Well, I was sitting here thinking back to TRST after watching the recent movie "Inception". I'm not going to go into it, but to anyone who's watched it, you'd have noticed the similarities between the main character and the First Eric Sanderson. The question came to me whether or not the First Eric Sanderson had precise intentions, and if so, what they were.

I think back to this quote towards the end of the book:



Which leads me to believe that he might have been facing the despair of losing her again in his memories. It's often said when someone dies that their "memory still lives on". But as anyone who has lost a loved one might tell you, and as I reference in the quote, memories become distorted and increasingly lose substance over time. The person begins to die a second death as time makes us more forgetful.

Now, I'm not entirely sure if I'm getting it right up to this point, but it seems as if his ultimate intention was to revive a complete, unadulterated memory of Clio as he knew her at the time since actually bringing her back to life was impossible.

But, what was his exact intention? To cease to forget her? To give his memory a metaphorical booster-shot? Or was it actually to end up on that seemingly perfect Conceptual World that he encountered at the end of the novel?

Reading through it, it seems almost as if it was by a stroke of luck that everything ended up alright with Clio and him on the conceptual Naxos.

I'm even more flustered as to what that particular Ludovician has to do with anything at all. We know so far from the book that the Ludovician eats memories. Check. We also know that Eric wanted to do something with the Ludovician (perhaps reverse-engineer it? I can't remember off the top of my head whether it is explicitly stated in the book) in order to revive Clio.

My problem is that if his memories were indeed incomplete --as he lamented in the quote I referenced to-- then what relevance has that particular Ludovician? Wouldn't he want to start somewhere with a relatively clean and complete image of her to store or to work with? I would better be able to understand if the Ludovician in question was what was responsible for the initial loss of integrity of his memories of Clio...

So how does it work? How did that Novel-ending explosion of matter and antimatter, Mycroft Ward and Ludovician lead to the resurrection of Clio and Naxos as more than the mere generalizations? And how did this Ludovician factor into any of the First Eric Sanderson's plans? Was the Conceptual Island even ideal?

From my understanding, what happened, at most, throughout the book is that the Second Eric Sanderson regained all the memories that the First Eric Sanderson had just prior to encountering the shark. The island at the end seemed to have been due to the "Conceptual-Enlightenment" he had gotten in his dream that allowed him to drink the glass of water Fidorous had given him.

So what was he trying to do? Improve the situation, or prevent them from getting any worse? Did he even really have in mind what the end result would be?


Please excuse me if the answers to my questions are very obvious. I have trouble comprehending things at times. Always been a little slow.

Interesting that we need to look for clues to the first Eric's intentions... Fidorous tells 2nd Eric that the 1st thought he could save Clio, referencing the Indian belief that being eaten by the shark preserved you in a sort of afterlife. I take it we can't take that at face value then?

My first instinct was that there is something Momento-esque going on, that this was more about an effort to forget Clio than to save her. 1st Eric gives himself up to the Ludovician to have his memories erased, specifically the pain they bring him... but through the letters gives himself a means to reconstruct his life and reunite with her in this conceptual way. That said, the letters suggest he had two intentions - his original plan be be reunited with her in that life, which goes wrong, and his secondary plan for his memory wiped other self.

It's tricky to decipher, and congratulations, first book I've ever read that I'm ready to dive straight back into.

I'm surprised at the lack of discussion on Randle's comment that it was Eric's 12th (or 11th?) recurrence of his memory lapse... this feels like it should be hugely important to unlocking the meaning of TRST. What did these other Eric's do - were they simply idle as the letters were yet to arrive, or did they play an active part in the 'present' narrative. A clue to this, I believe, is Fidorous expressing surprise that 2nd Eric had a cat... that struck me as odd.

I'm not so sure now about the 'other incarnations'... Randle does seem to to suggest the previous recurrences are not as severe as the one which creates 2nd Eric. He just loses more and more memory each time. Interesting though that the first memory he loses is that of the accident... given his grief, maybe he was looking to forget Clio all along.

The comment about the cat is bugging me though.