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...