:21:06
That's for a start.
:21:08
Now why this cut in time, this connection of memories?
That's just it, he can't understand.
:21:13
He hasn't come from another planet,
he comes from our future,
:21:17
Four thousand and one:
:21:19
the time when the human brain has reached
the era of full employment.
:21:22
Everything works to perfection,
all that we allow to slumber, including memory.
:21:26
Logical consequence:
total recall is memory anesthetized.
:21:31
After so many stories of men who had lost their memory,
:21:34
here is the story of one who has lost forgetting,
and whothrough some peculiarity of his nature
:21:41
instead of drawing pride from the fact and
scorning mankind of the past and its shadows,
:21:45
turned to it first with curiosity and then with compassion.
:21:49
In the world he comes from, to call forth a vision,
to be moved by a portrait,
:21:54
to tremble at the sound of music,
can only be signs of a long and painful pre-history.
:21:58
He wants to understand.
:22:00
He feels these infirmities of time like an injustice,
:22:04
and he reacts to that injustice like Ché Guevara,
like the youth of the sixties, with indignation.
:22:09
He is a Third Worlder of time.
:22:12
The idea that unhappiness had existed in his planet's past
is as unbearable to him
:22:18
as to them the existence of poverty in their present.
:22:24
Naturally he'll fail.
:22:25
The unhappiness he discovers is as inaccessible to him
as the poverty of a poor country is unimaginable to the children of a rich one.
:22:32
He has chosen to give up his privileges,
but he can do nothing about the privilege that has allowed him to choose.
:22:39
His only recourse is precisely that which threw him into this absurd quest:
a song cycle by Mussorgsky.
:22:46
They are still sung in the fortieth century.
:22:49
Their meaning has been lost,
but it was then that for the first time,
:22:52
he perceived the presence of that thing he didn't understand
which had something to do with unhappiness and memory,
:22:57
and towards which slowly, heavily,
he began to walk.