For better or worse, we're a multiverse

Some days ago, I bought a T-shirt with a line of text on it that stopped me short: "Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.

- Charles Assisi

That was Ernest Hemingway in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940).

I have always loved quotes like this one, that linger in the mind. So the T-shirt quickly became a favourite. As an aside, I often slip into the quiet hobby of peoplewatching. A couple talking softly. A group of teenagers arguing with the easy, lazy confidence one acquires, for a brief while, at this age. A young woman typing furiously (or angrily?) into her phone.

In moments like this, the line on the T-shirt has begun to creep to the front of the mind, with a whispered question: What if you were one of them?