Lately I have spent twenty-odd hours making deliveries in Death Stranding, marvelling every so often at the game's extraordinary worldbuilding. One of its core ideas is timefall: in this rain almost everything, living animals and lifeless metal alike, is rapidly eaten away, and the rain and the beautiful rainbows are also the sign that something more dangerous is on its way.
Rain really is a very good metaphor for time. It gives abstract time a flowing, cold texture. Rain brings the endless turning of life, and it also makes glory fleeting, like tears in rain. That classic line from Blade Runner has bound rain and tears together in my mind for good, along with a few things I don't want to forget. And it is memory that gives time a meaning that has to do with us.
The Brain: The Story of You describes an interesting thing:
When we are under threat, a region of the brain called the amygdala shifts into high gear and commandeers the resources of the rest of the brain, putting all of them into dealing with the situation at hand. When the amygdala is at work, the memories laid down are far more detailed and rich than under normal circumstances; it activates a secondary memory system. After all, this is what memory is for: keeping track of important events, so that if a similar situation comes up again, the brain has more information to draw on to survive. In other words, if something is frightening enough to threaten your life, it is time to take good notes.
(Translated here from the book's Chinese edition, so the wording is not David Eagleman's own.)
When I read it, I jotted down a thought: "Like raising the sampling rate: more frames are sampled in the same stretch of time, so looking back afterwards, the time feels longer." The brain is in fact a model of energy saving. It will not spend its own resources processing anything it judges to be of little value. That is why the memories of childhood and youth seem so rich and vivid: they are full of novelty, confusion, passion and discontent, and we would have loved to record every last frame. Later, as life settles into stability and sameness, there are fewer and fewer "first times", fewer and fewer things we long for and cannot have (those we went without for too long became learned helplessness), and time starts to go faster and faster; or rather, our sampling grows coarser and coarser. Every night as we lie in bed, we are better and better able to predict what will happen the next day, or even over the next week or month. How much in all that could endanger (or overturn) our lives? Perhaps risk is the heart of the matter. Value is often found where few people go.
The COVID-19 pandemic that broke out around the world slowed down a stretch of time for almost everyone and made many people's "tomorrow" unpredictable again. The financial elite call this market sentiment, and their job is to make better, less emotional predictions than everyone else and profit from the gap. But the pandemic will pass in the end, the market will steady in the end, and the small investors who get harvested like leeks will, in the end, grow back when the spring wind blows. What this period leaves us as so-called collective memory is still something illusory; in each person's heart it actually looks different. Perhaps that is inevitable in any great event. Only this time it is more helpless still: people fade out of your life before they can even sit down face to face with you for a few words.
In what I have written in this hour I set aside, apart from the one point I used as the opening, everything after it seems to lie outside what I first meant to write. But to take up the "pen" again after nearly two years, and leave this one frame for the future, is already another good beginning. I hope to see you again next week.