A Galaxy That Began with a Single Candle

About thirty years ago, while watching Men in Black, one strange image caught my attention. Inside a small bead hanging from a cat’s collar was an entire galaxy. Of all the scenes in the film, that one stayed with me for a strangely long time. The idea that an immense world could exist inside something so small was startling. I thought that someday I would like to write a novel from that image. But for a long time, the thought remained only a thought.

Not long ago, I asked myself a very simple question. What would happen if a single candle were lit inside a sealed room lined with mirrors? The candle would emit the same amount of light. But if the walls kept reflecting it, more light would remain inside the room than in an ordinary room. Then what would happen if light could be trapped perfectly? How long could a single photon exist? If more and more light were continually added, how much could accumulate?

The question soon produced another question. Light is energy, and energy produces mass and gravity. If an enormous amount of light were placed inside a small space, radiation pressure would increase, and eventually the problem of a black hole would arise. So the energy of a galaxy could not simply be placed inside a small bead. The bead would have to be not a storage container, but an entrance into another spacetime far larger than itself.

The cat’s collar I had seen thirty years earlier returned. What had once been merely a beautiful image had now become a question of physics. But the other half of the novel came from somewhere much older. Long ago, I read Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History and other writings of his. The Toynbee I remember was a man who looked at the ruins of ancient civilizations and thought about the fact that the civilization he himself lived in would not last forever either. The idea that a civilization might destroy itself through the very strength and rationality in which it had such confidence stayed with me for a long time.

While reading Toynbee and Colin Wilson’s A Criminal History of Mankind, I became interested in a problem slightly different from the rise and fall of civilizations. Why can a civilization not stop even when it knows that something is going wrong? Why do human beings solve each new problem only to create a larger problem out of the solution? If history is ruined by a few evil people, then the story is relatively simple. Remove the evil people. But if decent and rational people each do what they believe to be right, and the sum of those choices becomes a catastrophe, then the problem is much more difficult.

I have long been interested in that kind of tragedy. To follow such a thought, the eye of a historian alone was not enough. At times, the imagination of Don Quixote was necessary: the imagination of someone who sees before anyone else what no one can see, and perhaps even sees what does not exist, and still charges forward. At other times, I needed a gaze like that in Kim Soo-young’s poetry, which drags grand ideas all the way down to the ground of everyday life. Even while speaking of civilization, history, and the universe, I had to return in the end to the problems of one person eating, waiting, being afraid, and being unable to abandon someone.

There was another problem: form. I did not want to explain the history of a vast civilization through the life of one person and a single plot. I wanted to create a world in which immense stretches of time would pass, too many people would appear, and above all no one could see the whole. Borges showed that a complex world could be placed inside short sentences, invented documents, dictionaries, and footnotes. Dictionary of the Khazars made me think again about the fact that a story does not necessarily have to begin at the beginning and proceed toward the end. As a reader moves from one word to another and follows records that contradict one another, an unseen world may gradually take shape in the mind. That was why I began thinking about the form of a dictionary. Each word is small. But if you follow one word to the end, behind it appears an institution, an age, and the lives of countless people. And after reading all the words, the reader may suddenly realize that they have witnessed the birth and extinction of an entire civilization. That was how A Dictionary of Galactic Extinction began.

Looking back, I think there were two very different images at the starting point. One was the tiny galaxy hanging from a cat’s collar. The other was a single candle burning inside a room surrounded by mirrors. One remained in my mind for thirty years; the other suddenly began asking questions one day. Between them were Toynbee and Colin Wilson, Don Quixote and Kim Soo-young, Borges and Pavić. And there was the history of civilization I had read and thought about for a long time, along with my doubts about human beings. At first, I wanted to write a novel about putting a galaxy inside a small bead. But once I began writing, it became a completely different story. Instead of putting a galaxy inside a bead, I wanted to place human goodwill, desire, fear, and language inside a galaxy and see where they would lead if they continued to operate to the very end. A Dictionary of Galactic Extinction is the result.