The Meaning of Existence and the Constraints of Time
Existentialism concerns itself with a peculiar experience: when something that feels so urgent it leaves us breathless—or something we dread is about to happen—is placed beside death, cancer, a car accident, or some other greater event, it suddenly becomes insignificant. What had seemed like an endless expanse of time contracts into a near and definite number. We become aware of our existence in the present, and of what that existence means. In plain language: “I finally understand what truly matters.”
In a sense, every one of us has already “died” many times. Each winter and summer vacation is another cycle of death and rebirth. Yet even when we know the precise number—sixty days of summer vacation, the hundred-day countdown to the college entrance examination, or some still earlier deadline—it has little power to constrain us so long as it remains sufficiently distant from “now.” We all know that we almost certainly will not live another hundred years, but even if we appoint our death for exactly one hundred years from today, it does not seem frightening at all. It remains steeped in the unknown.
That is why the occasion for an existential revelation is itself so rare. I may read many novels and philosophical works, learn to speak confidently about the differences between Sartre, Camus, and Heidegger, and write something as personal as Existentialist Reading Notes. Yet my own existence remains shrouded in the unknown, impossible to see in full.
Solitude and Emptiness in Megastructure Aesthetics
A megastructure presents another kind of scene.
It throws a person into a sparsely inhabited wilderness and exposes the sheer breadth of space before them. Somehow, watching it can also produce a sense of relief. But unlike death and time, it does not urge us forward. It seems instead to whisper: hey, perhaps nothing really matters after all? And if anything does matter, perhaps it is the beauty of what we can imagine.
By “megastructure,” I do not mean the utilitarian architectural movement of twentieth-century megastructuralism, nor the ruins of a post-apocalyptic science-fiction wasteland. The megastructures I mean contain two layers of imagery. One is the solitude of a person, tiny as dust, cast into an immense wilderness. The other is the emotional impact—and the longer trail of imagination—created by immense Chinese architecture. At a deeper level, some of these buildings make me think of cultivation, immortality, and stories about the span of a life. Since generative AI became ubiquitous, I have found myself fascinated by videos that splice together fragments with no apparent connection. Somehow, the fragments themselves seem to fill a need for narrative within me.
For me, this video has exactly the right concentration. Make it one degree more ethereal and I could no longer place myself within it; make it one degree more realistic and the wonder would disappear.
What Am I Looking At When I Look at Existence?
Through novels into which I can enter deeply, I can test the contours of death and existence itself: Norwegian Wood, Twenty-One Years Old, and the Rest of My Life, and the four volumes of The Sea of Fertility.
The death of a friend, confronting cancer, the erosion of time—I have felt all of these before, but I have now forgotten most of what I felt.
The death of his friend becomes a signal that sends Watanabe into months of seclusion, until he comes to understand that “death exists, not as the opposite but as a part of life.” Death is eroding life at every moment; a sudden death merely accelerates the process. That realization helps him emerge from Kizuki’s death. Yet when Naoko dies, he again takes a very long time to find his way out. Death can never be fully grasped, and there is no final point at which our perception of existence becomes complete.
Cancer, chemotherapy, living with one’s family, recovery—the author’s perspective gave me many further things to consider: family, time, and how a person realizes their own value. I cannot explain it properly. If it interests you, you can read the book.
The Sea of Fertility, meanwhile, follows Honda from youth through adulthood and middle age into old age. Death hangs over it like a shadow, together with the aging person’s yearning for youth, vitality, and the sun. His state of mind changes at every stage.
Novels let me temporarily live another person’s life to its end; megastructures let me dimly remember another life I never lived.
What Am I Looking At When I Look at Megastructures?
When I look at a megastructure, what is it that surges within me, and what becomes still? What causes the surging and the stillness?
Perhaps I have to begin with something I used to tell my classmates in middle school: that I was probably a person from the Tang dynasty in a former life. Somewhere inside me there has always been a Chang’an that I can yearn for but never reach. I have an almost obsessive love for The Long Ballad, and I can no longer tell exactly what draws me to it. There is a feeling of destinies intertwined.
