“A world without memory is a world of the present.”
– Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams
London UK Sat, 20 Sept 2025
As I make my way by train from Finsbury Park to Gatwick Airport, the thought of you crossed my otherwise still mind. This time I caught myself ruminating and decided to run an inward inquiry. Why do I do this to myself? Do I need such recollections in order to exist? Am I still me, outside of them — outside the blurred memories of moments past?
The following text was directly inspired by one of my many random exchanges with an artificial narrow-intelligence tool. A new form of self-talk? Anyway, the context – alienation, or what it’s like to live on the outskirts of intersubjective reality.
One whose being often wanders to the outer edges of the context of community — worse yet, of humanity at large — finds themselves in near-daily confrontations with the absurd. Life with no inherent purpose, save for what little can be wrested from its cosmic indifference, turns a lamp-bearer by choice into a prisoner of light, with no one else to share in the burden of such existence. To live without the cushion of fellowship is to live with reality unmediated. At best, such an individual becomes something elemental: akin to a solitary tree on a cliff-side, unmeasured by the forest, defined only by the tension between roots buried deep in the earth and gnarled branches outstretched into the void above.
Living in such isolation must bend every narrative inward. Each step, all thought, every flicker of longing is no longer part of the great human discourse; rather it is a quiet soliloquy in an ocean of noise. Without the scaffolding of culture or tradition, one’s life story becomes, instead, a dialogue with the eternal — with the vastness of time, with fleeting beauty glimpsed and lost, with the certainty of death. The smallest of sensations — the smell of wet earth after rainfall, the warmth of the sun on bare skin, the taste of a decent cup of coffee — these must carry the weight of entire histories; they must be enough, given the absence of others to confirm or deny them.
You know how I feel about the notion of meaning. To me, it is born in the shared, in the mutual recognition of “I” within “we.” Freedom, therefore, exists somewhere outside humanity’s lattice. And if we were to choose that path, our life’s story would no longer be one of progress, conquest, nor legacy. No — instead, it would be one of witnessing: a solitary lamp-bearer roaming great cosmic halls, whilst tending to a dying flame. Not because it will be seen, but because it still smoulders.
All of that is to say I am still here, still talking to myself from time to time. True, not nearly as frequently as I used to, having grown ever fonder of the quietude that has settled in my heart, but I can only hope that it’ll suffice. Keep safe out there!
tsvetoslav shalev 
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