and India as he pursued other work for the CMS and the Church of England. His Trinity phase formed only part of his career; earlier, he had been a lay missionary in British East Africa and his later working life, as an educationist and a priest of the Church, was pursued in Ghana, then known as Gold Coast.

    I did not read the whole book; my interest was in Fraser as head of Trinity and a contemporary of William Stone, another legendary Ceylon headmaster and a key figure in Thomia, my own history of St Thomas’s College, a competing elite school founded and supported by the CMS’s High Church rival, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. The two men did not approve of each other or of their respective educational ideas (Stone once disparagingly described Trinity, which is built on a hillside, as ‘all steps and drains but no brains,' but were each firm supporters of Ceylonese independence, something that most Britons involved with Ceylon (as well as nearly all Ceylonese who had a say in the matter) had barely contemplated at the time. 

    I read the account of Fraser’s youth, skimmed the East African period and concentrated my attention on the chapters dealing with his years at Trinity, after which I set the book aside.

    Written in typical CMS missionary style – circumlocutive, bland and deeply reluctant to call a spade a spade – it is not a good read, although it brings out the driven, contentious nature of the man very well. The Society valued him highly – in spite of his remoteness from London, he played a substantial role in their counsels – but had to put up with a great deal from him. His colleagues at Trinity were ridden hard and often resented it; it is remarkable how many of them he quarrelled with and caused to leave, although he himself admitted their value to the school. The boys, of course, adored and feared him. All this aside, he was the saviour of an institution whose continuance was in doubt when he took it on, and he began the process of making it the great school it is today. He is a revered figure at Trinity, though one suspects that he must have been rather less generally loved there in his own time.

Pillaiyar’s Portrait Painter

 The words below were delivered yesterday over Mahen’s remains. There was no PA and quite a bit of unavoidable noise. People told me later they hadn’t been able to hear me properly, and many asked for a printed copy of what I had said. This blog post is for them.The temptation to add here to what I said there has been strong – there’s so much more that I could say – but I’ve avoided it.

Though it feels like I’ve known Mahen all my life, we weren’t boyhood friends. I was in my early twenties when we met; he, of course, was younger. He always will be, now.

       I remember our first meeting well. It was in 1982, at the Post Horn Gallop cast party – or, to be more accurate, on the street outside, which happened to be Initium Road, Dehiwela. Mahen hadn’t been invited to the party, but he had an interest in a young lady who had. Being Mahen, he was too shy to steam in anywhere without an invitation, so he waited outside in the hope of catching a glimpse of the adored object. He was, I think I should say, about eighteen at the time.

       I was playing guitar at the party. My friend Shiraz Rustomjee was overly impressed by my plunking, so he grabbed me and insisted that I play something for his music-loving buddy who was waiting outside. I followed him out through the front gate with my guitar – and there was Mahen, all alone, perched on the bonnet of somebody else’s car and smoking a cigarette. 

       I strummed a few chords and asked him inside, though it wasn’t my party. He declined, and would not be persuaded. I had the impression of someone who was a loner, a bit of a maverick – someone who didn’t consider himself respectable enough for polite society. In all the years I knew him, that impression never really left me. I don’t think it ever left him, either, for all that he ended up with a staggering number of friends and professional collaborators and a considerable artistic reputation. There was always something about Mahen that wouldn’t fit the conventional template, however hard he tried to make himself conform.

       Mahen, you see, had a difficult youth. His father Maurice, a military officer and a stern disciplinarian, died while he was still a young child, and his mother Carmen had to work very hard, for many years, to care and provide for him and his sister and brothers. His teenage years were wayward – he was badly injured in a motorcycle accident, briefly fell victim, as many Colombo kids from good families did around that time, to drugs, and when he cleaned up for good it was by letting himself be imprisoned in a gaol-like rehab camp run military-style by a ferocious Buddhist monk – an experience that scarred him, I think, more deeply than the drugs did. All this was before I met him; they were things he told me about later.

