Karl Knausgaard captures the sad ambivalence about this realization: Every single moment of life stands open in several directions, . . . as if it had three or seven doors, as in a fairy tale, into rooms that all contain different futures. These hypothetical offshoots of time cease to exist whenever we make a choice, and have never existed in themselves, a little like the unknown faces we see in dreams. While the past is lost for ever, everything that didn’t happen in it is doubly lost. This creates a particular kind of feeling of loss, the melancholy of an unrealized past. The feeling sounds
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