Time & Perspective Quote by John Perry Barlow

Barlow’s line lives in the delicious gray zone between skepticism and yearning, where a self-professed rationalist still wants language big enough to hold awe. He opens with a hedge - “I don’t know that I believe” - not to weaken the claim, but to establish credibility. He’s the kind of writer who expects you to distrust easy mysticism. Then he pivots: “but I do believe in miracles.” The trick is in the reframing. “Supernatural” implies a system, a metaphysics, a set of invisible rules. “Miracles” can be smuggled back into a secular worldview as lived experience: statistically absurd, emotionally undeniable, not proof of God so much as proof of meaning.

“Events of magical unlikelihood” is doing double duty. It’s romantic in the literal sense (the world re-enchanted), but it’s also a tacit argument about probability and fate: the relationship felt like it shouldn’t have happened, and yet it did, repeatedly. The phrase gives him plausible deniability - he’s not claiming ghosts, he’s claiming a run of coincidences so exquisite it demands a different register.

The context matters because Barlow, a key voice in late-20th-century American counterculture and the digital-libertarian imagination, spent a career resisting inherited authority while chasing altered states of possibility - political, technological, interpersonal. Here, he’s writing intimacy in the same dialect: freedom from dogma, hunger for transcendence. The subtext is a confession: even the most iconoclastic mind still wants to be overwhelmed, and love is the one miracle modernity will still allow itself to name.