At the End of the Matinee

by Keiichirō Hirano

while fiction makes it possible to refrain from revealing some secrets, it is the only way to reveal others.

At the encore, as if on cue, the audience rose in a standing ovation. While clapping, people leaned backward slightly and thrust their arms forward as far as they could in hopes of getting him to hear them. The height of clapping hands rises in direct proportion to the degree the applauder is moved; this was another thing the audience discovered that evening.

“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.”

Every time they were wounded in the future, again and again they would return in memory to look into each other’s eyes, embraced by the darkness of that night.

This is what Angie mentioned. Always remember the moment you fell in love and, when difficulties arise, take yourself back to that moment.

Ligne Roset Togo one-seater.

“Music is born in opposition to the beauty of silence; the creation of music lies in the attempt to use sound to bring about new beauty that contrasts with the beauty of silence.”

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.

“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.”

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. It was the conviction that you could search all you liked and never find any indication that you had influenced the growth of another artist.

Mitsuharu Inoue’s Tomorrow: August 8, 1945, Nagasaki.

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.

“In war, the question of who did what to whom can’t be ignored, but above and beyond that, there’s the perspective of humanity, don’t you agree? Things that human beings should and shouldn’t do, period. Making excuses by comparing yourself with others—I’m not as bad as the other guy; my country’s not as bad as theirs—that sort of relativism is just aggressors trading winks. It’s ugly. I can’t accept it. Victimhood in war is absolute, isn’t it? You can’t just say, ‘The bombing of Nagasaki and the London air raids were both awful, so let’s drop the subject.’ That can never happen. It mustn’t happen. Victims have to be regarded as human beings.

People could neither dream the dreams they wanted nor avoid those they didn’t want.

Handling a baby was a little like playing a musical instrument.