A Tale for the Time Being

by Ruth Ozeki

Print is predictable and impersonal, conveying information in a mechanical transaction with the reader’s eye. Handwriting, by contrast, resists the eye, reveals its meaning slowly, and is as intimate as skin.

Whenever I think about my stupid empty life, I come to the conclusion that I’m just wasting my time, and I’m not the only one.

And what does it mean to waste time anyway? If you waste time is it lost forever? And if time is lost forever, what does that mean? It’s not like you get to die any sooner, right? I mean, if you want to die sooner, you have to take matters into your own hands.

I could imagine myself searching for lost time under the tree, sifting through the fallen leaves that are her scattered golden words.

Time itself is being, he wrote, and all being is time . . . In essence, everything in the entire universe is intimately linked with each other as moments in time, continuous and separate.

He was an anomaly, a sport, a deviation from the mean. “Fries his fish in a different pan” was the way people sometimes described him on the island. But Ruth had always been fascinated by the meandering currents of his mind, and even though she often grew impatient, trying to follow its flow, in the end, she was glad she did. His observations, like those concerning the crow, were often the most interesting.

A name, Ruth thought, could be either a ghost or a portent depending upon which side of time you were standing.

the 6,400,099,980 moments40 that constitute a single day. His point is that every single one of those moments provides an opportunity to reestablish our will. Even the snap of a finger, he says, provides us with sixty-five opportunities to wake up and to choose actions that will produce beneficial karma and turn our lives around.

Life is fleeting! Don’t waste a single moment of your precious life! Wake up now! And now! And now!

When she was little, she was always surprised to pick up a book in the morning, and open it, and find the letters aligned neatly in their places. Somehow she expected them to be all jumbled up, having fallen to the bottom when the covers were shut. Nao had described something similar, seeing the blank pages of Proust and wondering if the letters had fallen off like dead ants. When Ruth had read this, she’d felt a jolt of recognition.

I was unreal and my life was unreal, and Sunnyvale, which was real, was a jillion miles away in time and space, like the beautiful Earth from outer space, and me and Dad were astronauts, living in a spaceship, orbiting in the cold blackness.

I believe it doesn’t matter what it is, as long as you can find something concrete to keep you busy while you are living your meaningless life.

We were doing direct proportions in math, and every time I saw a question like, If a train that travels 3 kilometers per minute goes y kilometers in x minutes, then . . . etc., my mind would go numb and all I could think about was how a body would look at the moment of impact, and the distance a head might be thrown on the tracks, and how far the blood would splatter.

The past is weird. I mean, does it really exist? It feels like it exists, but where is it? And if it did exist but doesn’t now, then where did it go?

I whispered Now! . . . Now! . . . Now! . . . over and over, faster and faster, into the wind as the world whipped by, trying to catch the moment when the word was what it is: when now became NOW. But in the time it takes to say now, now is already over. It’s already then. Then is the opposite of now. So saying now obliterates its meaning, turning it into exactly what it isn’t. It’s like the word is committing suicide or something.

In reality, every reader, while he is reading, is the reader of his own self. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument, which he offers to the reader to permit him to discern what, without the book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself. The reader’s recognition in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its truth. —Marcel Proust, Le temps retrouvé

There’s nothing sadder than cyberspace when you’re floating around out there, all alone, talking to yourself.

Ghosts in Japan are pretty intense. They’re not the kind you get in America that go around dressed in sheets. In Japan, they wear white kimonos, and they have long black hair hanging in their faces, and also they have no feet. Usually they’re women who are righteously pissed off because someone has done something horrible to them. Sometimes, if a person has been treated really badly, she can even become an ikisudama,74 and her soul leaves her sleeping body and wanders around the city at night doing tatari75 and wreaking vengeance on all her shitty classmates who have tortured her by sitting on their chests. That was my goal for the summer vacation. To become a living ghost.

The only thing lonelier than cyberspace is being a teenage kid,

I turned up the volume and played a few tracks of some old Nick Drake that Dad had given me, which I was really getting into. “Time Has Told Me.” “Day Is Done.” Nick Drake’s songs are so sad. He committed suicide, too.

