out with the old, in with the new

from new york times article, "lost in the new beijing: the old neighborhood" (27 July 2008) by nicolai ouroussoff:

it is a familiar pattern in american cities. the sad truth, as any architectural historian knows, is that poverty is often good for preservation; poor people lack the resources to tear down and rebuild houses every generation. once an affluent homeowner moves into a faded landmark, the first thing he or she does is bring in an army of restorers - or bulldozers. preservationists, who tend to have limited economic clout, strike a faustian bargain: better to save the basic architecture and let others worry about what goes on inside. breaking the pattern without aggressive government intervention seems almost impossible.

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.

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

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.

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."