Exhalation
Before diving in, some life updates first: I just moved to California last week. I think I like it here. The weather suits me. The people I work with are generous, brilliant, and humble. I feel a sense of purpose again, and after sixteen months at home, the change of scenery has definitely helped. That said, it’s now 1 am, and I still haven’t slept (r.i.p. my sleep schedule, again).
I first picked up this book at Kinokuniya in New York last February, the month before everything changed. There, I started reading “The Merchant at the Alchemist’s Gate.” I can’t help but compare all the science fiction I read these days to Ken Liu. Ted Chiang is more philosophical but less literary; his fiction reads a bit like “The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species.”
These stories touch on many themes: cognition; free will; love; time; memory; humanity’s search for meaning. I confess that I didn’t fully understand these stories, especially they are so rich. Considering that I essentially pulled an all-nighter reading this book (and that was last week), there are many details from this book that I don’t remember. But I think my favorite stories from this collection were “The Merchant at the Alchemist’s Gate,” “The Lifecycle of Software Objects,” “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling,” and “Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom.”
Some thoughts:
If we are able to revisit the past but not change it, which is something we are able to do now, we can only grow from remembering the good or forgiving ourselves and others.
Truth is subjective. The narratives we create will change with the adoption of digital or artificial remembrance - even things like taking videos and photographs, recording conversations on Zoom or Otter.ai, and using smart glasses like Google Glass or Snapchat Lens. Ted Chiang made a really astute observation when he wrote, “Our memories are not the impartial accumulation of every second we’ve lived; they’re the narrative that we assembled out of selected moments.” In a sense, writing, or any documentation, is a form of artificial remembrance. As technology evolves, our recall will, too. Storytelling might look different (or require different mediums), but it will nonetheless continue to exist.
To love is to sacrifice. This strikes me as a very Chinese value, and it’s certainly how I conceive of my love for my parents (the only real love I have felt yet) or the love they have for each other. It is about a willingness to expend effort. Love isn’t Breakfast at Tiffany’s - it’s what I see in the life that my parents have built for my brother and me; making up after an argument, doing chores together, finding pleasure in the little things (a good meal, a good conversation), sharing trust. That is the love I want to build one day for my family.
On digital memory: I’m brought back to Ken Liu’s The Paper Menagerie, where he explores similar themes.
We are now a race of cyborgs. We long ago began to spread our minds into the electronic realm, and it is no longer possible to squeeze all of ourselves back into our brains. The electronic copies of yourselves that you wanted to destroy are, in a literal sense, actually you.
And this:
Churchill said that we shape our buildings, and afterward our buildings shape us. We made machines to help us think, and now the machines think for us.
Here is Liu’s commentary:
The first person in recorded history to make this argument was arguably Plato, who, in Phaedrus, cautioned against writing: “This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.” We now know that Plato was at least partly right. Literacy has fundamentally altered the way we wield language and think, and even our oral expressions now are steeped in literary devices. (For more on this topic, I recommend Walter J. Ong’s Orality and Literacy.)
I don’t know how our consciousness will be altered by ever-tighter coupling with our technologies. I don’t think that’s inherently a negative development. As a technologist and programmer, I have a natural affinity for the idea that the brain can write code and code can also rewrite the brain. Writing has made us both more and less human, and perhaps these cognition-enhancing machines will do the same.
# 💬 Quotes that stuck
“Instead, he asked young Hassan to remind him of the pranks he had played as a child, and he laughed to hear stories that had faded from his own memory.”
“Like infernal fire, grief burns but does not consume; instead, it makes the heart vulnerable to further suffering.”
“Four things do not come back: the spoken word, the sped arrow, the past life, and the neglected opportunity.”
“Past and future are the same, and we cannot change either, only know them more fully. My journey to the past had changed nothing, but what I had learned had changed everything, and I understood that it could not have been otherwise. If our lives are tales that Allah tells, then we are the audience as well as the players, and it is by living these tales that we receive their lessons.”
“Nothing erases the past. There is repentance, there is atonement, and there is forgiveness. That is all, but that is enough.”
“I hope that you were motivated by a desire for knowledge, a yearning to see what can arise from a universe’s exhalation. Because even if a universe’s life span is calculable, the variety of life that is generated within it is not. The buildings we have erected, the art and music and verse we have composed, the very lives we’ve led: none of them could have been predicted, because none of them was inevitable. Our universe might have slid into equilibrium emitting nothing more than a quiet hiss. The fact that it spawned such plenitude is a miracle, one that is matched only by your universe giving rise to you.”
“Like a legion of Bartleby the scriveners, they no longer engage in spontaneous action.”
“The issue wasn’t confined to marriages; all sorts of relationships rely on forgiving and forgetting.”
“People are made of stories. Our memories are not the impartial accumulation of every second we’ve lived; they’re the narrative that we assembled out of selected moments.”
“He had come to trust what was written on paper over what was said by people, and that wasn’t the Tiv way.”
“As someone whose identity was built on organic memory, I’m threatened by the prospect of removing subjectivity from our recall of events. I used to think it could be valuable for individuals to tell stories about themselves, valuable in a way that it couldn’t be for cultures, but I’m a product of my time, and times change. We can’t prevent the adoption of digital memory any more than oral cultures could stop the arrival of literacy, so the best I can do is look for something positive in it.”
“It’s no coincidence that “aspiration” means both hope and the act of breathing. When we speak, we use the breath in our lungs to give our thoughts a physical form. The sounds we make are simultaneously our intentions and our life force. I speak, therefore I am. Vocal learners, like parrots and humans, are perhaps the only ones who fully comprehend the truth of this.”
“Sex isn’t what makes a relationship real; the willingness to expend effort maintaining it is. Some lovers break up with each other the first time they have a big argument; some parents do as little for their children as they can get away with; some pet owners ignore their pets whenever they become inconvenient…It’s similar to the way movies always depict love in terms of grand romantic gestures when, over the long term, love also means working through money problems and picking dirty laundry off the floor.”