Willa Ping, G9 平欣蕾

Annie is a junior high school student. Since childhood, she has been fond of reading science fiction and pondering the universe and extraterrestrial life.

That day, she came home from school as usual and saw a jar of honey on the table. She tasted a bit of it. However, the flavor in her mouth felt unreal. Then she began to wonder why honey wasn’t sweet. After all, in everyone’s memory, honey was always sweet. Suddenly, a thought struck her: Why did honey have to be sweet? Couldn’t it have other flavors? Who had defined it that way? Was the world we perceived the real one?

Anne felt a sharp pain in her head. She seemed to have grasped something but wasn’t quite sure. She rushed back to her room and started searching for answers online.

Parmenides’ theory, the Ontology of Being, states that being is unified, eternal and unchanging, while non-being is impossible.

A flash of inspiration struck her. Why should we accept others’ definitions? Why couldn’t we define things for ourselves? What would the world look like if we stripped away all its preexisting labels?

This thought was both thrilling and terrifying. If reality depends on human consensus, then everything she knew was potentially malleable. The taste of honey, the color of the sky, the very concept of self — all could be different. She felt the exhilarating freedom of a world without definitions, but also the vertigo of standing at the edge of an intellectual abyss.

Her mind raced, trying to conceive of a substance that was neither solid, liquid, nor gas, or a creature that perceived time backwards. Yet, each attempt felt like her brain was hitting a wall.

Annie tried to abandon her instincts, but she couldn't do it, because human imagination is limited and it’s difficult to envision anything beyond our existing experiences and knowledge. To put it simply, you can’t imagine a color that doesn’t exist. The frustration of this paradox built until her mind, straining against its limits, sought escape in a final, overwhelming thought: a four-dimensional world. Then she fainted.