Squirrel life

You can imagine reincarnation in different ways. On one picture, your stint as whatever new creature begins at the beginning of its life cycle—you wink in, gestate, get born, etc. On another picture, you might turn up in some creature’s body already in the middle of things, suddenly aware of the scene around you, your claws gripping the branch as you look down at the ground, with a vivid perception of danger but no memory of any previous moment. It is easy to imagine that squirrels experience themselves this way. Each moment is a startling discontinuity, every change in the environment the destruction of wherever one just was, a fresh horror that reinvents one’s body as an anxious object in the wrong place.