When I first read the beginning of the novel, I thought it was a memoir written in the first person, writing about when the husband proposed marriage and when the daughter was born, but when I read it, I found that it was not. Because when she tells the story of her daughter when she is 12 years old, she implies that she already knows when her daughter will die, and her husband will later live with another woman, as if in a tone that predicts the future.
The novel, which has also been filmed in 2016, is a science fiction film, written by a very famous Chinese-American science fiction writer named Ted Jiang, and the film adaptation is called "Arrival". The female protagonist is Amy Adams, and the male protagonist is Hawkeye.
The heroine of the story is Louise Banks, a doctor of linguistics, the so-called "story of your life", the "you", refers to her daughter, the book in the middle of the main story, has been interspersed with the story of her daughter's growth process.
At the beginning of the main story, she and her husband have just been married for two years, dancing in the moon after dinner, and her daughter has not yet been born. The acquaintance with her husband and the beginning of "foreknowledge" everything stemmed from the "Story of the Seven-Limbed Barrel"
The story of the "Barrel of Seven Limbs":
One day, alien spacecraft flew from space, and 120 "sight glasses" appeared all over the world, and there were 9 in the United States, through which you can communicate with aliens in space. Then Dr. Louise received a call from the government, and Colonel Weber gave her a recording and gave her and a physicist, Dr. Galle Donnelly (her future husband), on a mission to understand what aliens were doing:
"I want you to talk to aliens and learn their language, can you learn their language without letting them learn English through you?"
Depictions of aliens
Aliens have seven long limbs and a barrel hanging from the axis, which Gerey calls "barrel of seven limbs." There is a circle of eyes around the body of the seven-limbed barrel, there are seven of them, and it has eyes in all directions of its body, and any direction is "directly forward" for it.
Louise learned the language of the "Seven Limbs Barrel" in two ways, and the Seven Limbs Barrel has always been very cooperative.
1, pronunciation, self-introduction, and then guide the alien to introduce themselves, such as "I am Yu Tiantian" I point to myself, and then the seven-limbed barrel will also point to itself to emit a certain vibrating sound, recording this vibrating sound, marking the meaning of "seven-limbed barrel". This can cause errors during this period, take an example from a book:
In 1770, Captain Cook's Effort arrived off the coast of Queensland, Australia. After meeting the local aborigines, a crew member pointed to the animals jumping around with their cubs in their body bags and asked an aboriginal " What is this thing called" The natives said, "Kanguru." Since then, Cook and his men have used the term to refer to the animal (kangaroo). It was a long time before they understood that Kanguru meant in the indigenous language: What do you say? ”
2, writing, because linguists think it is easier to distinguish glyphs than to distinguish phonemes, but later found that their characters are not like English words, more like Chinese, Chinese is phenotypic, English is phonetic. We can learn the pronunciation of English through the appearance of English, but through the appearance of Chinese, it is completely impossible to pronounce the pronunciation. When watching movie reviews, I saw someone say that "seven-limbed barrel" is Chinese change hahaha.
However, the text of the seven-limbed barrel is more special, their language has little to do with the script, and they are two independent systems. The writing of the seven-limbed barrel is not as much as it is about the front, back, left and right, just like their bodies. Every time they write a sentence, they already know how the whole sentence will be laid out long before the first stroke is written.
Even more wonderful is the way the world is perceived behind the language of the seven-limbed barrel, and that way is completely different from ours. We perceive the world in the order of precedence and back, and understand the relationship between various events as cause and effect; while the "barrel of seven limbs" perceives all events at the same time, and there is no boundary between the past, present, and future in their eyes, and they can see both "cause" and "effect" first.
Just when the linguists were at a loss, the physicists made progress, they found that the seven-limbed barrel can be a good repetition of the "Fermat's minimum time law", and the scientists further determined that the linguistic world of the seven-limbed barrel is not composed of causality, but of teleology.
Interesting is the book's explanation of Fermar's law (I can't understand it): Why does light refract when it enters water? The previous understanding was that because water and air were different mediums, the moment light entered the water, it would change its path, but this was the common causal theory.
If it is teleology, the real reason is time.
The author explains this law, which is known as Fermat's law of least time, when light enters the water, the speed of propagation becomes slower, and if the light still goes down in its original straight line, it will take longer to reach its destination. Light needs to extend the path of propagation in the air and shorten the path of propagation in the water, so that the two periods of time are added together, so that the time from A to B becomes the shortest.
