Story of Your Life- Ted Chiang Thoughts

it has been a few days since i read this but maybe thats better to gwt a somewhat lasting impression of my thoughts of it. what sticks out most is its relation to my thoughts on time and how humans perceive it. how we look at it like a chronological timeline but whos to say it exists like that? when we exist in the present and communicate with each other what is the purpose? to create a reality we want? but what if it was all predetermined and we are acting theough a ritual like process.

i loved the linguistic focus of this story. i wish there had been imagery of the alien written language, heptapod B i think. there was a diagram of the physical property of light. that was a particularly strange but meaningful relationship i felt. light refracts its direction in water because of the physical properties of light being able to travel faster in air than water. but the light takes a specific path that ultimately leads to the least resistant, most efficient, and quickest direction. its as if the light beam already knows exactly where it is going before it could even be there. its direction refracts in way that decides to move through air to get as close to the final direction before traveling slower thru water. but its such a complex set of directions that it atuomatically or instinctively seems to follow. how can it always know where to go and its way before being there. or as it moves? i wonder how heptapod A, the spoke lnaguage, works. is it more similar to human language? maybe that was mention idk.

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