Creating meaning

[QuillPenLove]

After reading Why Fish Don’t Exist, how did the story make you feel about chaos and the way we try to create meaning in life? Since this was a book read by Hwang Hyunjin, what parts of the story do you think might have resonated with him?

Would you recommend this book to someone else, and why or why not? 📚

[minoko]

Since I’m getting on in years, I read this book as if I were looking back on my life. Whether it was about chaos, or the idea that not everything in the water is a fish, or the many things that become invisible behind the labels we attach through naming—it wasn’t a book of fresh, new discoveries, but rather one that made me think, “Oh, that’s right,” and sigh deeply in renewed realization.

If I were to sum it up in a single word, this book told me that, whether regarding chaos or our perspective on life, returning to “nostalgia” is what chaos is, and what our perspective on life is.

I suspect that he, who does not believe in eternity, was drawn not so much to this specific part of the book as to this fleeting nostalgia woven from the interplay of natural science and human emotion.

I believe this is a book in which that somehow warm “nostalgia” soothed the pain—the suffering of being driven into unimaginable chaos by the demands of being an idol, and the immense coldness of scientific laws that label all things in an impersonal manner, seemingly unrelated to such suffering.

I felt that the author had successfully fused natural science and storytelling in this way.

I want my daughter to read this book. The reason is that I feel modern society has forgotten this kind of inexplicable warmth—this “nostalgia.”