As much as her human body can, she experiences the whole universe at once, and time loses much of its significance. Though I don’t think she would use that phrase. This quote gives away the fact that Louise can “see into the future”. It’s a period encompassing the rest of my life, and the entirety of yours.” (p36). I perceive-during those glimpses-that entire epoch as a simultaneity.
She notes, “I have glimpses when heptapod B truly reigns, and I experience past and future all at once my consciousness becomes a half century long ember burning outside time. Louise, once becoming proficient in this, admits to it changing the way she thought about the world. I think what allows the two stories to be connected is the Heptapod B written language. Neither story is more important, as they are distractions to get to the real story that this amazing encounter opened new doors for Louise. The heptapods’ “language” is a very unusual language which allows visualizing things as a whole like an entire sentence appearing at once or an entire.
Humans can reflect so we are not just stuck thinking about things ahead, yet we don’t really know what’s really going to happen in the future. People speak and our lives unfold in a linear, chronological fashion. It’s really hard to know when she writes the letter, yet I believe that she is actually writing about her daughter’s future, and she is writing when her daughter is two years old, based on the second paragraph of the story, as she says “Right now your dad and I have been married for about two years”, and she’s writing about everything that will happen up to the end. When she’s writing to her daughter, its sounding like she is going back in time, reflecting on her life, writing something after it’s all happened. She can see everything that’s going to happen as well. Her memories are also very vivid, as they are just her life in its entirety. She can go back to her memories as if it was now, and also go forward to those future events as well, and see the day her daughter dies. You think the story is about aliens, and this bizarre encounter with these strange creatures, when all along it’s about the fact that the aliens are much wiser than us, and Louise actually benefits from her work with them, giving her wisdom and a completely new way of thinking. The stories are intertwined, as the language and the heptapods connect the two stories, as the heptapods give Louise the gift of seeing everything in its entirety, and to always be in the present. This is the moment that truly connects the two stories for me, because we now know why Louise is writing half the story addressed to her daughter, who we also now know she chose to have despite being aware of her imminent young death. They act to create the future, to enact chronology”) and it is in this moment that Louise decides knowing the future doesn’t change anything and she cannot act contrary to it (“now that I know the future, I would never act contrary to that future, including telling others what I know”). The heptapods have effectively convinced her of the inevitability of the future (“what distinguishes the heptapods’ mode of awareness is… that their motives coincide with history’s purposes.
STORY OF YOUR LIFE ARRIVAL HOW TO
The future is the connection between the two stories in the story of Louise deciphering how to communicate with the heptapods, we learn how she came about being able to see the future, while in the story addressing her daughter it is about letting the future play out in the way she has seen it.