A Tale for the Time Being

by Ruth Ozeki

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

How much can you really trust the promise of a suicidal father?

the Jungle Crow

Crows were in The Book of Form and Emptiness too. The author seems to have a theme.

Americans always call it World War II, but a lot of Japanese call it the Greater East Asian War, and actually the two countries have totally different versions of who started it and what happened.

“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 was still thinking about what she said about waves, and it made me sad because I knew that her little wave was not going to last and soon she would join the sea again, and even though I know you can’t hold on to water, still I gripped her fingers a little more tightly to keep her from leaking away.

Maybe you think that’s strange? We were soldiers, but even before they showed us how to kill our enemies, they taught us how to kill ourselves.

if you follow your unreachable star no matter how hopeless or far, your heart will be peaceful when you’re dead, even though you might be scorned and covered with scars like I am while you’re still alive.

“No. Haruki never hated Americans. He hated war. He hated fascism. He hated the government and its bullying politics of imperialism and capitalism and exploitation. He hated the idea of killing people he could not hate.”

“Life is full of stories. Or maybe life is only stories.

In trying to stop your tears, I was already obeying the officer’s command to the letter, not out of patriotic allegiance, but out of cowardice, in order not to feel the pain of my own heart, breaking.

I find myself drawn to literature more now than in the past; not the individual works as much as the idea of literature—the heroic effort and nobility of our human desire to make beauty of our minds—which moves me to tears, and I have to brush them away, quickly, before anyone notices.

I’m afraid my day is approaching and my next “official” letter to you may be the last one you receive from me. But no matter what nonsense I write in it, please know that those are not my last words. There are other words and other worlds, dear Mother. You have taught me that.

Do not think that time simply flies away. Do not understand “flying” as the only function of time. If time simply flew away, a separation would exist between you and time. So if you understand time as only passing, then you do not understand the time being. To grasp this truly, every being that exists in the entire world is linked together as moments in time, and at the same time they exist as individual moments of time. Because all moments are the time being, they are your time being. —Dgen Zenji, Uji

I should only make myself ridiculous in my own eyes if I clung to life and hugged it when it has no more to offer.

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.

If love be blind, love cannot hit the mark. Now will he sit under a medlar tree, And wish his mistress were that kind of fruit As maids call medlars, when they laugh alone.

“You picked a lemon in the garden of love.”

“A harder case is when we study about a terrible Japanese atrocity like Manchu. In this case, we Japanese people committed genocide and torture of the Chinese people, and so we learn we must feel great shame to the world. But shame is not a pleasant feeling, and some Japanese politicians are always trying to change our children’s history textbooks so that these genocides and tortures are not taught to the next generation. By changing our history and our memory, they try to erase all our shame.

Like Nanking

“This is why I think shame must be different from conscience. They say we Japanese are a culture of shame, so maybe we are not so good at conscience? Shame comes from outside, but conscience must be a natural feeling that comes from a deep place inside an individual person. They say we Japanese people have lived so long under the feudal system that maybe we do not have an individual self in the same way Westerners do. Maybe we cannot have a conscience without an individual self. I do not know. This is what I am worrying about.”

He always asserted that in Japan, suicide was primarily an aesthetic, not a moral, act, triggered by a sense of honor or shame. As you may or may not know, his uncle was a WWII war hero, a pilot in the Tokkotai, who died while carrying out a kamikaze mission over the Pacific.

“I’ve always thought of writing as the opposite of suicide,” she said. “That writing was about immortality. Defeating death, or at least forestalling it.”

At one point in my life, I learned how to think. I used to know how to feel. In war, these are lessons best forgotten.

Blessed Stars, please make this world into a place where we will never again be forced to kill an enemy whom we cannot hate. Were such a thing to come about, I would not complain even if my body were torn to pieces again and again.

Both life and death manifest in every moment of existence.

Montaigne wrote that death itself is nothing. It is only the fear of death that makes death seem important.

What if I travel so far away in my dreams that I can’t get back in time to wake up? “Then I’ll come and get you.”

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

Five strokes. Sei. Ikiru. To live. Still holding the brush, she looked at me and my dad. “For now,” she said to both of us. “For the time being.”

She says anonymity is the new celebrity. She says the mark of new cool is no hits for your name. No hits is the mark of how deeply unfamous you are, because true freedom comes from being unknown.