The Other Side of Night

For Elliot, who inspired this book with a simple question

Contents

Preface

What would you sacrifice for love?

As I look back on my life, I’m haunted by the question. Perhaps what troubles me most is that I never got to choose. The pain I suffer, the loss I feel, the regret that clouds every single day – I never chose my sacrifice. Someone made the choice for me.

Would I have taken a different path?

I don’t know, but the opportunity would have been nice. Instead, like a character in a story, my fate was decided by someone else.

My son.

I think about Elliot every day. Sometimes in anger, often with remorse, mostly in pity, but always with love. You can draw your own conclusions about the morality of his actions. To this day, my own mind is not at peace with what happened.

Is regret real?

We feel it, but it doesn’t exist anywhere. I can’t point to it, any more than I can relive the events that caused it. But does that mean it isn’t real? I devoted many of my years to science, and after decades spent pondering the intersection between perception and reality, I’ve come to the conclusion that regret and all the other emotions we feel so deeply are just as real as the clothes we wear or the air we breathe. I’ve dissected my life, studied the great thinkers of every age, and considered all the theories of reality I could find, and I’ve come to accept one inescapable truth:

Life is memory.

Everything we experience of the world exists only in our minds or the minds of those around us. The past is generally accepted as memory, so must we accept the present and future as fictions of our mind. Moments we perceive as ‘now’ have already passed, and the future is the imagined memory of things to come. We commonly think of time moving forward, but there are some who believe we’re travelling backwards, that the past lies ahead of us and the future behind. In many ways, this view of the cosmos makes sense. We can see the past, but are blind to the future. Are moments gone any more real than those yet to be had? We are equipped to experience the now, to take in sights and sounds, tastes, smells, to touch and be touched, to feel pain, heartbreak, anguish, and yet as we move from one moment to the next, each instant fades and the new now becomes more real than anything we remember, but it too is memory the instant we experience it.

What was, what is, and what will be – I now understand these things exist only in our minds, but that doesn’t make them any less real, any less inevitable. We are bound by the chains of causation that allow time to hold back chaos, and each link is essential to ensure we never escape our destiny. Every moment of suffering, every stab of pain, every shed tear is simply the price of order. We each long to be exempt from such tight bonds, to have one link unfastened to undo a moment, to alter the chain that constrains us, but such dreams are futile. We are stuck, bound to stories that have already been written. We just haven’t lived them yet, and when we have, it’s too late for them to be changed.