To his surprise, he felt nothing as they chatted stiffly on the veranda. Being in her presence slashed through the dream-withdrawal; he didn’t want her. It was a liberating revelation, even as it devastated him. Liberating because it meant he didn’t love this Julia—he loved the person she used to be. Devastating because the woman who haunted his

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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.

Perhaps memory is fundamental, the thing from which time emerges.

When a person dies, he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past…All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever. —KURT VONNEGUT,

That’s what it is to be human—the beauty and the pain, each meaningless without the other.

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The Hudson comes from a pond in the Adirondacks called Lake Tear of the Clouds. They went there one summer when Meghan was eight or nine. Camped in the spruce trees. Watched the stars fall. Tried to wrap their minds around the notion that this tiny mountain lake was the source of the Hudson. It’s a memory he returns to almost obsessively.

What is the Schwarzschild radius of a memory? A wild notion…when we die, does the immense gravity of our collapsing memories create a micro black hole? A wilder notion…does the memory-reactivation procedure—at the moment of death—then open a wormhole that connects our consciousness to an earlier version of ourselves?