Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

by Haruki Murakami

I think of myself as one of those people who take a convenience-sake view of prevailing world conditions, events, existence in general.

Let your body work until it is spent, but keep your mind for yourself.”

When the sun leaks through again, patch the roof for rain

“And for how long does that world go on?” “Forever,” said the Professor. “I don’t get it,” I said. “What do you mean ‘forever’? The physical body has its limits. The body dies, the brain dies. Brain dies, mind ceases. Isn’t that the way it goes?” “No, it isn’t. There’s no time to tautologies. That’s the difference between tautologies and dreams. Tautologies are instantaneous, everything is revealed at once. Eternity can actually be experienced. Once you set up a closed circuit, you just keep spinnin’ ’round and ’round in there. That’s the nature of tautologies. No interruptions like with dreams. It’s like the encyclopedia wand.” “The encyclopedia wand?” I was evolving into an echo. “The encyclopedia wand’s a theoretical puzzle, like Zeno’s paradox. The idea is t’engrave the entire encyclopedia onto a single toothpick. Know how you do it?” “You tell me.” “You take your information, your encyclopedia text, and you transpose it into numerics. You assign everything a two-digit number, periods and commas included. 00 is a blank, A is 01, B is 02, and so on. Then after you’ve lined them all up, you put a decimal point before the whole lot. So now you’ve got a very long sub-decimal fraction. 0.173000631… Next, you engrave a mark at exactly that point along the toothpick. If 0.50000’s your exact middle on the toothpick, then 0.3333’s got t’be a third of the way from the tip. You follow?” “Sure.”

Most human activities are predicated on the assumption that life goes on. If you take that premise away, what is there left?

Round and round it goes, and where it stops everyone knows.

Like a dead heat on the merry-go-round. No one pulls ahead, no one gets left behind. You always get to the same spot.

It is as she told me the first day: no matter how tired the body gets, one must never let the exhaustion enter one’s thoughts.

But as I see it, there are two types of people: the comprehensive-vision type and the limited-perspective type.

Fairness is a concept that holds only in limited situations. Yet we want the concept to extend to everything, in and out of phase. From snails to hardware stores to married life. Maybe no one finds it, or even misses it, but fairness is like love. What is given has nothing to do with what we seek.