Recursion

by Blake Crouch

“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.