       We didn’t become close friends immediately. It wasn’t till 1984, when he was working with his sister Sharmini, Dominic Sansoni and Tilak Conrad at Babylon, that I began to see more of him – and discovered what an outstanding artist and designer he was. His talent with the airbrush, in particular, was matchless; he remains to this day the finest artist on that instrument that Lanka has ever produced. 

       Our first professional collaboration was in 1988, on a couple of jobs for Access Graphics, where he was working at the time; it was the start of a creative partnership that lasted, intermittently, for the rest of his life. When I went off to Singapore in 1991 I gave him my motorbike; that finally ended its days impounded at Buttala police station, but it wasn’t Mahen’s fault. It’s a long story, though, and not quite suitable for a family audience. 

       The next time I saw Mahen was just after dawn one morning in Changi, Singapore, where I was living. He wasn’t expected, so it was a bit of a shock to see him at the front door. He told me he’d had to leave Lanka in a hurry after painting a cover for an Asiaweek feature that our president at the time didn’t like. Cast out again, you see. The magazine, very decently, offered him a job at their head office in Hong Kong. He had to change planes in Singapore to get there, though, and had a few hours between flights – hence the unannounced early-morning visit.

       Hong Kong, I think, is where Mahen properly grew up. It’s where he met his first wife, Nadia, and really began making a professional name for himself. Unfortunately I can’t tell you much about those years; I finished with Singapore fairly soon and returned to Lanka; he stayed in Hong Kong for a good long while, living on an outlying island and catching the ferry to work on the mainland every weekday morning. He later moved to Singapore to work with a music, art and fashion magazine called M3, of which he was chief art director. You can buy used copies of M3, with Mahen’s covers on them, on eBay for fifty dollars or more these days. Fifty US, that is. 

       Later he started his own design agency in Singapore, MCN. I used to visit the so-called Lion City on and off in those days, so we reconnected often. Now and then MCN would ask me to do some work for them, but even when I was just passing through I often stayed with him and Nadia at their lovely bungalow out on Seletar Air Base. Singapore showed Mahen to me in a very different frame: devoted father – Leah was just a baby then – family man, successful entrepreneur-manager: a man with dependants, and sizeable responsibilities that he discharged conscientiously without ever losing an iota of his love of a good time. He was also painting away, using an old freight container in the garden as his studio. He had already found the subject – Ganesh, the god of beginnings and endings – that he would devote himself to, artistically speaking, for the rest of his life.

       I was impressed, even a little envious. But in the midst of all these changes, there was so much about my friend that remained the same. And this, I must tell you, was marvellous. Despite his worldly success, Mahen remained as humble and self-effacing as he had been the day I met him on Initium Road. He was, of course, fully aware of the excellence of his talent and the superiority of his craft, but neither these, nor the success he was enjoying with them, had turned his head in the least. He had not lost his sense of humour, nor his love for his friends, which was so much at odds with his shyness. He hated big parties and showy events, preferring to have people about him in small, familiar circles. His professional image, too, was low-key: MCN was small but it had big, big clients, and it ran like clockwork. When he offered me a full-time job there in late 2003 I jumped at it, abandoning a project in Colombo that was just coming to fruition – and incurring the wrath of one or two of you who are present here today – to do so. 

       My time at MCN was wonderful but brief; I returned to Colombo just after the Presidential election of 2005 – not quite willingly, but it was a good thing I did, because I was here when, not long afterwards, Mahen found himself cast out – yes, again – from his adopted homeland and was obliged to return to Lanka, looking for things to do and people to reconnect with. He joined Q&E Advertising, where I was creative director at the time; but the urge to be his own man – another thing that never changed about him – was too strong. He set up a new iteration of MCN, working out of his house in Nawala, and I did a great deal of work with him, though only as a freelance. By then I had known for years how good he was, but the reminder was exhilarating; he remains by far the best art director I’ve ever worked with, and I’ve worked with a few legends. People who observed us at our craft would be amazed at how fast we came up with stuff, how we kept finishing each other’s doodles and sentences, how much we laughed at ourselves while doing it. It was a high, and no mistake – one I shall never enjoy again.

