At the End of the Matinee

by Keiichirō Hirano

What Akutagawa described as “opposition to the beauty of silence” was, in part, the sensation of anyone who stood onstage.

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.

Compared to a maze where every wrong path led to a dead end and forced you to retrace your steps, a maze with no dead ends and only different exits was far crueler.

French philosopher Alain that you used to quote came back to me often: ‘That which is not esteemed will be forgotten. This is one of the most beautiful laws of humanity.’