Recursion

by Blake Crouch

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.

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.”

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.”

What we think of as the ‘present’ isn’t actually a moment. It’s a stretch of recent time—an arbitrary one.

What does this mean?

Maybe their

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

déjà vu actually the specter of false timelines that never happened but did, casting their shadows upon reality?

When she finished her bachelor’s degree in social work,

How?

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.’

“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.

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