After the Quake

by Haruki Murakami

“Funny,” he said, “sitting here like this, it doesn’t feel as if I’ve come all that far.” “Because you flew. Those planes are too damn fast. Your mind can’t keep up with your body.”

As Joseph Conrad once wrote, true terror is the kind that men feel toward their imagination.

“Fyodor Dostoevsky, with unparalleled tenderness, depicted those who have been forsaken by God. He discovered the precious quality of human existence in the ghastly paradox whereby men who had invented God were forsaken by that very God.