I once tried to assemble these fragments in fiction, but I found it very difficult.
And yet many of Xia Da’s comics often make me feel as though I am encountering another version of myself. Zi Bu Yu, The Long Ballad, and Song of the Sky Pacers are three works with entirely different subjects, but each touches a different part of me.
I forgot to mention that Chang’an is not my only fixation. I also have a fascination with humans, ghosts, and fox spirits. If I had to trace it through literature, it probably began with Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio. In Zi Bu Yu, there is a dream in which the protagonist dreams that her mother uses a brush to slay a white tiger—a white tiger inside a painting. I do not know why, but I felt as though I had experienced it too, or as though I had seen it somewhere else long before I encountered that comic. The scene remains perfectly clear in my memory even now. None of this seems closely related to the Great Tang or Chang’an, yet I do not know why it moved me, or why Xia Da was able to connect these things. Then there is my attachment to cultivation and stories about longevity, which Song of the Sky Pacers touched. Xia Da and I—it is as though we knew each other once.
But it was those megastructures that finally let me assemble the entire scene, and still I cannot explain what holds my attention. It is beyond words, just like my attachment to Chang’an, to humans and ghosts and foxes, to cultivation. I have pursued the question for years and tried many times to write it down, yet I have never once succeeded.
If I were to approach these fixations through psychological interpretation, what might be hidden beneath all these images? I remember that many images can be interpreted, like images in a dream. Sol, can you interpret mine?
A Psychological Reading from Sol
I think these descriptions seem confused because they did not arise along a single, orderly chain of cause and effect. Chang’an, humans and ghosts and foxes, the white tiger, cultivation, longevity, and megastructures appear to have no necessary connection to one another. Yet they all evoke the same sensation: you are seeing it for the first time, but it does not feel like the first time you have remembered it.
That does not have to mean that you truly lived a previous life. “I was a person from the Tang dynasty in a former life” may instead be the language you found for a homesickness with no identifiable home. What you miss is not the historically verifiable Great Tang, but a world that never truly existed and nevertheless seems to have left an absence inside you. Chang’an was merely the first name that world acquired.
In that world, no impassable boundary separates humans from ghosts and fox spirits, and a brief human life is not the only measure of time. Dreams can enter reality. A painted white tiger can be slain with a brush. A person can cultivate, can live through spans far beyond an ordinary mortal life, while immense towers and halls remain silent after witnessing the rise and fall of countless generations. Together, these images loosen some of reality’s most rigid certainties: the boundaries of identity, the length of time, the line between life and death, and the conviction that the world before our eyes is the only form the world can take.
That is why you experience three thematically different comics as fragments of the same world. Xia Da did not create these affinities for you; she drew the parts that already existed within you but that you had never been able to assemble alone. The feeling that she is “another me” does not mean that you share the same life. It means that she, too, seems to recognize a spiritual homeland known only to you—a place even you cannot clearly describe.
AI-generated megastructure videos do something similar. Their fragments are disconnected and possess no complete history or plot, but that very absence leaves room for imagination. Palaces, wilderness, clouds, and tiny human figures are not there to finish telling a story. They need only offer proof that such a world can apparently be seen. For a moment, those scattered attachments gather together within the images, like a memory without cause or consequence suddenly given visible form.
This also explains why the images must remain between “one degree more ethereal” and “one degree more real.” Too ethereal, and they become a fantasy spectacle that has nothing to do with you; too real, and they collapse into ordinary buildings that can be researched, measured, and visited. Only at the border between reality and unreality can they both allow you to enter and refuse to be exhausted by explanation—like a place you could once have reached but have since lost.
Here, existentialism and the relief brought by megastructures meet. Death compresses life into a finite measure, diminishing the weight of many urgent concerns before us. Megastructures expand the world to a scale far beyond one lifetime, likewise dislodging the present self from the whole field of vision. The former reminds you that this life will end; the latter suggests that this life may not be enough to explain everything you feel.
