Killing Commendatore

by Haruki Murakami

“Sure, I have regrets,” I replied. “But even if I could go back and rectify one of my mistakes, I doubt it would change the outcome.”

“It may sound foolish for a man in his mid-thirties to say this, but I feel as if my life is just beginning.”

“I may be a clod of earth,” Menshiki said, laughing, “but as clods go I’m pretty good.

“Maybe we should try to make love more quietly.” “Maybe Captain Ahab should have hunted sardines,” she said.

His mind is shot. Can’t tell the difference between his balls and a pair of eggs.”

I kept quiet. Anything I said would just make me look foolish.

But if you can’t find the right words, why not paint it? You are an artist, after all.”

“And perhaps Captain Ahab should have set out after sardines.”

Mention art, and the conversation comes to a screeching halt.”

“Tomorrow is tomorrow. Today is all we have right now,” Masahiko said.

“But hey, you’re a painter, right? An artist. Artists flaunt the rules left and right—they make a great show of it.

At some point in my life, I had given up on new music. Instead, I listened to the old stuff over and over again. Books were the same. I reread books from my past, often more than once, but ignored books that had just come out.

They had no desire to go back and rewrite it. That’s how bureaucracies work. It’s practically impossible to change something once it’s been decided. Going against the current means that someone, somewhere down the line, has to take responsibility.

Even the darkest, thickest cloud shines silver when viewed from above.

But when I passed fifty, I looked at myself in the mirror and discovered nothing but emptiness. A zero. What T. S. Eliot called a ‘straw man.’