Recursion

by Blake Crouch

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

Recursion is the most personal book I’ve ever written—far more so even than Dark Matter. This sentence is too raw for me to really expound upon, other than to say I think life gets so much more complicated the longer you live it.

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.

I was trying to build out Barry Sutton’s character early on by showing him as a defeated man, kicked around severely by life. Of all my heroes, I think he probably starts at the lowest point. I started writing Recursion around the time I was going through my divorce, and it’s hard for me to go back and read much of it, because I can feel the angst and sadness literally coming off the pages. Having an outlet to express myself during that time literally saved my life.

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.

More building out of Barry’s character here. I think we’ve all had nights like these. I certainly have, especially around the time I was writing Recursion. There’s a special kind of misery to not being able to sleep while your mind races and rages with all the possible bad things that might happen, and all the regrets of your life are simmering under the surface. Clearly, I was going through a rough time at the beginning of this book, and all I could do was try to channel it into the character of Barry Sutton.

“I think balance is for people who don’t know why they’re here.”

This is both a mantra and an Achilles’ heel for me. I am one of those people who are cursed with only wanting to do one thing (write), but also extraordinarily fortunate that I get to do that thing for a living. Work-life balance is a struggle for me, because I don’t think of my work as work. I would do it all the time if I could. With Helena, I tried to write a character who had the same struggle.

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.

And this highlight brings full-circle the dark side of the work-life balance, where the love of work can slide toward obsession. It’s really strange looking at these highlights a year and a half after finishing work on this book. In hindsight, I was very clearly pulling from some darker aspects of my personality to create both Helena and Barry. I’m glad I made it through this period of my life.

“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.”

When I discovered, through the course of my research, that we never experience the present, that we actually live in memory, it was one of the most exciting writing days I’ve ever had. I love learning things about the world we live in that explode our notions of reality. Finding this bit of research, which is 100% true, was the reason to write this book.

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

Our brains are so incredible in how they carefully pull together all the stimuli coming at us and arrange it in a way that seems to make sense. The universe is a far weirder place than we realize, and reality is nothing remotely close to what we think it is.

“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.”

I came across many theories of time during the writing of this book, and this one was far and away the strangest. The idea of the past, present, and future all happening concurrently defies comprehension, because it suggests that there is no such thing as time at all, and that time is perhaps nothing more than an emergent property of conscious beings. In other words, time is an illusion created by our sentience. We overlay the concept of time on an otherwise static world.

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

This might be my favorite line of the book. Writing a book about time and memory made me quite nostalgic for all the people in my life who I love.

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.

I was a very different person at the beginning and end of this book. I started writing it from the darkest place I’d ever known. In fact, some of my early edits were geared at making my characters less pathetic sad sacks. But as the book evolved and I got better, I started to have some clarity on the purpose of pain in our lives. It’s not that any of us want to experience pain, but I came to the conclusion that pain is actually a necessary element of consciousness. When I was a kid and religious, one of the things that scared me about heaven was the idea that it would just be the same all the time. Infinite happiness isn’t really a happy concept. Sameness, whatever that is, is a terrifying proposition. So realizing that the painful moments served to make the good ones stand out really changed my perspective on how I would live my life going forward. This passage is a distillation of that idea.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you all for your enthusiasm for Recursion. I really do write these books not only to entertain but to share my experiences—the good and the bad—in this beautiful and mysterious universe (multiverse?) we all live in. Be safe out there, and I hope to have a new book for you sometime in 2021.