For many English-language readers, the first reference for time loop stories will be Groundhog Day. Balle takes the proposition in a profoundly different direction.
I often think about orangutans when I’m driving to work. Although I’m sure I first saw this anecdote on Twitter, I’ll give you a real citation: Jacobus Bontius, a physician with the Dutch East India Company, wrote in 1658 that the Malays believed the apes had the ability to speak but chose not to, “lest they be compelled to labor.” [1] Bontius was incredulous, but the orangutans are onto something given the resonance of that quote centuries later amongst doomscrollers. For his part, José Maria de Eça de Queirós muses at the end of his Adam and Eve in Paradise—when Adam and Eve become “irremediably human” and “will progress with such speed and impetus towards the perfection of the Body and the glory of the Mind”—on whether the orangutan, who “lingers idly on the soft moss, listening to the limpid songs of the birds, savoring the rays of sunlight,” is worthier of admiration than humans, when one considers all the pitfalls of God’s gifts granted the latter through evolution (pp.