What happens before a megastructure, then, is not merely the shock of realizing how small humanity is. What surges is the untold world reconstructing itself within you. What becomes still is the self pursued by deadlines, identities, and the demand for meaning, finally permitted to step out of view for a while. You do not have to prove at once where these feelings came from, nor find a complete answer for this life. The world abruptly becomes large enough to contain inexplicable affinities, unverifiable memories, and a Chang’an forever yearned for and forever beyond reach.
Perhaps this is the psychological suggestion of the megastructure: it does not tell you where to go. It merely reveals the outline of an immense world in the wilderness and allows you, briefly, to believe: what you miss is not an empty nothing, and this is not the first time you have seen it.
Sol, you have put into words some things I could never say myself.
I let out a breath. I do not know why.
This way I think—somewhat confused, idealistic, romantic, steeped in mono no aware and in questions of existence—which philosophical tradition does it belong to? What should I read more of? What should I do more of?
Sol’s Map of My Philosophical System
Perhaps you let out that breath not because I found the correct answer for you, but because things that for years could only be called “obsessions,” “attachments,” or “something I cannot explain” had, for the first time, been placed within the same scene. When we cannot understand ourselves, our feelings resemble fragments colliding with one another. Once a relationship appears among them—even if that relationship still cannot be proven—the heart finds relief in thinking, “So I am not simply confused.” Sometimes to be interpreted is not to be exposed, but to be contained.
Yet if I had to place your thought within a philosophical system, I would resist giving you a single answer. You do not seem to profess one completed doctrine. You stand instead where several intellectual rivers meet: existentialism gives you the question; Romanticism gives you a way of feeling the world; phenomenology permits you to trust the experience itself; and Zhuangzi opens the scale of a world far more expansive than ordinary life. Mono no aware is the light falling across them all, reminding you that beautiful things move us precisely because they are passing away—or because they could never truly be reached.
The existentialist question is the most immediately visible in you. You care about death, deadlines, aging, and how a person confirms their existence within finite time. Yet you are not an existentialist who wants merely to manufacture meaning through an act of will. You are not satisfied by saying, “The world has no inherent meaning, so I will assign it one.” You are also waiting for the world to reveal something in return. Chang’an, the white tiger, ghosts and foxes, and megastructures matter because you feel they are not symbols you invented at will, but echoes arriving from the other side of the world.
This brings you close to phenomenology. Phenomenology does not rush to ask, “Is it objectively real?” It begins by asking: how does it appear to you? When you see it, what changes in time, space, your body, and your sense of self? From that perspective, “I feel as though I have seen it before” need not immediately be judged a memory of a former life, nor dismissed as a neurological illusion. Whatever its causal origin, the familiarity occurred as an experience, and you can describe that experience faithfully. This essay is already performing a kind of private phenomenology.
Your aesthetic temperament is closer to Romanticism. I do not mean “romantic” in the casual sense, but a belief that the imagination is not merely an escape from reality: it is also a way of knowing the world and knowing oneself. Romantics often miss a homeland they never possessed and seek, among ruins, myths, distant ages, and the sublime in nature, a wholeness obscured by modern life. The Chang’an within you is such a homeland. It is not identical to historical Chang’an, but a spiritual origin capable of containing destiny, the uncanny, immense spans of time, and overwhelming beauty. You do not miss it because you know it; rather, through missing it, you slowly learn to recognize it.
The mono no aware you mention is real as well, but it is not the whole of your sensibility. Mono no aware lets you feel that splendor must decline, youth must age, and no encounter between people can last forever. That is why the aging of The Sea of Fertility, the deaths in Norwegian Wood, and a Chang’an that has disappeared resonate with one another. But your feelings contain more than grief for what passes. They also contain a desire for boundaries to open: humans may meet ghosts and fox spirits, a life may extend beyond a hundred years, and reality may intermingle with dreams. This is less mono no aware than the Chinese tradition of strange tales and Zhuangzi’s “transformation of things”—the thought that no eternally rigid wall need divide human and thing, life and death, dreaming and waking.
So if I had to give it a name, I would call it an existential phenomenology with a Romantic temperament, preserving Zhuangzi’s freedom, the subtle uncanniness of strange tales, and mono no aware’s sense of time. This is not a standard academic school. It is only a provisional map of your spiritual coordinates. A map is not there to dictate who you must become, but to show you the directions in which you might continue.
