Machines Like Me

by Ian McEwan

He had described it to me variously; he didn’t dream, he “wandered.” He sorted and rearranged his files, reclassified memories from short to long term, played out internal conflicts in disguised form, usually without resolving them, reanimated old material in order to refresh it, and moved, so he put it once, in a trance through the garden of his thoughts. In such a state he conducted in relative slow motion his researches, formulated tentative decisions, and even wrote new haikus or discarded or reimagined old ones. He also practised what he called the art of feeling, allowing himself the luxury of the entire spectrum from grief to joy, so that all emotion remained accessible to him when fully charged. It was, above all else, he insisted, a process of repair and consolidation from which he emerged daily, delighted to find himself to be, once again, self-aware, in a state of grace—his word—and to reclaim the consciousness that the very nature of matter permitted.