       We were closest, perhaps, in the last years of his life, after he met and married Rachel, and Manu came along. We’d both seen a lot of ups and downs by then, and understood each other, perhaps, better than ever. He remained, to the very last, the same kindly, easygoing, hospitable man he had always been – slow to anger, slow to judge and mild in his judgements, ever quick with ideas and impressions, innately musical yet too shy to sing a note – though he had, in fact, a beautiful singing voice. For all his sense of himself as a maverick and a rebel, his ethics and style were of the oldest and most courtly variety, reflecting his lifelong horror of anything excessive, ostentatious or vulgar. 

       Courtesy, privacy and a sense of what is fitting also showed in the way he handled his illness. When he received his diagnosis he came over, on his own, to tell Ruveka and me about it. He said he didn’t care to rot away in some hospital but would die with dignity – what little dignity death leaves us at the end – in his own bed. Apart from an absolutely essential course of radiotherapy at one point, he refused all but palliative and analgesic care. He continued to be as sociable and welcoming as ever, seeing his friends in little groups as was his habit. He and I spent some happy hours together in the months after his diagnosis. They were short months, though; the doctors had given him a year to eighteen months, but in the end, he got just six.

       I was less brave than he. Sharmini called last Thursday and told me he was fading; but cowardice disguised as a misplaced sense of responsibility made me complete some chores before I drove over, and I reached his front door at just about the moment he took his final leave. 

       Since then, I’ve been trying very hard not to think, though this last duty that he has laid upon me has forced me to confront the thoughts I had been hiding from. These words are the result.

MAHEN CHANMUGAM

23 vii 1964–30 x 2025

‘My life has been unusually full of beginnings and endings: 

good ones that ended badly, bad ones that ended well.’

From Hippo, with Love

Confessions 

St Augustine

This is, apparently, the world’s first autobiography. The parts of the narrative that deal with the author’s personal and emotional life are both well told and historically interesting, not to say fascinating. Augustine was also one of the greatest ancient post-Classical philosophers, and I was impressed by his ability to communicate difficult ideas lucidly.

    I’m not religious, so that aspect of the book was less important to me than it would be to most readers. I am interested in theodicy, but I found Augustine’s rather unsatisfactory – the usual Catholic position of blaming everything on human free will and error without tangling with the real questions about the power and goodness of God that are raised by the existence of evil. Augustine says evil isn’t a substance in its own right but simply the absence of good, or more accurately the absence of some good; in other words, evil as such doesn’t really exist. All things are good to God, he explains, but some things are less than perfectly good. All this is very neatly laid out but the logical contradictions are not addressed or even, it seemed to me, noticed.

    What I’d been hoping for most from this book was some insight regarding how an intelligent person (as Augustine most certainly was, though his true genius lay elsewhere) could appease or silence their intellect in order to accept the logical and moral contradictions of Christian belief. I have seen it happen to people in real life, and it always looks to me like self-betrayal, essentially giving up on oneself and settling for the easy option – like that bit in Watership Down where some of the escaped rabbits grow weary of the hardships of life in the wild and decide to return to the farm (and certain slaughter at the hands of the farmer).

    What I’d been hoping for most from this book was some insight regarding how an intelligent person (as Augustine most certainly was, though his true genius lay elsewhere) could appease or silence their intellect in order to accept the logical and moral contradictions of Christian belief. I have seen it happen to people in real life, and it always looks to me like self-betrayal, essentially giving up on oneself and settling for the easy option – like that bit in Watership Down where some of the escaped rabbits grow weary of the hardships of life in the wild and decide to return to the farm (and certain slaughter at the hands of the farmer). But in this regard, I was thoroughly disappointed by the Confessions; all the author has to say on the subject is that the Word of God supersedes all other knowledge and renders all intellectual questions irrelevant. I’ve heard that line before and I’m afraid it does not convince me.

