How We Are

We want to rush past our bitter moments, to a place of facility and ease, we want to be old at this new thing, but rushing won’t do it. Only time and repetition bring ease. Then it’s second nature, a walk in the park.

Time travel needs a self, and the self needs to travel in time. This formation of a story of the self, and a sense of that story developing through time, through incidents, encounters and events, in continuity, that’s the human trick, the one the other animals can’t do.

Memory and imagination are closely linked. One reconstructs based on the gist; the other builds on whatever desire or dread is fuelling your image of the future. Both are essentially creative activities; where they differ is not in form but in their source of inspiration.

Memory is shown to be not so much a library but more a repository of ready-to-run routines that enable our daily living.

Those are the kinds of friends you want, where your heartbeat only raises to just the perfect pitch of anticipatory excitement, where all that awful effort of the beginning of things is over, the paths beaten and the shovels shelved. Look out for those kind. They are hard to find, and difficult to lose.

The act of recall is never neutral, and the emotions prompting the recall will shape the events recalled, mixing memory with desire.

The word ‘routine’ derives from ‘route’, itself deriving from ‘rupta via’, meaning a road forged by force, a forced and beaten path.

Life is Cheap The brain is constantly trying to automate processes, thereby dispelling them from consciousness; in this way its work will be completed faster, more effectively and at a lower metabolic level. Consciousness, on the other hand, is slow, subject to error and ‘expensive’.

There is no real forgetting. Everything leaves a mark, whether you remember it, whether you can bring it to mind or not. There is no subtraction in mind.