Recursion: A Novel

slide into this one.” “So in nine years, on the night of November 5, 2018, I’m going

“I think I was the first one to realize what

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.

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.”

six books that mean the world to her: On the Fabric of the Human Body by Andreas Vesalius, Physica by Aristotle, The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy by Isaac Newton, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, and two novels—Camus’s The Stranger, and Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.

He has wondered lately if that’s all living really is—one long goodbye to those we love.

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.

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.