Exhalation: Stories

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.

And whether or not your brain is impelled by the air that once impelled mine, through the act of reading my words, the patterns that form your thoughts become an imitation of the patterns that once formed mine. And in that way I live again, through you.

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

writing is a technology, which means that a literate person is someone whose thought processes are technologically mediated.

Set up a rack of billiard balls and execute a flawless break. Imagine the table has no pockets and is frictionless, so the balls just keep rebounding, never coming to a stop; how accurately can you predict the path of any given ball as it collides against the others? In 1978, the physicist Michael Berry calculated that you could predict only nine c

He published papers on number theory and lectured at Cambridge until his death in 1918, during the global influenza pandemic.

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

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.