story of your life
spoiler alert
i just re-read this novella by ted chiang. it was my 4th time "consuming" the story. the first 2 times were watching and re-watching arrival. the 3rd was while reading story of your life and others. this time i listened to the audiobook. each time i read it, i love it more.
in the story, a linguist named dr. louise banks is tapped by the government to try to communicate with aliens (called heptapods) who have landed on earth. woven in with the story of her efforts to understand the heptapods’ language are her narrations of “memories” of her future unborn daughter’s life.
as the story progresses, she and her research partner/future husband discover that the heptapods don’t experience time the same way humans do, in a chronological order of events with cause-and-effect relationships. the heptapods’ reality is teleological—they are grounded in the underlying purpose of the events in their lives, rather than the occurrence of the events themselves. they experience all time and events at once.
their language, rather than being a tool to convey information, is a way to carry out events they already knew would happen, like acting out a script.
as dr. banks becomes more fluent in the language, she is able to, at times, experience reality in a similar way to them. she describes entering a meditative state where she can see the past and future.
the story starts and ends in the moment her husband asks if she wants to have a baby. knowing all the joy she will experience raising a child, as well as the pain she will experience losing her and going through a divorce with her husband, she says yes.
one metaphor i glazed over on my first read, which i really appreciated on a re-read, was that of a cigarette burning. chiang compares the burning end of the cigarette to the present, and the ashes are memories. for heptapods, there is no distinction between the flame and the ashes—everything is the present. for dr. banks as a human, she still experiences the present and memories as distinct things, but instead of the ashes representing memories of events in the past, they also represent future events.
i think a reason i am drawn to this story is how powerful and human it is. we constantly opt into experiences that we know will bring us joy, suffering, and everything in between. meaning is derived from the experience itself, not knowing that the experience will occur in the future or that it occurred in the past.
there were parts of this message that reminded me of the wisdom of the foretellers in the left hand of darkness by ursula k. le guin. the foretellers can see the future and demonstrate that the knowledge of the future itself is useless.
i also enjoyed how as dr. banks was describing memories of her child, they were out of order, but the story of her heptapod research leading up to her personally understanding time like them was all chronological, following the evolution of her understanding of the heptapod's perspective