The Lore of the World - by Erik Hoel

A child starts with only ancestral memories of archetypes: mother, air, warmth, danger. But none of the specifics. For them, life is like beginning to read some grand fantasy trilogy, one filled with lore and histories and intricate maps. Yet the lore of our world is far grander, because everything here is real. Stars are real. Money is real. Brazil is real. And it is a parent’s job to tell the lore of this world, and help the child fill up their codex of reality one entry at a time. Here are a few of the thousands of entries they must make. Your teeth mash your food, and you swallow that food down the tube of your esophagus, which goes to the way-station of your stomach, then the further tube of your intestines, where the nutrients are sucked out. The whole long gut finds its terminus at your anus, where you poop out the remains. In this, the core of your body is like a coiled worm, with its base desires of greed and selfishness, around which has grown up all the accoutrements of cons

A child starts with only ancestral memories of archetypes: mother, air, warmth, danger. But none of the specifics. For them, life is like beginning to read some grand fantasy trilogy, one filled with lore and histories and intricate maps. Yet the lore of our world is far grander, because everything here is real. Stars are real. Money is real. Brazil is real. And it is a parent’s job to tell the lore of this world, and help the child fill up their codex of reality one entry at a time. Here are a few of the thousands of entries they must make. Your teeth mash your food, and you swallow that food