“Story of Your Life” depicts time not as an external reality but as a subjective experience. It tells the story of first contact between humans and an extraterrestrial species called heptapods, who subjectively experience their lives as a single simultaneous instant rather than a progression from birth to death. The first description of the heptapods hints at the strange way they experience time. They have seven arms and seven eyes arrayed around their torsos, so that their bodies have no front or back. The heptapods’ simultaneous orientation toward all points foreshadows the revelation that they can remember both the past and the future, an ability that suggests time is not an external reality marching straight from the past to the future, but rather an experience that changes according to one’s characteristics.
The heptapods are the most dramatic example in “Story of Your Life” of time as a subjective experience, but they are not the only example. The narrator, Dr. Louise Banks, also expresses a subjective experience of time in her relationship with her daughter. By learning the heptapods’ written language, Heptapod B, Louise gains their ability to remember the future as well as the past. Thus, she knows exactly what is going to happen in her daughter’s life. Yet she’s repeatedly surprised at how fast her daughter grows up: for example, she is shocked when her adolescent daughter is embarrassed to be seen with her at the mall and shocked again when her daughter graduates from college. Louise already knows what will happen, but because time is a subjective experience, she is still capable of being surprised by its passage. In this sense, “Story of Your Life” suggests that time is an internal, subjective experiences rather than an external, objective reality.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Time ThemeTracker
Time Quotes in Story of Your Life
Your father is about to ask me the question. This is the most important moment in our lives, and I want to pay attention, note every detail. Your dad and I have just come back from an evening out, dinner and a show; it’s after midnight. We came out onto the patio to look at the full moon; then I told your dad I wanted to dance, so he humors me and now we’re slow-dancing, a pair of thirtysomethings swaying back and forth in the moonlight like kids. I don’t feel the night chill at all. And then your dad says, “Do you want to make a baby?”
[…]
I’d love to tell you the story of this evening, the night you’re conceived, but the right time to do that would be when you’re ready to have children of your own, and we’ll never get that chance.
Seven lidless eyes ringed the top of the heptapod’s body. It walked back to the doorway from which it entered, made a brief sputtering sound, and returned to the center of the room followed by another heptapod; at no point did it ever turn around. Eerie, but logical; with eyes on all sides, any direction might as well be ‘forward.’
“Their script isn’t word divided; a sentence is written by joining the logograms for the constituent words. They join the logograms by rotating and modifying them. Take a look.” I showed him how the logograms were rotated.
“So they can read a word with equal ease no matter how it’s rotated,” Gary said. He turned to look at the heptapods, impressed. “I wonder if it’s a consequence of their body’s radial symmetry: their bodies have no ‘forward’ direction, so maybe their writing doesn’t either. Highly neat.”
“I wanna be in Hawaii now,” you’ll whine.
“Sometimes it’s good to wait,” I’ll say. “The anticipation makes it more fun when you get there.”
You’ll just pout.
It won’t have been that long since you enjoyed going shopping with me; it will forever astonish me how quickly you grow out of one phase and enter another. Living with you will be like aiming for a moving target; you’ll always be further along than I expect.
As I grew more fluent, semagraphic designs would appear fully formed, articulating even complex ideas all at once. My thought processes weren’t moving any faster as a result, though. Instead of racing forward, my mind hung balanced on the symmetry underlying the semagrams. The semagrams seemed to be something more than language; they were almost like mandalas. I found myself in a meditative state, contemplating the way in which premises and conclusions were interchangeable. There was no direction inherent in the way propositions were connected, no “train of thought” moving along a particular route; all the components in an act of reasoning were equally powerful, all having identical precedence.
NOW is the only moment you’ll perceive; you’ll live in the present tense. In many ways, it’s an enviable state.
Freedom isn’t an illusion; it’s perfectly real in the context of sequential consciousness. Within the context of simultaneous consciousness, freedom is not meaningful, but neither is coercion; it’s simply a different context, no more or less valid than the other. It’s like that famous optical illusion, the drawing of either an elegant young woman, face turned away from the viewer, or a wart-nosed crone, chin tucked down on her chest. There’s no “correct” interpretation; both are equally valid. But you can’t see both at the same time.
Working with the heptapods changed my life. I met your father and learned Heptapod B, both of which make it possible for me to know you now, here on the patio in the moonlight. Eventually, many years from now, I’ll be without your father, and without you. All I will have left from this moment is the heptapod language. So I pay close attention, and note every detail.
From the beginning I knew my destination, and I chose my route accordingly. But am I working toward an extreme of joy, or of pain? Will I achieve a minimum, or a maximum?
