Recursion

by Blake Crouch

Time is but memory in the making. —VLADIMIR NABOKOV

“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.

What we think of as the ‘present’ isn’t actually a moment. It’s a stretch of recent time—an arbitrary one.

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.”

The pain of dying has become a dim and distant star,

“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

Our cognitions—our idea of reality—are shaped by what we can perceive, by the limitations of our senses.

And he wonders—is déjà vu actually the specter of false timelines that never happened but did, casting their shadows upon reality?

Time is what keeps everything from happening at once. —RAY CUMMINGS

“It will be destructive at first, like all progress. Just as the industrial age ushered in two world wars. Just as Homo sapiens supplanted the Neanderthal. But would you turn back the clock on all that comes with it? Could you? Progress is inevitable. And it’s a force for good.”

Albert has taken to calling their group the Department of Undoing Particularly Awful Shit, and like many names that start as a bad joke without a quick replacement, the name sticks.

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

“I’ll be in that Portland bar in October of 1990, waiting for you.” “You won’t even recognize me.” “My soul knows your soul. In any time.”