    As for the man himself, he always did believe in God, in one form or another, so this question never troubled him. His quest was not for God but for a religion that could meet his intellectual and psychological needs. As the narrative approached the moment of his conversion I grew quite excited, waiting for the big intellectual denouement, but the whole thing came and went in a welter of emotive description and heartfelt praise, like the climactic scene of a romance novel, without a single intelligent word said about what I really wanted to understand.

    At this point I rather lost interest in the good father’s story. The investigation of time in Book XI is impressive, certainly for someone writing in an era lacking accurate timepieces; Augustine could probably have been persuaded agree with Einstein that ‘the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.’ I skipped most of Book XII, in which the author seems to take to task those who interpret the Bible symbolically before doing, as far as I could see, exactly the same. I skipped the last book, XIII, completely.
    I wish I knew of a critical analysis or review of the Confessions for non-religious readers, written from a secular, essentially philosophical and historical perspective. If anyone knows of such a thing, please tell me about it. I want to read it – so long as it’s not too long-winded.

Digital Dualism

When people project their thoughts along what even we greybeards no longer call the Information Superhighway, nuance and subtlety seem to get left behind in the parking lot. Our opinions and responses, even with regard to the most complex ideas and issues, are reduced to brutally opposed binaries: for vs against, men vs women, Left vs Right, us vs them, good vs evil. We act as though each of us is all one thing or another, as if where we stand on any issue completely defines who we are.

    Conceptual binaries are, of course, an essential part of our human mental equipment, but they’re far from being the whole toolkit. Nothing, to coin a phrase, is all black or white. The world is a messy, complicated place, infinitely varied in all its aspects, and human beings are evidently the messiest and most complicated things that exist in it. Binaries, therefore, useful though they are for the operations of logic, cannot even begin to describe us. Binaries are just endpoints on the spectrum of all possible measurements some physical, economic, social or psychological variable. Sometimes we can look at these variables as being made up of relevant binaries added together in different proportions, the way you get varying shades of grey by mixing black and white in differing proportions. But however it is these intermediate positions are defined or arrived at, most of us – when offline, at least – are willing to acknowledge their existence. We don’t normally think of the world and its inhabitants as being all one way or the other, with nothing in between: not unless we’re idiots, or fanatics.

    But when we get on the internet, and particularly (though by no means exclusively) on social media, all that subtlety and nuance, all those insights into how complicated life is, how conflicted people are, how difficult and often illogical our behaviour and in particular our moral choices can be, and how much allowance for all this one should make when dealing with others – all these suddenly seem to vanish. If anyone disagrees with us, they’re The Enemy, to be opposed, argued with, trolled, gulled, ridiculed, insulted and beaten back into the digital undergrowth with every resource at our disposal. We scarcely notice that in projecting this kind of extremism on to our opponents, we make extremists of ourselves too; by pushing them into one corner we inevitably force ourselves into the opposite one, and never even notice that we’re doing it.
    As someone who does most of his communicating these days through the internet, I have had reason to think a lot about this. Most of my thinking so far has centred on the frailties of human nature, particularly my own, and I am happy to report that, by trying to understand those I communicate with on the internet better as people, I have become a less argumentative (and at times abrasive) interlocutor than I used to be. But I’m no saint, and am still liable to lose my equanimity from time to time when confronted by people with whom I disagree, especially if they lack what I regard as courtesy or are trying to sell me something.

    More and more often, though, I’m beginning to wonder whether these polarities and divisions, these regular online revelations of what must surely be our worst selves to the whole wide world, are entirely our fault. I am becoming convinced that the playing-field on which we perform, like the buttress inside an Eton fives court, is affecting the rules of the game.

✸

How could that be? Here is what I think may be the matter. 

    Computers and the internet are products of digital technology, and digital technology is based on binary logic: ones and zeroes. A computer is basically nothing but a huge arrangement of switches, and each of these switches can have only two positions: ON and OFF – or, as it might be, 1 and 0, or YES and NO. All the logical operations of a computer, even the most complex and abstract, are nothing but a series of brute binary choices: this way or that way, accept or reject, true or false, yes or no. No middle ground.

