445. Recursion
Rating: ☆☆☆☆
Recommended by:
Author: Blake Crouch
Genre: Fiction, Science Fiction, Thriller
336 pages, published June 11, 2019
Reading Format: Audio Book on Overdrive
Summary
New York City cop Barry Sutton is perplexed as he investigates the devastating phenomenon the media has dubbed False Memory Syndrome, a mysterious affliction that drives its victims mad with memories of a life they never lived. Helena Smith has dedicated her life to research that will let us re-experience our most precious memories. When Helena invents a technology that lets us re-set time and start over, she intersects with Barry and they team up to save the world from destroying itself.
Quotes
“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.”
“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. You think you’re tasting this wine, hearing the words I’m saying, in the present, but there’s no such thing. The neural impulses from your taste buds and your ears get transmitted to your brain, which processes them and dumps them into working memory—so by the time you know you’re experiencing something, it’s already in the past. Already a memory.”
“He has wondered lately if that’s all living really is—one long goodbye to those we love.”
“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards. —SØREN KIERKEGAARD”
“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. He’s experienced all of that. But what do you cling to, moment to moment, if memories can simply change. What, then, is real? And if the answer is nothing, where does that leave us?”
“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.”
“I think balance is for people who don’t know why they’re here.”
“He thinks perhaps there’s a reason our memories are kept hazy and out of focus. Maybe their abstraction serves as an anesthetic, a buffer protecting us from the agony of time and all that it steals and erases.”
“He has made peace with the idea that part of life is facing your failures, and sometimes those failures are people you once loved.”
“He thinks how it will be winter soon, and then another year gone by and another one on the chopping block, time flowing faster and faster. 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.”
“This low point isn’t the book of your life. It’s just a chapter.”
“My soul knows your soul. In any time.”
“In high school, in college, she was encouraged again and again to find her passion-a reason to get out of bed and breathe. In her experience, few people ever found that raison d’etre.
What teachers and professors never told her was about the dark side of finding your purpose. The part where it consumes you. Where it becomes a destroyer of relationship and happiness. And still, she wouldn’t trade it. This is the only person she knows how to be.”
“Saint Augustine said it perfectly back in the fourth century: “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. That’s what it is to be human—the beauty and the pain, each meaningless without the other.”
“Is this what you want? To drop yourself into a still-life painting of a memory because life has broken your heart?”
“He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past. —GEORGE ORWELL, 1984”
“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-FIVE”
“But on a night like this, of a restless mind and dreams of ghosts, time feels secondary to the true prime mover—memory. Perhaps memory is fundamental, the thing from which time emerges.”
“The three most important people in her life are gone, and she will never see them again. The stark loneliness of that knowledge cuts her to the bone.
She is forty-nine, and she 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.”
“Consciousness is a result of environment. Our cognitions – our idea of reality – are shaped by what we can perceive, by the limitations of our senses.”
“She realizes that children are always too young and self-absorbed to really see their parents in the prime of their lives.”
My Take
I found Recursion to be a highly engaging and fascinating read. While it stands on its own as a SciFi thriller, author Blake Crouch also has a lot of interesting things to say about time and memory and the role they play in making us who we are. Recommended.
