Memory is one of the themes that runs through Nectar of Time. Below is everything in the Nectarium that touches on it.
Where it comes up 4
Within this theme 16
Concepts 4
- Perception as Delayed Reconstruction
From the Recursion passage: sensory signals reach the brain at different speeds, so the brain waits for the slowest, reorders them, and presents a 'simultaneous' experience about half a…
- Nonlinear Time
Following Vonnegut, Tamir argues time is multi-dimensional and all moments are equally real. What matters is less whether we live in the past or the future than how we interpret those…
- WWII trauma in Murakami
Salih's reading that unexplained events like the children collapsing in Kafka on the Shore, Lieutenant Mamiya's war, and figures like Colonel Sanders are Murakami processing Japan's war…
- False Memory Syndrome
In Recursion, a mysterious affliction where people suddenly 'remember' lives they never lived, which turn out to come from other timelines.
Books 3
- Recursion
Sci-fi novel Tamir had just finished. Researcher Helena builds a chair that records memories, and a billionaire funds it. Combined with a deprivation tank that briefly kills the user and…
- Abandoning a Cat
Murakami's autobiographical essay about his father, published in The New Yorker. Salih recounts the story of the family abandoning a cat at the beach only to find it home before them, and…
- First Person Singular
Short story collection that both name as their least favorite Murakami book, though Tamir counts its opening story 'Cream' among his favorites.
People 1
- Blake Crouch
American science-fiction novelist, author of Recursion, which Tamir had just finished reading. Its lesson that life can't be engineered to avoid pain anchors the second half of the…
Quotes 2
A memory is nothing but a specific combination of neurons firing together... but in actuality it's the filter between us and reality.
The scenes in Murakami novels you carry with you in your backpack for the rest of your life.
Insights 3
- Everything you experience is already memory
By the time you know you're experiencing something, the brain has already processed and synchronized it, so all experience is a reconstruction about half a second late, filtered by your own…
- Authors hide their lives in fiction
Writers say little in interviews but leave their histories in their books: Murakami's cats and Tengo's father likely trace back to his own father.
- We do live in the past and future
Strictly speaking we're prisoners of the present, but in practice rumination, memory and regret mean we live in the past, and desire and visualization mean we live in the future…
Stories 2
- Abandoning the cat at the beach
Salih relates Murakami's memoir of his father: the family left their cat at the beach, drove home, and found the cat already waiting there, inexplicably. Salih takes this as Murakami's real…
- Ferris wheel and pan flute in Greece
Sputnik Sweetheart's images stick with both men. Salih sees Miu whenever he sees a Ferris wheel and recently reread the passage in Greece; Tamir thinks of the novel's mysterious pan flute…
Films, music and art 1
- Super Mario Bros.
Comes up in the excerpt from Troll Tamir reads: the narrator has watched people glitch through the game in under five minutes and feels nostalgic for childhood memories he never had.