Story of Your Life: Reading Notes
BY Xiaoyi Cai (Mia) Date: 10/03/2020
Summary:
Louis, a professor of linguistics, changed her thinking into a totally different way because of the arrival of heptapods (aliens). She deciphered their languages and even learned them. During this process, she gained the knowledge of how heptaods thought, instead of perceiving the relationship of events as cause and effect, they perceived a purpose underlying them all, which enabled her to foresee the future. Despite knowing the future, she did not do anything that would change the future, and just obeyed the original path of the future.
Heptapod:
A creature that looked like a barrel suspended at the intersection of seven limbs, which was also radially symmetric and any of its limbs that had no distinct joints could serve as an arm or a leg. There were seven lidless eyes ringed the top of the heptapod’s body. The texture of its gray skin was like corduroy ridges arranged in whorls and loops. Hetapods fluttered thee sound as their verbal tool, which was quite different from a human’s way to speak. Their script isn’t word-divided; a sentence is written by joining the logograms for the constituent words. The writing of heptapods didn’t appear to be writing at all; it looked more like a bunch of intricate graphic designs. The writing system referred to ‘Heptapod B,’ and ‘Heptapod A’ referred to the spoken language. Heptapod mathematics and human mathematics were equivalent, which indicated that heptapods and humans experienced the same world, but used different approaches to explain themselves. They experienced all events at once and perceived a purpose underlying them all, which varied from us.
Final Thoughts:
After reading the “story of your life”, I obtained a new way to think about the world. Also, the conclusion that the story impresses me a lot, which expresses that there is only one choice between free will and predicting the future. In other words, everything is doomed in fact. Last but not least, I want to emphasize the writhing style of Ted, which I have never experienced before. He let all the timelines be disrupted and alternate narratives with two clues advancing side by side. One line is to decipher the language of the heptapod barrel, and the other line is the life of the future child. This unique writing style makes rational discovery and perceptual memory be combined organically, which let the article to be more interesting.