At the End of the Matinee

by Keiichirō Hirano

Choosing now and then to “concentrate on vegetables,” as she put it, sounded easy, but how many people managed to pull it off?

“However many languages I might speak, it’s sad not to know my father’s.”

“People think that only the future can be changed, but in fact, the future is continually changing the past. The past can and does change. It’s exquisitely sensitive and delicately balanced.”

From now on, people would forevermore be creatures of exhaustion, distinguished from other animals by their continual state of fatigue. Caught up in the tempo of machines and computers, their senses buffeted by constant noise, people griped about daily life with piteous intensity before entering the complete silence obtainable only by death.

As they grew older, people distanced themselves from love not so much from a diminishing of passion, the desire to love, as from a dulling of the clear and anguished self-awareness of adolescence, the fear that they were not lovable.

flaccid. No matter how blessed a marriage based on such love might be, there would inevitably be a pinch of resignation mixed in.

Loneliness, when it came down to it, was the awareness of your utter lack of influence in the world—knowing that you could and would have zero influence on either your contemporaries or on future generations.

People are spurred to act less by eager dreams of a happy future than by anxiety over the danger, remote or otherwise, of remaining stuck in the status quo.

Happiness was having someone with whom to share all the everyday experiences of his world.

Meister Eckhart’s curious interpretation of the passage came to mind, an interpretation

hinging on Martha’s virginity, which was nowhere mentioned in the text. He