Recursion

by Blake Crouch

We are homesick most for the places we have never known.

Imagine if you could see the world through the eyes of more advanced beings—in four dimensions. You could experience events in your life in any order. Relive any memory you want.”

Healthy minds are being made unwell; unwell minds are being driven over the edge.

“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.”

“ ‘Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.’ Einstein said that about his friend Michele Besso. Lovely, isn’t it? I think he was right.”

“What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.”

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.