virginia woolf

i came across an excellent book sale last week and grabbed jacob’s room by virginia woolf for five bucks. i sort of have an obsession with her, the oppression she dealt with supposedly being homosexual, having some sort of mental illness (dementia, hearing voices), but still seeing the political oppression of being a woman in the victorian age. she was brilliant in her own strange, almost avant garde, way. i’ve read mrs. dalloway three times in college, the first two times for a paper and the third time for another class. by then, i really didn’t need to read the book again, but i did as i saw it as an opportunity to indulge myself. it’s weird to think that i used to read so much.

i actually didn’t care for mrs. dalloway the first time i read it. it’s just about this woman, clarissa dalloway, whose only concern was a party she was throwing. the story takes place in only one day. but in this one day, she comes to an epiphany. another character had been a soldier who suffers from post trauma stress disorder. even though they don’t know each other in the story, they are basically two sides of the same coin. only after reading it again did i begin to grasp the beauty of the book, and even at that time, i could barely articulate why i loved it so much. what i’ve come to conclude is that even though clarissa dalloway seemed so shallow with her only concern about a party, she was a lovely person, worrying about how people would get along. also, it was the style of writing, stream of conciousness, that i fell in love with.

so we’ll see how i feel about jacob’s room. here’s the first excerpt that jumped out at me:

“who...” said the lady, meeting her son; but as there was a great crowd on the platform and jacob had already gone, she did not finish her sentence. as this was cambridge, as she was staying there for the week-end, as she saw nothing but young men all day long, in streets and round tables, this sight of her fellow-traveler was completely lost in her mind, as the crooked pin dropped by a child into the wishing-well twirls in the water and disappears for ever.

a model world

i've been reading michael chabon's a model world and other short stories. i was first drawn to it because i loved the amazing adventures of kavalier & clay, and the collection begins with a quote from elizabeth bishop, my favorite poet: "more delicate than the historians' are the map makers' colors." it's one of the few new books that i've ever bought, being generally a used-books gal.

it's divided into two halves: the first being a small collection of stories, "the model world," pretty much unrelated to each other; and the second being a collection that almost works as a novella, "the lost world." i liked "the model world" okay, didn't love it, didn't hate it. "the lost world," however, i loved. it's about a little boy, nathan, and his view of the world as his parents are going through a divorce and beginning to date others. he ages a few years or so between each short. what i loved about this series was that even though it was about a child and told in large parts through his eyes, it was sophisticated and treated the child as a human being with feelings and thoughts of his own. it wasn't condescending just because he was young.

children's stories written for adults is actually the genre where i found my voice when i wrote in college. i guess what struck me about reading this is that it has, in a small way, inspired me to write again. after reading some of it last night, i'm sitting here blogging, not just this entry but another on my other blog. yes, it's informal writing, but it's writing nonetheless. it's more writing that i normally do nowadays. and actually, since i've embarked on a relationship with someone love deeply, i haven't really been reading as much as i used to. i was able to find time to read last night because i slept alone, neither of us able to make it to the other's because of my cold and his exhaustion from a long day at work. before dating, i always read in bed before falling asleep. i have to work harder on finding time to read, something i miss dearly even though the reason i miss it has made me happier.

finished

the wind-up bird chronicle has been an incredible read. of the books i've read so far from murakami--the wind-up bird chronicle, norwegian wood, after the quake, and south of the border, west of the sun, his protagonists tend to be pretty inert and comfortably so. external forces seem to occur as a test to see if the protagonists would sway, which they all do, just a little. but that's the way it is in reality. people rarely change. even if they do, it's bit by bit. the change happens over a long period and with immense subtlety.

i love that toru okada remains so faithful to kumiko throughout all that time. the way that malta & creta kano and nutmeg & cinnamon appear so suddenly and then disappear so quietly works in this story. people weave in and out of our lives like that some times, and there's a certain beauty to it.

also, the concept of the antithesis of a soulmate is fascinating. people talk about finding one's soulmate all the time but never mention having to face one's...soul nemesis? the idea of a soulmate and its antithesis is really about who each of us are, at our core. and murakami touching on a dismal part of japan's history makes the idea of soulmate and soul nemesis more profound by reaching back in time. it hints at the concept as an inherent element to life. it's not solely a modern day concept or something that only happened in the past. it's just there and has always been there.

