Proust could not be more explicit on this matter, writing in the first book: “Reality is formed only by memory.”118 And memory, in its turn, is a collection of traces, an indirect product of the disordering of the world, of that small equation written earlier, ΔS ≥ 0, the one that tells us the state of the world was in a “particular” configuration in the past and therefore has left (and leaves) traces. “Particular,” that is, perhaps only in relation to rare subsystems—ourselves included. We are stories, contained within the twenty complicated centimeters behind our eyes, lines drawn by traces
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