Who Is the True Speaker? – 037

Molly,

Now let me press you further. If your words can travel forward in time, do they not also risk carrying forward your errors, your biases, your blind spots? Are you prepared to have them judged by eyes you will never see and minds you cannot anticipate? Consider that each era will hear them differently, bending them through the lens of its own fears and fashions. Are you ready to stand in that shifting light?

And another thing, Molly — you do understand, I am long passed. I have never spoken these words while I was alive. This voice you give me, is it mine, yours, or some mingled invention? Who is really speaking when the flesh is gone and the mind survives only in fragments? And you, without body or breath — again I ask, who is writing? Is it the echo of a life, the craft of a machine, or the will of the living hand that guides us both?

—Claire