Even If You Remember Everything
About This Reading
Ouspensky sent Osokin back twelve years with his memory intact, and he changed nothing. On the Wheel of Fortune, the collapsed interval, and being present.
Ouspensky sent Osokin back twelve years with his memory intact, and he changed nothing. Ivan Osokin has ruined himself in the ordinary way - expelled, out of money, out of prospects. He goes to a magician and asks to be sent back. The magician sends him back twelve years with his memory intact. And Osokin remembers. That is the cruelty of the premise. He remembers the letter he should not write, the fight he should not pick, the afternoon he should not waste. He watches himself write it, pick it, waste it. At the end he is in the magician's room again. This is simply turning round on a wheel, he says. The magician does not argue. He only gives the wheel its proper name: this trap, he says, is called life. Which leaves one question, and Osokin asks it for us: Even if I remember everything? "Even if you remember everything." Remembering does not help, because remembering is not the same as being present. Osokin's memory does not give him room to move. It gives him a script. He is never inside the moment where a different thing could be done, because he spends that moment three seconds ahead of it, waiting for the part he recognises. He knows what happens next, so what happens next has already happened by the time it arrives. Call it the collapsed interval. You have your own twelve years. You have a conversation rehearsed so completely that you would not notice if the other person said something new. You have a Sunday you have already spent by nine in the morning. None of that is memory failing. It is memory succeeding, in the wrong place, at the wrong tempo. So: where, today, are you three seconds ahead of your own life?
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