Abhiraj

“Ah! my brother," said a chieftain to his white
guest, "thou wilt never know the happiness of both thinking of nothing and doing nothing. This, next to sleep, is the most enchanting of all things. Thus we were before our birth, and thus we shall be after death. Thy people ... when they have finished reaping one field, they begin to plough another; and, if the day were not enough, I have seen them plough by moonlight. What is their life to ours,—the life that is as naught to them? Blind that they are, they lose it all! But we live in the present.”
― William James, On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings

“All right," I said, still wishing we could talk about Zima rather than me. "But what practical difference does it make whether the artificial memory is inside my head or outside?"

"All the difference in the world," Zima said. "The memories stored in the AM are fixed for eternity. You can query it as often as you like, but it will never enhance or omit a single detail. But the implants work differently. They're designed to integrate seamlessly with biological memory, to the point where the recipient can't tell the difference. For that very reason they're necessarily plastic, malleable, subject to error and distortion."

"Fallible," I said.

"But without fallibility there is no art. And without art there is no truth.”
― Alastair Reynolds, Zima Blue and Other Stories

“He had already packed his bags. Everything was ready, tied with string, and labeled. He planned to take the bare necessities only: typewriter, a barrel of ink, ten trunkfuls of bedside books (he knew the rest by heart), the chicken runs, the portable rabbit warren, the best armchair, the piano and, of course, drinks.”
― René Daumal, A Night of Serious Drinking

“I listened to her string of non sequiturs, entranced. I understood what she was telling us. There was no coherence. Nothing led to anything else. There were only jagged moments of half comprehension. Nothing could be known. We were all incomplete, unfinished. That was life until completed by death. And none of us could complete our own story because we would no longer be present. We were all frozen in our railway carriages waiting for another to finish our tale, to complete us, if anyone cared to do so. Otherwise, unfinishedness was our inescapable fate.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Eleventh Hour: A Quintet of Stories