ARRIVAL--WHY ARE THEY HERE?
2021/02/17閱讀時間約 5 分鐘
For the longest journey would merely return them to the place whence they had come. — Tower of Babylon
Arrival
Ted Chiang
Chapter 1, Tower of Babylon, was my second preference that described the people in Shinar who had built the tower in order to touch the sky and see the god, Yahweh, for a century. As the tower was so tall that it should spend 4 months to climb on the top, the people would send new workers and bricks up to the tower often. And they had a ceremony with delicious food together with those people on the top tower which their meal had been sent to the tower 4 months ago.
Hillalum was a member of the worker team. There came a joke that when I man fell from a tower, others would be thankful for the tool left which can be used by others if they drop the tool carelessly. Moreover, Hillalum had seen the village on the way to the top, there were families that had lived in the tower for decades and they planted vegetables (with the stems all hung downwards because they were higher then the sun) by themselves. The residents there did not have desires to go back to the ground. Then, during the way Hillalum worked, there came a torrent water. Hillalum was too late to escaped the tunnel and he finally fainted. Surprisingly, he woke up on the ground, found that he went back to the Shinar from the sky.
Hillalum was a member of the worker team. There came a joke that when I man fell from a tower, others would be thankful for the tool left which can be used by others if they drop the tool carelessly. Moreover, Hillalum had seen the village on the way to the top, there were families that had lived in the tower for decades and they planted vegetables (with the stems all hung downwards because they were higher then the sun) by themselves. The residents there did not have desires to go back to the ground. Then, during the way Hillalum worked, there came a torrent water. Hillalum was too late to escaped the tunnel and he finally fainted. Surprisingly, he woke up on the ground, found that he went back to the Shinar from the sky.
And then it came to him: a seal cylinder. When rolled upon a tablet of soft clay, the carved cylinder left an imprint that formed a picture. Two figures might appear at opposite ends of the tablet, though they stood side by side on the surface of the cylinder. all the world was as such a cylinder. Men imagined heaven and earth as being at the ends of a tablet, with sky and stars stretched between; yet the world was wrapped around in some fantastic way so that heaven and earth touched.
It dawned on me that sometimes the end of one thing might be the beginning of another one as well. Like the Möbius strip, no matter how long we walk, we will meet together at some time. There perhaps does not exist the absolutely starting point or ending point in the world as every phenomenon such like the water cycle, carbon cycle or the born and death of a human’s life, there are a great amount of example to explain the world.
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