    Is it coincidence, then, that our surrender to computers and the internet seems to have made us start thinking of all human questions in terms of reductive binaries, just as all problems are reduced, inside a computer, to a series of Boolean logical functions? Is it too big a stretch to think that the apparent inevitability of either total disagreement or total agreement that we find on the internet – this idiot tendency to view everything in the world as a collection of binary qualities or traits – good or evil, Left or Right, for or against – is at least partly determined by the very structure of the machines we use and the specific, highly reductive logic by which they operate? Is it possible that much of the disagreement and misunderstanding that arises when people communicate via the internet could be arising, somehow, from the very digital infrastructure that makes it all possible?

    And will it get worse as digital technology infiltrates every aspect of the world we live in? In some countries (though not, of course, in dear old Ceylon) the infiltration is almost complete. What kind of monsters shall we have become by the time it is fully accomplished? Will civilization itself still be left standing? Look at how divisions in politics, society and the global community of nations have accelerated and been exacerbated since the internet became a public utility. Look, for God’s sake, at what has happened to the United States of America...

    I am neither a philosopher nor a computer scientist. If some member of either profession – or, for that matter, any profession – could suggest a mechanism by which this digital duality might be transmitted from the infrastructure to its users, I should be very grateful indeed. And if they can show me why it can’t – show me, that is, where I am wrong, and set me straight – I would be more grateful still. Only try not to make your argument too straightforwardly black and white, or coming over the internet as it probably will, I am all too likely to disagree, reject it, and insult you into the bargain.

Mental Slumming: The Prague Cemetery

I normally enjoy the work of Umberto Eco. A professor as well as a novelist, he all but invented the field of semiology, the study of the meaning of signs and symbols. It isn’t too long a step from this to his celebrated fascination with conspiracy theories, which I have long shared. Like Eco, I set out from the premise that all such theories are false, created to benefit their fabricators and promoters in some way. They can very easily turn dangerous, even lethal, and are intrinsically evil in any case, for they are nothing more nor less than inflammatory lies told with the intent of making trouble.

       The Prague Cemetery is the origin-story of one of the most infamous conspiracy theories of all. It is the third of Eco’s novels that I have read. The other two were also about conspiracy-theories and forgeries: The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum. I greatly enjoyed the first and absolutely delighted in the second, so I took up the present volume with high hopes. When I found that it was a historical novel set in Europe during the revolutionary phase of the nineteenth century, my hopes rose even higher; history, after all, is my subject. Here, I thought, is just the dish for me.

       The confusing opening sequence threw me a little, though all was easily (and perhaps too soon) explained. When the real action began in a series of flashbacks, I readied myself for a treat. The first part of the novel is set in Italy during the Risorgimento, a period about which I knew little and was keen to learn more. Forewarned by Eco that, apart from the central character, nearly everyone else in the novel is a real person, I read through this part of the story with my phone beside me, googling away at names and historical references. This slowed my reading down a bit, and probably kept me from getting properly into the story, but without it I should have been even more quickly put off, because the text is full of references to historical events and persons and much of the interest of the tale depends on the reader knowing who and what the main ones are.

       Meanwhile, another obstacle to reading pleasure had manifested itself. The central character, Simone Simonini, is a selfish, cynical, apparently asexual misogynist and introvert without a single redeeming quality in his make-up. It was Eco’s self-confessed ambition to create the most repulsive character in all of fiction (Shakespeare’s Richard III was the target he set himself to beat) and though he, arguably, succeeded, he did so at the expense of his book. Much of the tale is told in the first person and even the parts that aren’t are still largely focused on the protagonist, so Simonini’s repulsiveness rubs off on the novel itself. By the time the Risorgimento sequence ended and the action moved to Second-Empire Paris, where Simonini, who is employed by various secret services as a secret agent and fabricator of inflammatory propaganda, has been sent to make trouble, I was thoroughly nauseated, so I put the damned thing down for good. It had taken me almost a month (a pretty busy one, I must admit) to get through about two hundred pages.

