Exhalation
Quotes and highlights from Exhalation by Ted Chiang — 11 passages I marked up while reading (August 2023), 1 of which carry a note I left in the margin. Everything below is taken straight from my Kindle, unedited and in the order I read it.
What this book keeps circling back tofallibility, memory, stories and exactly.
Where I stopped to argue
The passage I had something of my own to say about.
We are not really consuming air at all. The amount of air that I draw from each day’s new pair of lungs is exactly as much as seeps out through the joints of my limbs and the seams of my casing, exactly as much as I am adding to the atmosphere around me;
in the marginLinks to Into The Cool
All 11 highlights
for like infernal fire, grief burns but does not consume; instead, it makes the heart vulnerable to further suffering.
“Four things do not come back: the spoken word, the sped arrow, the past life, and the neglected opportunity,”
We are not really consuming air at all. The amount of air that I draw from each day’s new pair of lungs is exactly as much as seeps out through the joints of my limbs and the seams of my casing, exactly as much as I am adding to the atmosphere around me;
in the marginLinks to Into The Cool
Civilization now depends on self-deception. Perhaps it always has.
People are made of stories.
It seemed to me that a perfect memory couldn’t be a narrative any more than unedited security-cam footage could be a feature film.
Within our minds, each of us will be transformed from an oral culture into a literate one.
What digital memory will do is change those stories from fabulations that emphasize our best acts and elide our worst, into ones that—I hope—acknowledge our fallibility and make us less judgmental about the fallibility of others.
Let me always be inquisitive, but never be suspicious.
Let me be compassionate while remaining true to my convictions. Amen.
If we have only ever been on our own, then our successes in spite of that are proof of our capabilities.
What I've written around this
Where these ideas turn up in my own work.
- On City LightsLights on used to provide such a weird sense of comfort and wonder as a child.
- Chapter 2
- On the Midjourney whole-body scanner
Read alongside
Other books on the shelf that cover similar ground.
I write about what I read — medicine, technology, and what holds up across centuries — in Side Effects. The essays live in the archive, and the rest of the shelf is on Book Notes.