Recursion

by Blake Crouch

“My son never existed. Do you get that? He’s just a beautiful misfire in my brain.”

But in person, it never feels right. He can’t bring himself to say what’s in his heart, which always feels clenched and locked up, encased in scar tissue. The awkwardness doesn’t bother him like it used to. He has made peace with the idea that part of life is facing your failures, and sometimes those failures are people you once loved.

“I don’t know.” The truth is he does it constantly. He is always looking back, living more in memories than the present, often altering them to make them prettier. To make them perfect. Nostalgia is as much an analgesic for him as alcohol.

Mandela Effect?” “I don’t know. Maybe.” The next round comes. Barry drinks his shot of Old Grand-Dad and chases it with a Coors as the light through the front windows fades toward evening. He says, “Apparently thousands of people remember Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 1980s, even though he lived until 2013.” “I

Slade looks at her, says, “I think balance is for people who don’t know why they’re here.”

What teachers and professors never told her was about the dark side of finding your purpose. The part where it consumes you. Where it becomes a destroyer of relationships and happiness. And still, she wouldn’t trade it. This is the only person she knows how

Same theme as Dark matter

“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.”

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

What we think of as the ‘present’ isn’t actually a moment. It’s a stretch of recent time—an arbitrary one. The last two or three seconds, usually. But dump a load of adrenaline into your system, get the amygdala to rev up, and you create that hyper-vivid memory, where time seems to slow down, or stop entirely. If you change the way your brain processes an event, you change the duration of the ‘now.’ You actually change the point at which the present becomes the past. It’s yet another way that the concept of the present is just an illusion, made out of memories and constructed by our brain.”

‘It is evident the mind does not know things immediately, but only by the intervention of the ideas it has of them.’ ” Helena laughs with surprise. “So you’ve read John Locke.”

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

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.

That clipped line of memories of his other life is receding, as if he’s just woken from the longest, most horrific nightmare. An eleven-year-long nightmare.

With his mom, he has years to say goodbye, to make certain she knows he loves her, to say all the things that are in his heart, and there is immeasurable comfort in that. He has wondered lately if that’s all living really is—one long goodbye to those we love.

“Most of them were quiet explorations of who I am, who I could be, in different places, with different people. Some were…louder. But this last timeline, I discovered that I could no longer generate a sufficient synaptic number to map my own memory. I’ve traveled too much. Filled my mind with too many lives. Too many experiences. It’s beginning to fracture. There are entire lifetimes I’ve never remembered, that I only experience in flashes. This hotel isn’t the first thing I did. It’s the last. I built it to let others experience the power of what is still, what will always be, your creation.”

We’ll never escape the loop of universal knowledge of the chair. It will live on in every subsequent timeline. We’ll have doomed humanity forever. I’d rather take the chance at passing up something glorious than risk everything on one roll of the dice.”

“I think we can make it,” he says. “We have to. Why would they hit Denver?” “If they unleashed their full arsenal, they’re striking every major city in America, thousands of warheads, probably hoping they get lucky and take out the chair.”

Unrealistic Dialog

If matter can neither be created nor destroyed, where will all this matter go when this timeline ceases to exist? What’s happened to the matter of all the dead timelines they’ve left behind? Are they time-capsuled away in higher, unreachable dimensions? And if so, what is matter without time? Matter that doesn’t persist? What would that even look like?

Saint Augustine said it perfectly back in the fourth century: “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 the grooves of a record that already exists—beginning, middle, and end. As if our choices, our fates, were locked from our first breath.

Yes

But on a night like this, of a restless mind and dreams of ghosts, time feels secondary to the true prime mover—memory. Perhaps memory is fundamental, the thing from which time emerges.

Time and memory

crashing through forgotten moments, understanding finally that memory is all he’s made of.

Before he experienced waking to the fear that his best days were behind

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

The thought comes almost like a prayer—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. And

Nostalgia