Recursion

by Blake Crouch

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.

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

a role in the creation of a chemical called dimethyltriptamine, or DMT. You’ve heard of it?” “It’s one of the most potent psychedelics known to man.” “In tiny doses, released into our brains at night, DMT is responsible for our dreams. But at the moment of death, the pineal gland releases a veritable flood of DMT. A going-out-of-business sale. It’s the reason people see things when they die, such as racing through a tunnel toward a light, or their entire life flashing before their eyes. To

“The kind of breakthrough I’m looking for today doesn’t happen in the shallow end of the pool.”

“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.”

“Exactly. To a two-dimensional being, traveling along a third dimension wouldn’t just be impossible, it’d be something they couldn’t conceive of. Just as our brains fail us here. 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.”

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

when Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian Serb, murdered Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, and in so doing, tipped over the first domino in a chain that would ultimately trigger the First World War.

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-FIV

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