Exhalation: Stories

if everyone remembered everything, would our differences get shaved away? What would happen to our sense of self? It seemed to me that a perfect memory couldn’t be a narrative any more than unedited security-cam footage could be a feature film.

It will be the end of pressure, the end of motive power, the end of thought. The universe will have reached perfect equilibrium.

What that demonstrates to me is that we as humans are capable of creating meaning for our own lives.

Contemplate the marvel that is existence, and rejoice that you are able to do so. I feel I have the right to tell you this because, as I am inscribing these words, I am doing the same.

When we speak, we use the breath in our lungs to give our thoughts a physical form. The sounds we make are simultaneously our intentions and our life force.

This was an engine undergoing continuous transformation, indeed modifying itself as part of its operation. The lattice was not so much a machine as it was a page on which the machine was written, and on which the machine itself ceaselessly wrote.

Nothing erases the past. There is repentance, there is atonement, and there is forgiveness. That is all, but that is enough.