Stories of Your Life and Others

by Ted Chiang

It had always seemed inspiring to Hillalum, a tale of thousands of men toiling ceaselessly, but with joy, for they worked to know Yahweh better.

For the first time, he knew night for what it was: the shadow of the earth itself, cast against the sky.

of flax.” Hillalum squinted. “Balconies? What are they for?” “They have soil spread on them, so people may grow vegetables. At this height water is scarce,

However, during one of my forays into number theory, I found a lovely technique for factoring extremely large numbers.

I view the tapestry of human knowledge from a broader perspective than anyone ever has before; I can fill gaps in the design where scholars never even noticed a lack, and enrich the texture in places that they felt were complete.

Classifications like “optics” or “thermodynamics” are just straitjackets, preventing physicists from seeing countless intersections.

I’m designing a new language. I’ve reached the limits of conventional languages, and now they frustrate my attempts to progress further. They lack the power to express concepts that I need, and even in their own domain, they’re imprecise and unwieldy. They’re hardly fit for speech, let alone thought.

unlike Leibniz, I recognize symbolic logic’s limits.

Speaking this language would be out of the question, given the limited bandwidth of the human larynx.

I understand the mechanism of my own thinking. I know precisely how I know, and my understanding is recursive.

What Godel would have given to see this language, where modifying a statement causes the entire grammar to be adjusted.