Reading Remembrance of Earth's Past

I finished Cixin Liu’s trilogy, Remembrance of Earth’s Past, in two weeks from beginning to end. I found it wonderful. Its answer to the Fermi paradox seems so simple and so brutal, so desolate and so trivial.

Reading it evoked so many feelings: insignificance, vastness, meaninglessness, wonder, the satisfaction of intellectual curiosity, discovery, amazement. I have read most of Kurt Vonnegut’s work and experienced similar feelings there.

During some chapters of the third book, Death’s End, I was listening to Agriculture’s The Spiritual Sound. The emotions evoked by the music blended into this image of brutalist space, relativity, time dilation and frequency shifts.

Something similar happened when I read The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn while listening to Takashi Yoshimatsu’s piano works on Crystal Dream. The music blended with the brutal violence, morphing into the indifferent blooming and rotting of the human universe. Years later, I listen again and experience similar feelings.

Art moves me in two directions. These novels bring an explosion of unfamiliar emotions that might become motivation or a change of direction. The other reaches inward. Recently, the rhythm of Dance Me to the End of Love moved me to write poems. Lines of 7–8 or 14–16 syllables appeared in my head, fully formed and fitting the song’s rhythm without effort. The lines were anchored to people and events deep in my past, uncovering emotions buried there. The novels open up unfamiliar feelings; the poems draw out my own.