Exhalation

Author:: Ted Chiang Full Title:: Exhalation Tags:#media/book

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• Summary::
  • summary 1

* highlights from 2021-02-08

* Just as we grow to understand the purpose of customs that seemed pointless to us in our youth, Hassan realized that there was merit in withholding information as well as in disclosing it. ([Location 182](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07GD46PQZ&location=182))
* like infernal fire, grief burns but does not consume; instead, it makes the heart vulnerable to further suffering. ([Location 409](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07GD46PQZ&location=409))
* “Four things do not come back: the spoken word, the sped arrow, the past life, and the neglected opportunity,” ([Location 423](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07GD46PQZ&location=423))
* “Coincidence and intention are two sides of a tapestry, my lord. You may find one more agreeable to look at, but you cannot say one is true and the other is false.” ([Location 449](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07GD46PQZ&location=449))
* Nothing erases the past. There is repentance, there is atonement, and there is forgiveness. That is all, but that is enough. ([Location 510](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07GD46PQZ&location=510))
* People used to speculate about a thought that destroys the thinker, some unspeakable Lovecraftian horror, or a Gödel sentence that crashes the human logical system. It turns out that the disabling thought is one that we’ve all encountered: the idea that free will doesn’t exist. It just wasn’t harmful until you believed it. ([Location 808](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07GD46PQZ&location=808))
* Marco’s talking about the craft sessions that the digients now have every day. These began a few months ago, after an owner wrote software that allowed a few of Data Earth’s on-screen editing tools to be operated from within the Data Earth environment itself. By manipulating a console of knobs and sliders, a digient can now instantiate various solid shapes, change their color, and combine and edit them in a dozen different ways. The digients are in heaven; to them it seems as if they’ve been granted magical powers, and given the way the editing tools circumvent Data Earth’s physics simulation, ([Location 1296](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07GD46PQZ&location=1296))
* There are dungeons without quests, malls without businesses, stadiums without sporting events; it’s the digital equivalent of a postapocalyptic landscape. ([Location 1754](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07GD46PQZ&location=1754))
* Marco and Polo aren’t human, and maybe thinking of them as if they were is a mistake, forcing them to conform to his expectations instead of letting them be themselves. Is it more respectful to treat him like a human being, or to accept that he isn’t one? ([Location 2329](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07GD46PQZ&location=2329))
* Given his mathematical inclination, he viewed a child’s emotional state as an example of a system in unstable equilibrium. His notebooks from the period include the following: “Indulgence leads to misbehavior, which angers the nanny and prompts her to deliver punishment more severe than is warranted. The nanny then feels regret, and subsequently overcompensates with further indulgence. It is an inverted pendulum, prone to oscillations of ever-increasing magnitude. If we can only keep the pendulum vertical, there is no need for subsequent correction.” ([Location 2424](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07GD46PQZ&location=2424))
    * **Note**: Same with procrastination and indulgences to yourself
* The sounds a person made while speaking were as smooth and unbroken as the hide of a goat’s leg, but the words were like the bones underneath the meat, and the space between them was the joint where you’d cut if you wanted to separate it into pieces. By leaving spaces when he wrote, Moseby was making visible the bones in what he said. ([Location 2719](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07GD46PQZ&location=2719))
    * **Tags**: [[blue]]
* “Forgive and forget” goes the expression, and for our idealized magnanimous selves, that is all you needed. But for our actual selves the relationship between those two actions isn’t so straightforward. In most cases we have to forget a little bit before we can forgive; when we no longer experience the pain as fresh, the insult is easier to forgive, which in turn makes it less memorable, and so on. It’s this psychological feedback loop that makes initially infuriating offenses seem pardonable in the mirror of hindsight. ([Location 2746](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07GD46PQZ&location=2746))
* He told you the story with his whole body, and you understood it the same way. None of that was captured on paper; only the bare words could be written down. And reading just the words gave you only a hint of the experience of listening to Kokwa himself, as if one were licking the pot in which okra had been cooked instead of eating the okra itself. ([Location 2793](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07GD46PQZ&location=2793))
* It seemed to me that continuous video of my entire childhood would be full of facts but devoid of feeling, simply because cameras couldn’t capture the emotional dimension of events. As far as the camera was concerned, that afternoon with my grandmother would be indistinguishable from a hundred others. And if I’d grown up with access to all the video footage, there’d have been no way for me to assign more emotional weight to any particular day, no nucleus around which nostalgia could accrete. ([Location 2875](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07GD46PQZ&location=2875))
* 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. ([Location 2887](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07GD46PQZ&location=2887))
* Before a culture adopts the use of writing, when its knowledge is transmitted exclusively through oral means, it can very easily revise its history. It’s not intentional, but it is inevitable; throughout the world, bards and griots have adapted their material to their audiences and thus gradually adjusted the past to suit the needs of the present. The idea that accounts of the past shouldn’t change is a product of literate cultures’ reverence for the written word. ([Location 3136](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07GD46PQZ&location=3136))
* Because I think there are events of another category that are likewise not fixed in a causal chain: acts of volition. Free will is a kind of miracle; when we make a genuine choice, we bring about a result that cannot be reduced to the workings of physical law. Every act of volition is, like the creation of the universe, a first cause. ([Location 3690](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07GD46PQZ&location=3690))
* We human beings may not be the answer to the question why, but I will keep looking for the answer to how. ([Location 3708](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07GD46PQZ&location=3708))
* For a hypothetical time traveler who wanted to prevent Hitler’s rise to power, the minimal intervention wasn’t smothering the baby Adolf in his crib; all that was needed was to travel back to a month before his conception and disturb an oxygen molecule. Not only would this replace Adolf with a sibling, it would replace everyone his age or younger. By 1920 that would have composed half of the world’s population. ([Location 3990](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07GD46PQZ&location=3990))
* “And it’s not just your behavior in this branch that you’re changing: you’re inoculating all the versions of you that split off in the future. By becoming a better person, you’re ensuring that more and more of the branches that split off from this point forward are populated by better versions of you.” ([Location 4532](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07GD46PQZ&location=4532))
* The difference is that the heat energy we radiate is a high-entropy form of energy, meaning it’s disordered. The chemical energy we absorb is a low-entropy form of energy, meaning it’s ordered. In effect, we are consuming order and generating disorder; we live by increasing the disorder of the universe. It’s only because the universe started in a highly ordered state that we are able to exist at all. ([Location 4701](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07GD46PQZ&location=4701))