The Strange Library

by Haruki Murakami

Why do I act like this, agreeing when I really disagree, letting people force me to do things I don’t want to do?

“I get it,” I said. “Our worlds are all jumbled together—your world, my world, the sheep man’s world. Sometimes they overlap and sometimes they don’t. That’s what you mean, right?”

No matter what the situation may be, I still take pleasure in witnessing the joy of others.

“The world follows its own course,” he said. “Each possesses his own thoughts, each treads his own path. So it is with your mother, and so it is with your starling. As it is with everyone. The world follows its own course.”

At the same time, my anxiety had turned into an anxiety quite lacking in anxiousness. And any anxiety that is not especially anxious is, in the end, an anxiety hardly worth mentioning.

The tricky thing about mazes is that you don’t know if you’ve chosen the right path until the very end.