Recursion

by Blake Crouch

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

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.

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.

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.

“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 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.”

The paradox of the specious present. 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.”

“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

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

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

He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past. —GEORGE ORWELL, 1984