1Q84 (1Q84, #1-3)

by Haruki Murakami

Komatsu believed that mental acuity was never born from comfortable circumstances.

“Math is like water. It has a lot of difficult theories, of course, but its basic logic is very simple. Just as water flows from high to low over the shortest possible distance, figures can only flow in one direction. You just have to keep your eye on them for the route to reveal itself. That’s all it takes. You don’t have to do a thing. Just concentrate your attention and keep your eyes open, and the figures make everything clear to you. In this whole, wide world, the only thing that treats me so kindly is math.”

I come here every day, say hello to the butterflies, and talk about things with them. When the time comes, though, they just quietly go off and disappear. I’m sure it means they’ve died, but I can never find their bodies. They don’t leave any trace behind. It’s as if they’ve been absorbed by the air. They’re dainty little creatures that hardly exist at all: they come out of nowhere, search quietly for a few, limited things, and disappear into nothingness again, perhaps to some other world.”

What did it mean for a person to be free? she would often ask herself. Even if you managed to escape from one cage, weren’t you just in another, larger one?

you can love someone with your whole heart, even one person, then there’s salvation in life. Even if you can’t get together with that person.”

“It’s the same with menus and men and just about anything else: we think we’re choosing things for ourselves, but in fact we may not be choosing anything. It could be that everything’s decided in advance and we pretend we’re making choices. Free will may be an illusion. I often think that.”

“Most people are not looking for provable truths. As you said, truth is often accompanied by intense pain, and almost no one is looking for painful truths. What people need is beautiful, comforting stories that make them feel as if their lives have some meaning. Which is where religion comes from.”

“You are afraid, just as the people of the Vatican were afraid to accept the Copernican theory. Not even they believed in the infallibility of the Ptolemaic theory. They were afraid of the new situation that would prevail if they accepted the Copernican theory. They were afraid of having to reorder their minds to accept it. Strictly speaking, the Catholic Church has still not publicly accepted the Copernican theory. You are like them. You are afraid of having to shed the armor with which you have long defended yourself.”

Nobody’s easier to fool, Ushikawa thought, than the person who is convinced that he is right.

Let me speculate here, Ushikawa said to himself. Following the famous rule of Occam’s razor, I’ll try to find the simplest possible explanation. Eliminate all unnecessary factors, boil it all down to one logical line, and then look at the situation.

most people in the world don’t really use their brains to think. And people who don’t think are the ones who don’t listen to others.

Being alive, if you had to define it, meant emitting a variety of smells.