I don't know if this explanation can be explained, in short, it chose a path with the shortest time in order to reach its destination faster.
So, does the light complete the path according to the causal theory of "cause and effect", or does it arrange the path "from the beginning of the end" under the given purpose? Is it that the moment it is emitted, it has foreseen all the media to be experienced to reach B, and thus planned the most time-saving path? This is an old problem. This law has been discussed ever since Fermat proposed it in the seventeenth century.
After breaking the deadlock, Louise learned the written language of the seven-limbed barrel, and the memory of the future was like a puzzle board of a huge jigsaw puzzle game, pieced together piece by piece. They did not come in sequence or spliced in order, and soon combined into fifty years of memories.
Language affects people's thinking patterns, which in turn affects the way people perceive the world.
"Sometimes I am completely dominated by the written language of the seven-limbed barrel, and this moment, at a glance, the past and the future burst forth at the same time, and my consciousness becomes the ashes of half a century, and time has not yet reached the ashes. Fifty years of all sorts of things unfolded at a glance, and the rest of my life was in it. And, your whole life. ”
In the book, the last seven limbs of the barrel suddenly all gone, without explanation of intention and without leaving a trace. The movie is different, the movie explains the meaning of the seven-limbed barrel - they know that they need human help in 3,000 years, and come to visit humans in advance.
The story of your life
After the end of the main line, the heroine marries the physicist Gueret, and this way of perceiving the world deeply affects her, so that she has insight into herself and the life of her daughter who does not exist for the time being.
She also foresees that she will divorce someone she loves now. But despite this, she still chose to marry her current husband and give birth to a daughter. It then records what happened in her daughter's life and the unavoidable accident.
She even foresaw herself in the morgue: when a handyman lifted the hood covering the dead, the face of the little girl that appeared was her future daughter, but she could not change it.
The first time I read this story, I thought this science fiction novel was very hardcore, too literary, but yesterday I read this novel for the second time, the feeling was completely different, probably different ages. In my opinion, this novel, its philosophical significance, is far greater than the science fiction value. And this movie is one of the best adaptations I've ever seen.
It involves "fatalism" and "self-awareness",
Two titles in eating chicken suddenly came to mind:
"Heavenly Justice" and "My Destiny is My Destiny"
Whether everything we experience is a fate that has long been arranged, or a different result that comes from different causes of self-awareness. This brings me to several genres:
In Harry Potter, the prophecy says that a child born at the end of July and Voldemort can only have one person alive, so Voldemort identified Harry Potter and always wanted him to die, but thus achieved him step by step;
In Star Wars, the Jedi prophesied that Anakin's wife would die, so Anakin had to blacken in order to protect his wife, but instead prompted his wife's death to become a fact;
In Ancient Greek Mythology, when King Oedipus was born, his father received an oracle saying that when the son grew up, he would kill his father and marry his mother, abandoning him to the wilderness, which accelerated the tragedy of his life of killing his father and marrying his mother;
In the original A Song of Ice and Fire, it is predicted that Cersei will be replaced by a more beautiful queen (the little rose in the original book is not dead) If there is no accident, the little rose will definitely defeat Cersei as predicted. It must also be because Cersei's repeated difficulties have fulfilled her.
The terrible thing about prophecy is that the attempts made by the prophecy figures to change the prophecy have become part of the prophecy and are one of the catalysts for the prophecy to come true.
Therefore, even if the heroine Louise foresees that her daughter will eventually die in an accident, she will embark on this journey of life, because the birth and death of her daughter is an indispensable part of her life, and even an indispensable part of this universe. The death of her daughter will also propel Louise and everything else into the future and the past.
The past is the future, the future is the past, and time is a circle without a beginning and an end. In this way of thinking, human existence is not limited to time and space, but is eternal in the ring.
Our whole life is a stage play that has been rehearsed, and even if we know the ending, we must finish it. We have to go down the script, it's fate, it's like a ritual.
The ending of the story is beautiful, back to where it started, and Louise and her husband finish a dance.
It was now, right in this courtyard, in the moonlight. In many years, I will break up with your father and separate from you again. I knew the end from the beginning, and I chose the path I wanted to take, that is, the only way to go in the future. I followed the path, full of joy, perhaps with pain. At this point, your father asked me, "Do you want a child?" I smiled and said, "Yes." ”
I prefer the last sentence of the original English book:
TO MAKE LOVE,TO MAKE YOU.
I have a superpower,
I can meet all the things in the future,
I know you're going to die soon.
But I will still choose to meet you.