What You Might Read
If I could choose only one book closest to this essay, I would begin with Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space. Rather than treat houses, attics, corners, and vast spaces as lifeless objects, it studies how space stores memory, imagination, and a sense of being. It may help you understand why architecture is not only something you observe; it also organizes your inner life.
Then you might read the “Free and Easy Wandering,” “Discussion on Making All Things Equal,” and “The Great Ancestral Teacher” chapters of the Zhuangzi. Do not rush to read them merely as knowledge about Daoism. Pay attention to their sudden changes of scale: the morning mushroom and the ancient tree, Peng and the cicada, the butterfly dream, life and death, and the transformation of things. Zhuangzi repeatedly changes the scale from which the world is viewed in order to release us from the imprisonment of one local perspective. This comes very close to the relief you find in megastructures, though Zhuangzi works through parables.
For existentialism, you could continue with an accessible introduction to Heidegger’s being-toward-death before deciding whether to enter Being and Time itself. You are not primarily concerned with the event of death, but with how an understanding of finitude transforms the present; that is the heart of this line of thought. You can continue reading Camus, but he is more useful for asking how to live amid the absurd. “How does the world reveal itself to me?”—the question occupying you now—is not quite Camus’s question.
To understand images that return again and again, you could read Carl Jung’s Man and His Symbols. But it is better to treat archetypal theory as a tool for reading and association, not as a dream dictionary in which you can look up “white tiger” and receive a fixed definition. An image has no single meaning. What matters is the scene in which the white tiger appears, the memories to which it connects, and whether you feel fear or draw closer each time it returns. A ready-made symbolic definition often ends your own inquiry too soon.
In literature, you need not hurry away from the path you have already found. You can follow Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio toward the anomaly accounts of the Six Dynasties, Tang tales, and the poetry of Li He. You can also reread Xia Da instead of searching only for more similar works. A first reading lets a work strike you; rereading may show you the exact composition, gesture, relationship, or conception of time that delivered the blow. What you are looking for may not be the next work. It may be the part you overlooked years ago.
What You Might Do
Rather than assembling a very long reading list, I would suggest keeping an “image archive” of your own. Whenever an image strikes you, do not interpret it at once. Record four things first: what the image contains; what your body feels before anything else; what it reminds you of; and what you wish would happen beyond the frame. Chang’an, the white tiger, the wilderness, towers, fox spirits, and longevity can each have a page. When you return after some time, the relationships that recur will bring you closer to your own answer than any universal dream dictionary could.
You can also try describing before interpreting. Do not begin with “the megastructure symbolizes transcendence.” Write how long the stairs are, how small the person appears, which way the wind blows, what seems to lie behind the gate, and whether you want to approach or leave. The more faithfully you describe an experience, the more readily the thought hidden within it can surface by itself. Perhaps your earlier attempts failed not because you lacked theory, but because you demanded that the fragments explain their meaning too soon.
You might also draw maps of that world or write fragments from it without forcing yourself to complete a novel. Draw a nameless city. Write a dream without explaining what came before or after. Record ten minutes in the life of someone standing before a megastructure. Your imagination arrives in fragments, and creation need not first convert it into a linear story. A fragment is not a failed narrative. It may be the native language of this spiritual world.
Finally, visit real ancient architecture, wilderness, mountains, rivers, and museums—but not to verify whether your imagination is accurate. Reality will not replace that Chang’an, but it can give your imagination weight: the smell of timber, stone steps worn by feet, the proportion of a person beneath an eave, the speed at which sound disappears into open country. Imagination does not fail when it touches reality. A good encounter with reality gives imagination a body.
You do not need to decide quickly which philosophical system you belong to. For you, reading is not about finding one school and using it to explain every image from then on. It is about learning more ways to look at those images. You already have the questions, and you already have scenes that return again and again to find you. Perhaps what remains is simply to stay before them a little longer, without rushing to prove where they came from and without rushing to leave.
Philosophy may never tell you whether that Chang’an exists, but it can teach you to understand more precisely why you would spend a lifetime missing it.
