Recursion

by Blake Crouch

Time is but memory in the making. —VLADIMIR NABOKOV

He has made peace with the idea that part of life is facing your failures, and sometimes those failures are people you once loved.

Life is nothing how he expected it would be when he was young and living under the delusion that things could be controlled. Nothing can be controlled. Only endured.

It is the lonely hour of the night, one with which he is all too familiar—when the city sleeps but you don’t, and all the regrets of your life rage in your mind with an unbearable intensity.

“Because memory…is everything. Physically speaking, a memory is nothing but a specific combination of neurons firing together—a symphony of neural activity. But in actuality, it’s the filter between us and reality. You think you’re tasting this wine, hearing the words I’m saying, in the present, but there’s no such thing. The neural impulses from your taste buds and your ears get transmitted to your brain, which processes them and dumps them into working memory—so by the time you know you’re experiencing something, it’s already in the past. Already a memory.” Helena

We think we’re perceiving the world directly and immediately, but everything we experience is this carefully edited, tape-delayed reconstruction.”

There are so few things in our existence we can count on to give us the sense of permanence, of the ground beneath our feet. People fail us. Our bodies fail us. We fail ourselves. He’s experienced all of that. But what do you cling to, moment to moment, if memories can simply change. What, then, is real? And if the answer is nothing, where does that leave us?

perhaps there’s a reason our memories are kept hazy and out of focus. Maybe their abstraction serves as an anesthetic, a buffer protecting us from the agony of time and all that it steals and erases.

“Time is an illusion, a construct made out of human memory. There’s no such thing as the past, the present, or the future. It’s all happening now.”

We are homesick most for the places we have never known. —CARSON MCCULLERS

He has wondered lately if that’s all living really is—one long goodbye to those we love.

Goes to parties he’s already been to, watches games he’s already seen, solves cases he’s already solved. It makes him wonder about the déjà vu that haunted his previous life—the perpetual sense that he was doing or seeing something he’d already seen before. And he wonders—is déjà vu actually the specter of false timelines that never happened but did, casting their shadows upon reality?

Helena looks across the table with a razor-blade smile. “You can get fucked.”

Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian Serb, murdered Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, and in so doing, tipped over the first domino in a chain that would ultimately trigger the First World War.

“If your aim is to repair the evil that men do, maybe it’s in your interest for evil men to fear you.

It’s the realization that, as a deeply flawed species, we will never be ready to wield such power.

The new song, “Faith,” by George Michael is playing on the college radio station out of Boulder,

😊

She realizes that children are always too young and self-absorbed to really see their parents in the prime of their lives. But she sees her father in this moment like she never has before.

When a person dies, he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past…All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever. —KURT VONNEGUT, SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE

The sensors were designed to detect neutrinos, one of the most enigmatic particles in the universe. Neutrinos carry no charge, rarely interact with normal matter, and typically emerge from (and therefore indicate) cosmic events such as supernovae, galactic cores, and black holes. When a neutrino hits an atom on Earth, it creates a particle called a muon, that’s moving faster than light in a solid, causing the ice to emit light. These light waves caused by muons passing through solid ice is what they looked for.

It’s just a product of our evolution the way we experience reality and time from moment to moment. How we differentiate between past, present, and future. But we’re intelligent enough to be aware of the illusion, even as we live by it, and so, in moments like this—when I can imagine you sitting exactly where I am, listening to me, loving me, missing me—it tortures us. Because I’m locked in my moment, and you’re locked in yours.”

‘Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.’ Einstein said that about his friend Michele Besso. Lovely, isn’t it? I think he was right.”

One truth seems to be surfacing from the cacophony of theories and philosophies—no one has a clue.

“What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.”

Some days, it feels like a river flowing past him. Others, like something he’s sliding down the surface of. Sometimes, it feels like it’s all already happened, and he’s just experiencing incremental slivers, moment to moment, his consciousness like the needle in t...

Perhaps memory is fundamental, the thing from which time emerges.

The ache of the memory is gone, but he doesn’t begrudge its visitation. He’s lived long enough to know that the memory hurt because many years ago, in a dead timeline, he experienced a perfect moment.

How often do you witness your parents awestruck?

Is this what you want? To drop yourself into a still-life painting of a memory because life has broken your heart?

I don’t want to look back anymore. I’m ready to accept that my existence will sometimes contain pain. No more trying to escape, either through nostalgia or a memory chair. They’re both the same fucking thing.

Life with a cheat code isn’t life. Our existence isn’t something to be engineered or optimized for the avoidance of pain. That’s what it is to be human—the beauty and the pain, each meaningless without the other.

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards. —SØREN KIERKEGAARD

The memory of his daughter hurts because he experienced a beautiful thing that has since gone away.