i wonder what my soulmate and soul nemesis are like. i want to be ready when i meet them or come upon them again.

kind of weird

lately, it's really been bothering me that, i don't know, the way people work like this every day from morning to night is kind of weird. hasn't it ever struck you as strange? i mean, all i do here is do the work that my bosses tell me to do the way they tell me to do it. i don't have to think at all. it's like i just put my brain in a locker before i start work and pick it up on the way home. i spend seven hours a day at a workbench, planting hairs into wig bases, then i eat dinner in the cafeteria, take a bath, and of course i have to sleep, like everybody else, so out of a twenty-four-hour day, the amount of free time i have is like nothing. and because i'm so tired from work, the "free time" i have i mostly spend lying around in a fog. i don't have any time to sit and think about anything. of course, i don't have to work on weekends, but then i have to do the laundry and cleaning i've let go, and sometimes i go into town, and before i know it the weekend is over. i once made up my mind to keep a diary, but i had nothing to write, so i quit after a week. i mean, i just do the same thing over and over again, day in, day out.

but still--but still--it absolutely does not bother me that i'm now just a part of the work i do. i don't feel the least bit alienated from my life. if anything, i sometimes feel that by concentrating on my work like this, with all the mindless determination of an ant, i'm getting closer to the "real me." i don't know how to put it, but it's kind of like by not thinking about myself i can get closer to the core of myself. that's what i mean by "kind of weird."

--may kasahara

killing

strange as it may seem--or perhaps it does not seem so strange--[the soldiers] all had the same thought: it was so much easier to kill humans on the battlefield than animals in cages, even if, on the battlefield, one might end up being killed oneself.

core

everybody's born with some different thing at the core of their existence. and that thing, whatever it is, becomes like a heat source that runs each person from the inside. i have one too, of course. like everybody else. but sometimes it gets out of hand. it swells or shrinks inside me, and it shakes me up. what i'd really like to do is find a way to communicate that feeling to another person. but i can't seem to do it. they just don't get it. of course, the problem could be that i'm not explaining it very well, but i think it's because they're not listening very well. they pretend to be listening, but they're not, really..."

--may kasahara

hatred

hatred is like a long, dark shadow. not even the person it falls upon knows where it comes from, in most cases. it is like a two-edged sword. when you cut the other person, you cut yourself. the more violently you hack at the other person, the more violently you hack at yourself. it can often be fatal. but it is not easy to dispose of. please be careful, mr. okada. it is very dangerous. once it has taken root in your heart, hatred is the most difficult thing in the world to shake off.

--creta kano


the way hatred is self-distructive completely makes sense to me, but i don't think i fully understand it. i understand it in a logical sense, in my head, but in my heart, it's very difficult to not feel it. hatred is a very difficult thing to talk myself out of.

i

i needed time to get used to my new self. what kind of a being was this self of mine? how did it function? what did it feel--and how? i had to grasp each of these things through experience, to memorize and stockpile them. do you see what i am saying? virtually everything inside me had spilled out and been lost. at the same time that i was entirely new, i was almost entirely empty. i had to fill in that blank, little by little. one by one, with my own hands, i had to make this thing i called "i"--or, rather, make the things that constituted me.

--creta kano


not as drastic but i ask myself similar questions now that i've accepted that i'm an adult. there's no use to deny this phase in life anymore. i want to discover and understand what kind of a person, a grown person, i am, how would kids think of me and possibly look up to me.

time

and so time flowed on through the darkness, deprived of advancing watch hands: time undivided and unmeasured. once it lost its points of demarcation, time ceased being a continuous line and became instead a kind of formless fluid that expanded or contracted at will. within this kind of time, i slept and woke and slept and woke, and became slowly and increasingly accustomed to life without timepieces. i trained my body to realize that i no longer needed time. but soon i was feeling tremendous anxiety. true, i had been liberated from the nervous habit of checking my watch every five minutes, but once the frame of reference of time faded completely away, i began to feel as if i had been flung into the ocean at night from the deck of a moving ship. no one noticed my screams, and the boat continued its forward advance, moving farther and farther away until it was about to fade from view.

--toru okada


i was just thinking about the existence of time the night before reading this passage, that it exists without a beginning and end, the way it's measured, not simply in terms of seconds, minutes, or hours, but also by the movement of the planets and the rhythm created by our repetitive physiological functions and their changes.

why we die

"if people lived forever--if they never got any older--if they could just go on living in this world, never dying, always healthy--do you think they'd bother to think hard about things, the way we're doing now? i mean, we think about just about everything, more or less--philosophy, psychology, logic. religion. literature. i kinda think, if there were no such thing as death, that complicated thoughts and ideas like that would never come into the world. i mean--"...

