Recursion

Author:: Blake Crouch Full Title:: Recursion Tags:#media/book

• themes::
  • theme 1
• Summary::
  • summary 1

* highlights from 2021-02-08

* He has made peace with the idea that part of life is facing your failures, and sometimes those failures are people you once loved. ([Location 217](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07HDSHP7N&location=217))
* He is always looking back, living more in memories than the present, often altering them to make them prettier. To make them perfect. Nostalgia is as much an analgesic for him as alcohol. ([Location 248](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07HDSHP7N&location=248))
* 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. ([Location 263](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07HDSHP7N&location=263))
* 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. ([Location 364](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07HDSHP7N&location=364))
* How strange then, decades later and his life so far off the course he charted, to find himself alone on a couch in a friend’s apartment, attempting to assuage his fears with the same logic he used on his child all those years ago. Everything will look better in the morning. There will be hope again when the light returns. The despair is only an illusion, a trick the darkness plays. ([Location 371](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07HDSHP7N&location=371))
* “I think balance is for people who don’t know why they’re here.” ([Location 426](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07HDSHP7N&location=426))
* 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 relationships and happiness. And still, she wouldn’t trade it. This is the only person she knows how to be. ([Location 429](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07HDSHP7N&location=429))
* this contradictory set of events, is whispering to him—a misalignment he feels a compulsion to put right. ([Location 472](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07HDSHP7N&location=472))
* “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.” ([Location 577](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07HDSHP7N&location=577))
* We think we’re perceiving the world directly and immediately, but everything we experience is this carefully edited, tape-delayed reconstruction.” ([Location 584](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07HDSHP7N&location=584))
* If you change the way your brain processes an event, you change the duration of the ‘now.’ You actually change the point at which the present becomes the past. It’s yet another way that the concept of the present is just an illusion, made out of memories and constructed by our brain.” ([Location 590](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07HDSHP7N&location=590))
* It’s a mere flicker of thought in her mind that will one day be cast out into that wasteland of oblivion where forgotten memories die. And yet it contains the smell of the sea. The white, wet feathers of the bird glistening in the early sun. The pounding of her heart from the exertion of the run. The cold slide of sweat down her sides and the burn of it in her eyes. Her wondering in that moment where the bird considered home in the unending sameness of the sea. ([Location 634](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07HDSHP7N&location=634))
* When every memory contains a universe, what does simple even mean? ([Location 637](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07HDSHP7N&location=637))
* 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? ([Location 717](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07HDSHP7N&location=717))
* Buried deep inside our brain is a rice-size gland called the pineal, which plays a role in the creation of a chemical called dimethyltriptamine, or DMT. ([Location 823](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07HDSHP7N&location=823))
* Explosions of color detonate in Barry’s oxygen- and blood-starved brain—a light show for a dead man, each flash closer and brighter than the one before. ([Location 1268](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07HDSHP7N&location=1268))
* Maybe their abstraction serves as an anesthetic, a buffer protecting us from the agony of time and all that it steals and erases. ([Location 1300](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07HDSHP7N&location=1300))
* “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.” ([Location 1494](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07HDSHP7N&location=1494))
* 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.” ([Location 1536](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07HDSHP7N&location=1536))
* Because the absence of tragedy is having an inverse, proportional effect on what he sees when he looks into her eyes. They astound him. Bright and present and clear. The eyes of the woman he fell in love with. And it hits him all over again—the ruinous power of grief. ([Location 1651](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07HDSHP7N&location=1651))
* He has wondered lately if that’s all living really is—one long goodbye to those we love. ([Location 1845](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07HDSHP7N&location=1845))
* And he wonders—is déjà vu actually the specter of false timelines that never happened but did, casting their shadows upon reality? ([Location 1857](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07HDSHP7N&location=1857))
* She makes acquaintances, no friends, and enough wanderers pass through the bar and the town to afford the occasional twenty-four-hour-lonely-heart liaison. ([Location 1946](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07HDSHP7N&location=1946))
* with the splitting of the atom came the atomic bomb. The ability to change memory, and thereby reality, would be at least that dangerous, in part because it would be so seductive. Was she herself not changing the past now, and at her first opportunity? ([Location 1966](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07HDSHP7N&location=1966))
* She starts to pick out memories she thinks her mother would count as her most special and important, and then realizes it’s far too intimate a choice to make for another person. She can only share her own. ([Location 2022](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07HDSHP7N&location=2022))
* Healthy minds are being made unwell; unwell minds are being driven over the edge. ([Location 2352](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07HDSHP7N&location=2352))
* “I am begging you. Show restraint. Its use has only ever caused mayhem and pain.” “Maybe the wrong people were at the controls.” “Humanity doesn’t have the wisdom to handle this sort of power.” “I’m about to prove you wrong.” ([Location 2987](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07HDSHP7N&location=2987))
* She knows the pain of letting go of the promise of the chair. It isn’t just the disappointment of all the unrealized scientific and humanitarian uses to which it might be put under ideal conditions. It’s the realization that, as a deeply flawed species, we will never be ready to wield such power. ([Location 3452](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07HDSHP7N&location=3452))
* We have made it far too easy to destroy ourselves. ([Location 3978](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07HDSHP7N&location=3978))
* And the motes of fire gradually fall slower and slower, until they’re suspended all around him in the air like a billion lightning bugs— ([Location 3986](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07HDSHP7N&location=3986))
* His life feels like a dream, flitting from one reality to the next, memories becoming reality becoming nightmares. Everything real in the moment, but fleetingly so. Landscapes and emotions in a constant state of flux, and yet a twisted logic to it all—the way a dream makes sense only when you’re inside it. ([Location 3996](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07HDSHP7N&location=3996))
* Some days, it feels like a river flowing past him. Others, like something he’s sliding down the surface of. Sometimes, it feels like it’s all already happened, and he’s just experiencing incremental slivers, moment to moment, his consciousness like the needle in the grooves of a record that already exists—beginning, middle, and end. ([Location 4517](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07HDSHP7N&location=4517))
* 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. ([Location 4524](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07HDSHP7N&location=4524))
* Space is one of the few places where time makes sense to him. He knows, on an intellectual level, that when he looks at any object, he’s looking back in time. In the case of his own hand, it takes the light a nanosecond—one billionth of a second—to transport the image to his eyes. When he looks at the research station from half a mile away, he’s seeing the structure as it existed 2,640 nanoseconds ago. It seems instantaneous, and for all intents and purposes, it is. But when Barry looks into the night sky, he’s seeing stars whose light took a year, or a hundred, or a million to reach him. The telescopes that peer into deep space are looking at ten-billion-year-old light from stars that coalesced just after the universe began. He’s looking back, not just through space but through time. ([Location 4548](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07HDSHP7N&location=4548))
* The timeline he’s on is the original, and he’s accelerating upstream against the river of his life, crashing through forgotten moments, understanding finally that memory is all he’s made of. All anything is made of. ([Location 4628](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07HDSHP7N&location=4628))
* an exhale in the midst of life’s journey, between storms, where everything has settled into fleeting alignment. ([Location 4639](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07HDSHP7N&location=4639))
* He can’t explain why, but it feels like the memory he’s been searching for his entire life, and the seductive gravity of nostalgia is pulling his consciousness in, because this isn’t just the quintessential memory of home, it is the safe and perfect moment—before life held any real pain. ([Location 4665](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07HDSHP7N&location=4665))
* 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. ([Location 4676](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07HDSHP7N&location=4676))