Thin as Pain

The short story Fragments of a Hologram Rose by William Gibson, the inventor of literary cyberspace, is a futuristic account of a man who, using ‘APPARENT SENSORY PERCEPTION (ASP)’ – a form of human sensory impressions recorded on cassettes – relives the feelings of the woman he once loved, thereby recalling various stages of his life. In the eponymous “draft of a play” (later titled “Thin as Pain”), dance, music and light interpret the text as a parable about the loss of the present through the reality of the past, thereby depicting the existential loneliness inherent in the experience of indelible memories.