..."i mean...this is what i think, but...people have to think seriously about what it means for them to be alive here and now because they know they're going to die sometime. right? who would think about what it means to be alive if they were just going to go on living forever? why would they have to bother? or even if they should bother, they'd probably just figure, 'oh, well, i've got plenty of time for that. i'll think about it later.' but we can't wait till later. we've got to think about it right this second. i might get run over by a truck tomorrow afternoon. and you, mr. wind-up bird: you might starve to death. one morning three days from now, you could be dead in the bottom of a well. see? nobody knows what's going to happen. so we need death to make us evolve. that's what i think. death is this huge, bright thing, and the bigger and brighter it is, the more we have to drive ourselves crazy thinking about things."

--may kasahara

reality & change

ok, then, enough of this thinking about the mind. think about reality. think about the real world. the body's world. that's why i'm here. to think about reality. the best way to think about reality, i had decided, was to get as far away from it as possible--a place like the bottom of a well, for example.

--toru okada


even after i had seen her home and returned to my room, to lie in bed and look at the ceiling, i could sense the change. i was a new me, and i could never go back to where i had been before. what was getting to me was the awareness that i was no longer innocent. this was not a moralistic sense of wrongdoing, or the workings of a guilty conscience. i knew that i had made a terrible mistake, but i was not punishing myself for it. it was a physical fact that i would have to confront coolly and logically, beyond any question of punishment.

--toru okada

love

among all the methods by which love is brought into being, among all the agents which disseminate that blessed bane, there are few so efficacious as the great gust of agitation which, now and then, sweeps over the human spirit. for then the creature in whose company we are seeking amusement at the moment, her lot is cast, her fate and ours decided, that is the creature whom we shall henceforward love. it is not necessary that she should have pleased us, up till then, any more, or even as much as others. all that is necessary is that our taste for her should become exclusive. and that condition is fulfilled so soon as--in the moment when she has failed to meet us--for the pleasure which we were on the point of enjoying in her charming company is abruptly substituted an anxious torturing desire, which the laws of civilized society make it possible to satisfy and difficult to assuage--the insensate, agonizing desire to possess her.

--marcel proust, swann's way

memories

as you know, the war ended a very long time ago, and memory naturally degenerates as the years go by. memories and thoughts age, just as people do. but certain thoughts can never age, and certain memories can never fade.

...i have stayed alive all these years clinging to the frail hope that these memories of mine were nothing but a dream or a delusion. i have struggled to convince myself that they never happened. but each time i tried to push them into the dark, they came back stronger and more vivid than ever. like cancer cells, these memories have taken root in my mind and eaten into my flesh.

even now i can recall each tiny detail with such terrible clarity, i feel i am remembering events that happened yesterday. i can hold the sand and the grass in my hands; i can even smell them. i can see the shapes of the clouds in the sky. i can feel the dry, sandy wind against my cheeks. by comparison, it is the subsequent events of my life that seem like delusions on the borderline of dream and reality.

...but what i want to convey to you, mr. okada, is this: i happened to lose my life at one particular moment in time, and i have gone on living these forty years or more with my life lost. as a person who finds himself in such a position, i have come to think that life is a far more limited thing than those in the midst of its maelstrom realize. the light shines into the act of life for only the briefest moment--perhaps only a matter of seconds. once it is gone and one has failed to grasp its offered revelation, there is no second chance. one may have to live the rest of one's life in hopeless depths of loneliness and remorse. in that twilight world, one can no longer look forward to anything. all that such a person holds in his hands is the withered corpse of what should have been.

