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Time is but memory in the making.
He has made peace with the idea that part of life is facing your failures, and sometimes those failures are people you once loved.
“There were these children’s books when I was a kid, and a lot of people remember them being called The Berenstein Bears, S-T-E-I-N, when it’s actually spelled Berenstain. S-T-A-I-N.”
Everything will look better in the morning. There will be hope again when the light returns. The despair is only an illusion, a trick the darkness plays.
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 to be.
“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.”
They have endlessly debated what type of memory should be the first one they map. Something simple? Complex? Recent? Old? Happy? Tragic? Yesterday, Helena decided they were overthinking it. How does one define a “simple” memory anyway? Is there even such a thing when it comes to the human condition? Consider the albatross that landed on the platform during her run this morning. It’s a mere flicker of thought in her mind that will one day be cast out into that wasteland of oblivion where forgotten memories die. And yet it contains the smell of the sea. The white, wet feathers of the bird
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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?
pineal, which plays a role in the creation of a chemical called dimethyltriptamine, or DMT.
“In tiny doses, released into our brains at night, DMT is responsible for our dreams. But at the moment of death, the pineal gland releases a veritable flood of DMT. A going-out-of-business sale. It’s the reason people see things when they die, such as racing through a tunnel toward a light, or their entire life flashing before their eyes. To have an immersive, dreamlike memory, we need bigger dreams. Or, if you will, a lot more DMT.”
“Helena, you didn’t just build a chair that helps people relive their memories. You made something that can return them to the past.”
He hugs her fiercely, still gasping for air, but there are sobs mixing in now, and he can’t hold them back. It’s too much. Her smell. Her voice. The sheer presence of her.
“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.
“You said it yourself. ‘Now’ is just an illusion, an accident of how our brains process reality.”
He has wondered lately if that’s all living really is—one long goodbye to those we love.
And he wonders—is déjà vu actually the specter of false timelines that never happened but did, casting their shadows upon reality?
her: On the Fabric of the Human Body by Andreas Vesalius, Physica by Aristotle, The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy by Isaac Newton, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, and two novels—Camus’s The Stranger, and Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.
“You think that’s what FMS really is?” she asks. “Changing memories to change reality?”
“My soul knows your soul. In any time.”
People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.’
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
