jkatkina

I just finished reading Annihilation and oh by that's going to take a little bit to digest.

A very good book. Speaks a language I understand on a number of fronts, including that very specific something that comes with isolation. The protagonist is something I imagine I would have been had I taken a different path in life: her fascinations simply turned towards ecology rather than people.

Moreover the book ends on a strong, unifying concept, one that I parse as the relationship between searching for knowledge vs. searching for (or witnessing) significance. It poses a question, and then does not offer an answer, and I love it.

Is the search for knowledge -- pulling the data out of the noise -- a somewhat self-deceiving subset of the search for significance? How do you quantify significance? It seems to me like significance might be the subjective equivalent of knowledge, except that even hard data is, to some degree, subjective, given that the parameters of observation are still decided upon by some person, somewhere, with their own set of biases in regards to what is significant enough to record.

There's an interesting line, towards the end of the book, that addresses religion and its need to apply a deeper meaning to things. It is set that up in opposition to the sciences. I think it's largely what put me on the path of thinking about this thematic thread throughout the book.

The search for understanding, particularly in the realm of the scientific, is the search for something, and if that something isn't meaning, what is it? Especially as it can trigger its own experience of transcendence, comparable to what is offered up in religion?

The witnessing of, or experience of, significance?