Gregory:
Those around him in addition to his own flesh and blood family share a body of sorts; a network of familiarity and personal knowledge. He’s a part of them whether he knows it or not. They are geographically desirable to the identity that might claim to represent this small collection of humanity: neighborhood, community, village…
Sensibly, it is through a fictional character’s interpretation of his experience that frames his world. An author can fashion a slim image of such an alternative creation: a representation of life in that alternative world, that parallel universe. And to that can be added behaviors and acts that might influence events one direction or another. The characters might be prompted to look up from the pages of their Flatland and cast their eyes out across the panorama of the city and the world that is wider than their small community. They might, in turn, identify themselves as part of something even larger than their immediate neighborhood.
But where is humanity? Not many are visible at any given moment. They are not hiding; they are somewhere, but somewhere unseen. They exist; they have lives; stuff is going on. What more proof is needed to ascertain that parallel worlds exist not simply in the pages of science fiction, but in the commonplace and mundane activities of those with the intellectual capacity to consider such things – should they choose to do so. Parallel worlds within parallel worlds; pages on pages; thinking about thinking; ideas about ideas…
So now, Gregory, a former Watcher now reformed (transformed?) into a new life, transported from one side of the world to the other, reconstituted from one state of being to another. A moment ago he was twenty years old, and he woke just for a sub-second to realize the fact that he had been twenty once, but now he was forty. And that a sub-set of a later micro-second at which time he was, in succession, twenty forty sixty, and beyond.
thermodynamics of ideas 