Recursion

by Blake Crouch

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

Nostalgia is as much an analgesic for him as alcohol.

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.

never managed to achieve escape velocity from the irresistible gravity of her work—

“I think balance is for people who don’t know why they’re here.”

passion—a reason to get out of bed and breathe. In her experience, few people ever found that raison d’être.

“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.

The visual and auditory information arrive at your eyes and ears at different speeds, and then are processed by your brain at different speeds. Your brain waits for the slowest bit of stimulus to be processed, then reorders the neural inputs correctly, and lets you experience them together, as a simultaneous event—about half a second after what actually happened. We think we’re perceiving the world directly and immediately, but everything we experience is this carefully edited, tape-delayed reconstruction.”

It is evident the mind does not know things immediately, but only by the intervention of the ideas it has of them.’”

When every memory contains a universe,

There are so few things in our existence we can count on to give us the sense of permanence, of the ground beneath our feet. People fail us. Our bodies fail us. We fail ourselves.

Maybe their abstraction serves as an anesthetic, a buffer protecting us from the agony of time and all that it steals and erases.

“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.

“More like our perception of it is so flawed that it may as well be an illusion. Every moment is equally real and happening now, but the nature of our consciousness only gives us access to one slice at a time. Think of our life like a book. Each page a distinct moment. But in the same way we read a book, we can only perceive one moment, one page, at a time. Our flawed perception shuts off access to all the others. Until now.”

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

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.

He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.

wonders if this is what feeling old really means—not just a physical deterioration, but an interpersonal. A growing silence caused by the people you most love, who have shaped you and defined your world, going on ahead into whatever comes after.

who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.’

“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.”

I don’t want to look back anymore. I’m ready to accept that my existence will sometimes contain pain. No more trying to escape, either through nostalgia or a memory chair. They’re both the same fucking thing. 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.

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards. — SØREN KIERKEGAARD