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