I am sitting on our Barcelona terrace with a cortado, watching the Mediterranean light do that thing it does in February—turning everything golden and honest—and I am thinking about a woman I haven’t seen in twenty years. I am thinking about a fallen log in the Tennessee woods and the hours we spent talking about…

For over thirty years, I’ve been talking about something I call “cracks in time” —those rare moments when the fabric of human civilization splits open, and everything changes. Suddenly, irrevocably, like a fault line rupturing beneath our feet. The discovery of fire was a crack in time. So was the invention of the wheel. The…