Do all kids have to worry about their parents’ mental health? The way society is set up, parents are supposed to be the grown-up ones and look after the kids, but a lot of times it’s the other way around.

now that I think about it, even though I still intend to kill myself, I actually haven’t, yet, and if I’m still alive and not dead, maybe it’s working.

You try to forget about it, but as soon as you do, the fish starts flopping around under your heart and reminds you that something truly horrible is happening.

Zazen is better than a home. Zazen is a home that you can’t ever lose,

Think not-thinking. How do you think not-thinking? Nonthinking. This is the essential art of zazen.

“A wave is born from deep conditions of the ocean,” she said. “A person is born from deep conditions of the world. A person pokes up from the world and rolls along like a wave, until it is time to sink down again. Up, down. Person, wave.”

‘I should only make myself ridiculous in the eyes of others if I clung to life and hugged it when I have no more to offer.’

I started to really experience stuff for the first time, like the beauty of the plum and cherry blossoms along the avenues in Ueno Park, when the trees are in bloom. I spent whole days there, wandering up and down these long, soft tunnels of pink clouds and gazing overhead at the fluffy blossoms, all puffy and pink with little sparkles of sunlight and blue sky glinting between the bright green leaves. Time disappeared and it was like being born into the world all over again. Everything was perfect. When a breeze blew, petals rained down on my upturned face, and I stopped and gasped, stunned by the beauty and sadness.

I don’t even believe in myself anymore. I don’t believe I exist, and soon I won’t. I am a time being about to expire.

What does separation look like? A wall? A wave? A body of water? A ripple of light or a shimmer of subatomic particles, parting? What does it feel like to push through?

Her fingers press against the rag surface of her dream, recognize the tenacity of filaments and know that it is paper about to tear, but for the fibrous memory that still lingers there, supple, vascular, and standing tall. The tree was past and the paper is present, and yet paper still remembers holding itself upright and altogether. Like a dream, it remembers its sap.

Sometimes the mind arrives but the words don’t. Sometimes words arrive but the mind doesn’t.

Sometimes mind and words both arrive. Sometimes neither mind nor words arrive.

Mind and words are time being. Arriving and not-arriving are time being.

A book is like a large cemetery upon whose tombs one can no longer read the effaced names. On the other hand, sometimes one remembers well the name, without knowing if anything of the being, whose name it was, survives in these pages. —Marcel Proust, Le temps retrouvé

it’s not new. Nothing is new, and if you buy the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, then everything that’s possible will happen, or perhaps already has.

there’s no single outcome until the outcome is measured or observed. Until that moment of observation, there’s only an array of possibilities, ergo, the cat exists in this so-called smeared state of being. It’s both alive and dead.”

To forget the self is to be enlightened by all myriad things. Mountains and rivers, grasses and trees, crows and cats and wolves and jellyfishes. That would be nice.

If you start snapping your fingers now and continue snapping 98,463,077 times without stopping, the sun will rise and the sun will set, and the sky will grow dark and the night will deepen, and everyone will sleep while you are still snapping, until finally, sometime after daybreak, when you finish up your 98,463,077th snap, you will experience the truly intimate awareness of knowing exactly how you spent every single moment of a single day of your life.

Everything in the universe is constantly changing, and nothing stays the same, and we must understand how quickly time flows by if we are to wake up and truly live our lives.

The day the mountains move has come. Or so I say, though no one will believe me. The mountains were merely asleep for a while. But in ages past, they had moved, as if they were on fire. If you don’t believe me, that’s fine with me. All I ask is that you believe this and only this, That at this very moment, women are awakening from their deep slumber. If I could but write entirely in the first person, I, who am a woman. If I could write entirely in the first person, I, I. —Yosano Akiko

does the existence of a singular cat, either dead or alive, require an external observer, i.e., you? And if not you, then who? Can the cat be an observer of itself? And without an external observer, do we all just exist in an array of all possible states at once?

Truth is like the moon in the sky. Words are like a finger. A finger can point to the moon’s location, but it is not the moon. To see the moon, you must look past the finger.