--lieutenant mamiya


a powerful expression of what post-traumatic disorder must feel like, with its roots wrapped tightly around the memories of extraordinary events, so tight that life is stuck in that moment, unable to move forward.

may kasahara

she took me by the hand and led me into her yard. there she moved a canvas deck chair into the shade of the oak tree and sat me down on it. the thick green branches cast cool shadows that had the fragrance of life.

the last sentence stopped me in the reading; the imagery is so beautiful.

unknown silence

he shook his head. "some things i know, some things i don't know. but you'd probably be better off not knowing, lieutenant. it may be presumptuous of someone like me to say such big-sounding things to a college graduate like you, but a person's destiny is something you look back at after it's past, not something you see in advance. i have a certain amount of experience where these things are concerned. you don't."
--corporal honda

"...for both of us, it had simply been too enormous an experience. we shared it by not talking about it. does this make sense?"
--lieutenant mamiya

war

he told me about the war in china. he was a soldier all the way, with only grammar school behind him, but he had his own reservations about this messy war on the continent, which looked as if it would never end, and he expressed these feelings honestly to me. "i don't mind fighting," he said. "i'm a soldier. and i don't mind dying in battle for my country, because that's my job. but this war we're fighting now, lieutenant--well, it's just not right. it's not a real war, with a battle line where you face the enemy and fight to the finish. we advance, and the enemy runs away without fighting. then the chinese soldiers take their uniforms off and mix with the civilian populations, and we don't even know who the enemy is. so then we kill a lot of innocent people in the name of flushing out 'renegades' or 'remnant troops,'...i'm telling you, lieutenant, this is one war that doesn't have any righteous cause. it's just two sides killing each other. and the ones who get stepped on are the poor farmers, the ones without politics or ideology. for them, there's no nationalist party, no young marshal zhang, no eighth route army. if they can eat, they're happy. i know how these people feel: i'm the son of a poor fisherman myself. the little people slave away from morning to night, and the best they can do is keep themselves alive--just barely. i can't believe that killing these people for no reason at all is going to do japan one bit of good."
--sergeant hamano

i wouldn't be surprised if some of the american soldiers sent to iraq share the same feelings, although a different time and place. actually, i hope some of them do.

pessimistic

"can you give me a concrete example of what you mean by that--to die little by little?"

"well...i don't know. you're trapped in the dark all alone, with nothing to eat, nothing to drink, and little by little you die..."

"it must be terrible," i said. "painful. i wouldn't want to die like that if i could help it."

"but finally, mr. wind-up bird, isn't that just what life is? aren't we all trapped in the dark somewhere, and they've taken away our food and water, and we're slowly dying, little by little...?"

i laughed. "you're too young to be so...pessimistic," i said, using the english word.

"pessi-what?"

"pessimistic. it means looking only at the dark side of things."

"pessimistic...pessimistic..." she repeated the english to herself over and over, and then she looked up at me with a fierce glare. "i'm only sixteen," she said, "and i don't know much about the world, but i do know one thing for sure. if i'm pessimistic, then the adults in this world who are not pessimistic are a bunch of idiots."

the wind-up bird chronicle by haruki murakami

i'm saving the rest of proust for the next lazy sunday. the wind-up bird chronicle by haruki murakami, one of my favorite authors, has taken over the space next to my pillow.

"you've got to spend your money for the things that money can buy, not worry about profit or loss. save your energy for the things that money can't buy."
--toru okada's uncle

"but knowing what i don't want to do doesn't help me figure out what i do want to do. i could do just about anything if somebody made me. but i don't have an image of the one thing i really want to do. that's my problem now. i can't find the image."
--toru okada

active reading

i've started reading swann's way by marcel proust by making the mistake of reserving it as a bedtime read. when i'm working on a project, my day averages at 12 hours a day, leaving little time during the week for any leisure activity that requires intellectual effort. really, at the end of a work day, i just want to veg in front of the tv for about an hour and get my bills paid so i don't have to do it on the weekends. when the weekend rolls around, social engagements and mere exhaustion from the week leaves me little time and energy to motivate myself to attend to any intellectual pursuits.

yeah, these are all just excuses. maybe. but one sunday, i grabbed swann's way with me to read at a quiet college campus. it was that day, that i realize how much i had been missing out reading that book in a half-conscious state. to be able to focus on the book with minimal distraction, i remembered the pleasure of reading.

reading before going to bed is a must for me, even if it's just a page or two. otherwise, i don't think i would read very much. with most books, reading at this pace is not much of a problem, especially if they are plot driven. proust is just a little more difficult since it's a bit more in the style of stream of consciousness.

so in an effort be more of an active reader and stop squandering those precious moments with a book in bed, glazing over the words without extracting meaning from them, i'm devoting this blog to just random thoughts and quotes from my current nighttime read, like a shoebox of random notes. it's a commitment to pay attention.

anyway, here goes...