"…Then they send me those ridiculous videos that they think are so daring, the video’s a real curse, and even then I often arrange to meet them, as if nothing that happens before the actual meeting counts. It’s too artificial, I think, people behave differently when they’re face to face. It’s as if I was giving them another chance, forgetting what they made of their first chance, or what I made of mine. It’s an odd thing but, regardless of the falseness of the situation in which they’re made, the videos never lie. You see, you watch a video the way you watch television, with impunity. We never look so closely or brazenly at anyone in the flesh, because in any other circumstance we know that the other person will also be watching us, or that they might see us watching them on the sly. It’s an infernal invention, it’s put an end to transience, to the possibility of deceiving oneself and describing the way things happened differently from how they actually did happen. They’ve put an end to memory, which was imperfect and open to manipulation, selective and variable. Now that you can’t remember something at your leisure once it’s been recorded, how can you remember something that you know you can see again, exactly as it happened, in slow motion if you like? How can you possibly alter it?" (p. 156)