How a terrible physics student attempts to understand block time
In my Asian Literature class, I used to teach a unit on my favorite writer, Jhumpa Lahiri, combining some of her short stories with her personal essays on language and translation. While I enjoyed putting the unit together and teaching how Lahiri tells stories through restraint and subtext, my students found her stories to be too sad. I asked my students what stories they preferred to read and many of them said sci-fi. I polled my younger colleagues, several of whom are one zodiac cycle younger than I, and they skewed toward speculative fiction. If I asked an even younger audience, such as my daughter, who is 13 and a voracious reader, her answer would be fantasy. There’s a trend here – a dramatic move away from realistic fiction. Sci-fi and fantasy have never been my go-to genre, but I’ve begun to reframe my understanding of young people’s appetite for alternate realities. It’s not that readers of sci-fi can’t stomach reality, it’s that they prefer reality packaged in a different form. Another way to understand this is through Emily Dickinson’s notion of telling the truth, but telling it slant.
This year, I swapped out Jhumpa Lahiri for Ted Chiang. Ted Chiang is a science fiction writer perhaps best known for the novella, “Story of Your Life,” which was the basis for the 2016 movie, Arrival, starring Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner. In typical sci-fi fashion, aliens play a significant role in this story. The narrator is a linguist hired by the US government to decode alien language so that humans can figure out why the aliens have arrived and what they want from us. Through translation and language acquisition, the narrator begins to experience alien concepts and the aliens’ way of being (because language describes culture – for multilinguals, consider how you are a different person in different languages). The alien’s language model is not linear, based on the logic of cause and effect; rather, idea and expression occur simultaneously, motivated by purpose. The alien’s language is a reflection of their experience of time, not as linear – the way humans live, with the past behind us, and the future yet unknown – but as a plane, where the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously. This is, in fact – with or without the presence of aliens – what physicists call “block time.”
I nearly failed physics in high school, so I won’t pretend to understand block time in a scientific way, but I can offer my understanding through a translation analogy. We usually think of time as a vector with a clear direction, like a train with a destination. But in block time, time is three-dimensional, a space we can inhabit and experience and move around in. In Chinese, time is 時間. 時 is “hour” or “occasion,” and 間 is “in-between,” or the measure word for room or space. In this sense, time is a room where one can enter and, unlike a vector that is only going in one direction, time is inhabited spatially. If I did a literal translation of 時間, it is an “occasion room” one could enter from multiple directions and experience from multiple perspectives.
In “Story of Your Life,” when the narrator begins to understand block time through alien language, she starts to experience future memories. Future memory might seem like an impossibility – how can you have a memory of something that has yet to happen? – but please stay with me. (I did consider writing a note here about spoilers for those who haven’t read the story or watched the movie, but in the spirit of block time, knowing what will happen in the story will not spoil your experience of it.) The most significant future memory the narrator has is the death of her future daughter at the young age of twenty-five. Having a future memory is different from being able to see the future, because it has already happened, and so there is nothing one can do to change the event. But her knowledge of the future can change how she experiences the present moment. It might be easier for us to consider this notion when we think of the past. We know we cannot change the past, but we can – through reflection, learning, and yes, time – change our understanding of it. Let’s return to the idea of time as a room, if you change where you stand in the metaphorical room you’re in, your perspective will change. When you move, you can shift the energy.
Ultimately, teaching Ted Chiang was not very different from teaching Jhumpa Lahiri. Both writers use language and translation as a metaphor for how we understand the world and both writers deal with the unavoidable sadness of the human condition. The truth is, we all know what will happen in the future: We know that nothing lasts forever. And it is the inability to accept this inevitable future that makes us sad. Both writers remind us that a balm for this sadness is – in the words of the narrator of “Story of Your Life” – to “pay close attention and note every detail.” Because in the end, this is what we humans have – a collection of all our past and future memories.
It is almost the last day of 2025. The end of the year is typically a time when we look back to reflect on the past and look ahead to make aspirational promises for the future. But if we think of time as a room, where we can see the past and the future all around us, can we instead aspire to understand the past (the Latin root of “aspire,” Ted Chiang reminds readers in another short story, is “to breathe upon” or “to breathe toward”) and reflect – to “curve toward” the future with awareness and attention?
∞
Since beginning this newsletter at the start of 2025, I’ve written 35 short essays on topics ranging from swimming to theater to karaoke to Buddhism. I really appreciate you being at the receiving end of these dispatches. It has been so meaningful to be in conversation with you – either when you respond to a certain essay or when your presence at the other end allows me to imagine us in dialogue. Whether or not Ted Chiang has convinced you that we exist in block time, may we all live each moment with care and attention. Being able to write micro essays for you here is one way for me to practice noting each detail of the human experience. Thank you.
More to come in the new year.