       The Prague Cemetery was published when Umberto Eco was eighty, and although he still had all his marbles at the time, the book is indubitably an old man’s work, with all the infirmities and deficits that we, the superannuated, must endure in our declining years. Skip it is my advice, and – if you haven’t already – read Foucault’s Pendulum instead. At least that one has pretty girls in it.

Time is Only a Side Effect

The Order of Time

Carlo Rovelli

A strange, slim, captivating volume. Its scope is wide-ranging, the writing dense in terms of content and reference, yet it would be slimmer even than it is (and far less captivating) if you dispensed with all the digressions, elaborations and poetic flourishes that bulk it out. The notes at the back are as impenetrable as the text is lucid, mischievously reversing the traditional order of things. 

     Rovelli, a theoretical physicist whose speciality is loop quantum gravity, considers here what physics implies about time. The discussion is in three parts. In the first, he demonstrates how relativity abolishes universal simultaneity, absolute time and even the relation between past, present and future, before moving on to show us how quantum mechanics eliminates even the flow of time. We are left with a set of events that we are able to distinguish from one another only because our experience of reality is blurred. There is only one physical support for the contention that time exists at all: the Second Law of Thermodynamics. 

     Having narrowed things down this far, Rovelli then does his best to demolish the ‘illusion’ of time generated by entropy. I don’t think he wholly succeeds, but I am not clever enough, nor sufficiently well read either in physics or philosophy, to mount a meaningful criticism. The best I can do is report that I was able to follow his logic quite easily but found it unconvincing in places. As to why, the reasons are better articulated here than I could express them myself.

    The second part of the book is very short and describes some of the physical implications of discarding time as a factor in our calculations.
     The third and most important part is an inquiry into how the sense of time that is so real and familiar to us comes into being. The discussion ranges through philosophy and psychology as well as physics. This is inevitable, since time is both metaphysical and – in so many of its aspects – subjective. Rovelli, who seems to be as interested in philosophy as in physics, argues that it is wholly so, emerging from the peculiar way in which humans (and some other animals) have evolved to operate in the physical world. 

     I think I grasped the way in which, according to him, time emerges from entropy, and I love the insight that it is the latter and not energy that really makes the world go round. This is one of a handful of intellectual thunderflashes Rovelli detonates before our eyes: time is an effect of gravity, time is made of emotion (he’s a fan of Proust, as well you may imagine), the world is made up of events not objects. However, it seems to me that he hasn’t quite worked out how all that happens; he modestly advances the proposal that it has to do with the particular way we have evolved to experience reality, which in turn defines the reality we experience. This argument is closely analogous to the weak anthropic rationale for the hospitality of the universe to intelligent life.

     The physics of how, in this entropic argument, the past is constructed out of traces of former states of a system that lie preserved in its current state is both speculative and abstruse. It also seems a bit risky, in survival terms, for organic evolution to have proceeded on such a basis. To Rovelli’s credit, he isn’t laying down the law here; this is how he thinks it all works, but he freely admits that his explanation is merely the best one he has found that fits the facts.

     Despite this softness at the centre, the book seems to hang together well. Rovelli’s model is certainly more comfortable, conceptually, than those ghastly block universes in which, absent time, every configuration of the world exists simultaneously. In Julian Barbour’s version of this concept even motion in absent; consciousness (or experience) is just a ball bouncing from one point in configuration space to another. Beat that for futility.

     One thing that Rovelli doesn’t really address, though, is how come we all share a common experience of time even though it appears to pass differently for each of us and our perception of it is based on our different individual histories, etc. This, of course, is an aspect of a bigger question: our experience of reality is constructed, but how? He does gesture at an answer by explaining that we partake of aspects of the world that are relevant to us, and since we’re much alike as entities these aspects are roughly the same. Sadly, this doesn’t take us very far before we stumble over the question of how to account for the differences.