In learning to drive, walk, see or talk, in our very being, we are a massive interpenetrating collection of paths and routines worn by repetition; we are each a landscape, shaped by recurring patterns of force and formed by desire.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.