the Time Being
I've been reading an old book of the best Sci-Fi stories of the year (from 2000 i believe). I just finished one by Ted Chiang, called "The Story of Your Life" which was really good, and got me wondering about our perception of time passing. The story concerns a linguist who is called upon to learn and translate the language of the first aliens landing on earth. The aliens' written language is completely different from their spoken language, and, is written in such a way as to be read in a temporally non-linear fashion. in other words, you don't read the language from left to right or right to left as most human written languages are read, rather the language contains no preferred order.
Of course the spoken language cannot be that way, and, thus, is less interesting to our linguist. The linguist finds herself so possessed by the aliens' written language, that she becomes "unstuck in time" (to borrow from slaughterhouse 5), and starts seeing her own life as moments appearing randomly. thus she experiences her daughters' death and birth, her marriage, etc., "out of order," so to speak.
In Slaughterhouse 5, a much less thoughtful work, but one which i read when I was 10 and was pretty enthralled with, the main character "Billy Pilgrim" gets unstuck in time, and views the moments of his life randomly but, if i remember correctly, he sees the moments more than once. I think this is different than the Ted Chiang story.
In "real" life, we experience a moment, and it is gone forever...like "tears in rain." So if we were to experience moments out of order, we'd still probably only visit them once, correct? Perhaps then we wouldn't build memories, because we wouldn't be alerted that we had to pay attention to this particular moment by the moments that came before. Does this make sense? I mean, you say goodbye to your dying cat, or dying parent, and it means something because of the moments that came before, which tied you to this entity. AND because of the moments which come after, where you know you won't see them ever again. But, if the moment of their dying came randomly, would you pay attention to it? I mean I guess you would, because that moment would probably have all the other moments somehow attached. I don't know.
My ex-husband used to refer to an entity called "the Time Being." So every time you did something "for the time being", it was for this entity. Like, I think I'll stay in this apartment "for the time being"... I tended to think of this entity as a sort of large pacman, eating up moments in a linear progression. But, even pacman can change direction. And what would he (or ms pacman) do if the moments came from every which direction? The time being would become more like the cartoon tasmanian devil...a mini tornado of an entity.
At any rate, the freakin clocks go forward today, which means I have to get up at an even more ungodly hour tomorrow. It would be comforting if I could somehow just skip the moment of the alarm clock...
Of course the spoken language cannot be that way, and, thus, is less interesting to our linguist. The linguist finds herself so possessed by the aliens' written language, that she becomes "unstuck in time" (to borrow from slaughterhouse 5), and starts seeing her own life as moments appearing randomly. thus she experiences her daughters' death and birth, her marriage, etc., "out of order," so to speak.
In Slaughterhouse 5, a much less thoughtful work, but one which i read when I was 10 and was pretty enthralled with, the main character "Billy Pilgrim" gets unstuck in time, and views the moments of his life randomly but, if i remember correctly, he sees the moments more than once. I think this is different than the Ted Chiang story.
In "real" life, we experience a moment, and it is gone forever...like "tears in rain." So if we were to experience moments out of order, we'd still probably only visit them once, correct? Perhaps then we wouldn't build memories, because we wouldn't be alerted that we had to pay attention to this particular moment by the moments that came before. Does this make sense? I mean, you say goodbye to your dying cat, or dying parent, and it means something because of the moments that came before, which tied you to this entity. AND because of the moments which come after, where you know you won't see them ever again. But, if the moment of their dying came randomly, would you pay attention to it? I mean I guess you would, because that moment would probably have all the other moments somehow attached. I don't know.
My ex-husband used to refer to an entity called "the Time Being." So every time you did something "for the time being", it was for this entity. Like, I think I'll stay in this apartment "for the time being"... I tended to think of this entity as a sort of large pacman, eating up moments in a linear progression. But, even pacman can change direction. And what would he (or ms pacman) do if the moments came from every which direction? The time being would become more like the cartoon tasmanian devil...a mini tornado of an entity.
At any rate, the freakin clocks go forward today, which means I have to get up at an even more ungodly hour tomorrow. It would be comforting if I could somehow just skip the moment of the alarm clock...
posted by abigail at 11:03:00 AM
1 Comments:
Most of the time I read your blog because I like it. Right now, I'm reading it because I like it and because I can't sleep. No offense, but I'd rather be sleeping. And I'd still like your blog to boot. Everyone would win. Who invented this zero-sum crap anyway?
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