How Do You Live?

by Genzaburo Yoshino

Gazing down in silence, Copper began to imagine that the individual cars were insects. If they were bugs, he thought, they would be rhinoceros beetles. They’re a swarm of rhinoceros beetles that comes crawling in a big hurry. Then once they’ve done their job, they go hurrying home. There’s no knowing what it’s about, but to them great affairs are happening, make no mistake.

Right now, beneath Copper’s very eyes, as well as in places he couldn’t even see, some hundreds of thousands of people were living. How many different sorts of people were there? What were they all doing now, while Copper watched from above? What were they thinking? It was an unpredictable and chaotic world.

there may be nothing more deep-rooted and stubborn than the human tendency to look at and think of things with themselves at the center.

In the world at large, people who are able to free themselves from this self-centered way of thinking are truly uncommon. Above all, when one stands to gain or lose, it is exceptionally difficult to step outside of oneself and make correct judgments, and thus one could say that people who are able to think Copernicus-style even about these things are exceptionally great people. Most people slip into a self-interested way of thinking, become unable to understand the facts of the matter, and end up seeing only that which betters their own circumstances.

If it means anything at all to live in this world, it’s that you must live your life like a true human being and feel just what you feel. This is not something that anyone can teach from the sidelines, no matter how great a person they may be.

you must make a habit of thinking honestly, with your own experience as a foundation, and—Copper, this is very important!—if someone fakes this part, no matter what kind of great-sounding things they think or say, they are all lies in the end.

The most important thing—more than what other people think, more than anything—is that you should first know for yourself, truly and deeply, where human greatness lies.

They already felt close enough that there was no need to speak. How nice it was just to lie there in silence.

But needless to say, Copper, human beings must be human. For people to be in an inhuman relationship is quite a shame. Even between perfect strangers, human relationships have to be human.

There is nothing more beautiful than people nurturing goodwill toward their fellow beings. And those are the human relations that humans truly deserve. Copper, don’t you agree?