'Replacement' by Tor Ulven

To relieve himself of a lifetime of disappointment, an old man, lying incapacitated in bed, separates the part of himself that experiences from the part that observes the experiences. His memories are thereby pushed away from him as speaker and onto an unspecified auditor addressed as "you": perhaps the ‘person’ thought of as him (or the reader assailed by the text). These ‘memories’, relieved of overarching story and meaning, are restored as experiences in the present tense, in which everything is equally detailed, intense and (un)important; in which the ‘momentous’ and the mundane have absolute equivalence. What we (in)conveniently think of as a person can be seen as little more than a sequence of little bundles of experience, each replacing the last rather than accreting into a single identity.

(July 2013)