Book Review: The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

Fiction is a great way to explore ideas outside your usual mode of thought. Ones that toy with philosophical themes and take you outside your comfort zone provide a dizzying feeling of existential nausea that is often paradoxically pleasant. These are the types of books that make you appreciate life.

I recall reading a Goodreads review on this book saying that the first half of the book was great and the second half was awesome. I can wholeheartedly agree on that perspective. The book explores a reality in which the world is in an endless loop. Moreover, a small subset of the population retains memories of their previous lives and are in a sense reborn into the same life. This entails that the remaining population is also in a loop but does not know it. Hence, each life is lived as a first experience. Members of the former group are called Kalachakra, combining the Sanskrit words kala (time) and chakra (wheel) to mean wheel of time.

The more I read the more I began to immerse myself in this pseudo-reality. I began to wonder whether I was a member of the unlucky subset of people known as the linear mortals. To a Kalachakra, existence is not as meaningful as it is to a linear mortal. I think the 2004 adaptation of The Iliad captures the feeling perfectly when Achilles tells Briseis:

“I’ll tell you a secret. Something they don’t teach you in your temple. The Gods envy us. They envy us because we’re mortal, because any moment might be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we’re doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.”

~ Achilles, Troy (2004)

On a similar note when the great Persian king Xerxes stood atop a hill to view his massive army ready to cross the Hellespont to rain destruction upon the Greeks, he suddenly wept inexplicably.

”[…] it came into my mind to feel pity at the thought how brief was the whole life of man, seeing that of these multitudes not one will be alive when a hundred years have gone by.”

~ Xerxes

The idea explored in this novel isn’t new as people have been thinking about this for millennia. Nietzsche restated the idea of eternal recurrence as a thought experiment. He oddly enough attempted to create a “proof” of eternal recurrence in a notebook found posthumously. He reasoned that since the universe may exist for an infinite amount of time but contains only a finite quantity of energy, given enough time the universe will eventually repeat a previous set of configurations. Despite being far from rigorous, if we did assume eternal recurrence to be true it would only be meaningful if the individual was capable of remembering previous iterations.

This book made me realize that there are an incalculable number of perspectives. People may see the same situation and think completely different thoughts. There was a period of time in which I was wondering what it must feel like to be in an eternal return. My thoughts about situations had a pleasant overlay of recurrence. When I became aware of this overlay I took one step back and realized that everyone sees reality through a mental filter. Even practices that seem to do away with this filter such as mental noting (vipassana) have a subtle background thought which is the intention to sustain the act of noting. Unfiltered reality devoid of a mental filter is not possible to experience.