Some of the companies advertising in this paper do not exist.

You may have noticed. There is an earth-moving firm run by a wombat and an anteater. There is an investment house run by an elephant. There is a capital fund whose founder is a peach. You cannot call them. They have no offices. As of this printing, they are imaginary.

The word is worth looking at. When Descartes needed a name for the square roots of negative numbers, in 1637, he called them imaginary, and he did not mean it kindly. He meant: these are not real, do not take them seriously. Four centuries later, those same numbers run the power grid and the physics of the atom. Nothing about them changed. The name was wrong. It was nomenclature.

Not all of it is nomenclature. Some imaginary things stay imaginary. But the line between the two is much blurrier than the words let on.

The geometer William Thurston wrote that understanding is an individual, internal thing, and that passing it from one person to another is hard and tricky; the structure lives in your head. If you could empty that head out onto a table, you would see an architecture: rooms, halls, how one thing connects to the next. Part of that building is the past. Part of it is the present. And the mind does something remarkable with those two parts. It builds a bridge out of them, into a day that hasn't happened yet.

The bridge is only as strong as what it rests on. If you see the past in a blur, and the present in a blur, the bridge goes nowhere. So you look at both as clearly and honestly as you can, in the finest resolution you can stand. Then you build.

That is what the advertisers in this paper are. They are bridges, built from what is already here, that do not reach the other side yet. Today an elephant investment house is a small box in a free newspaper. But every real company you can name was, at some point, exactly that: a picture of something that didn't exist, written down by somebody who could see it.

Some of these will stay on the page. Some of them, one day, may not.