Chai > Recent Status Updates

"Nations became civilized in three fundamental ways, they said : science, education and beauty contests."

Here we go again, with the heart wrenching unfairness of life and people.

"The possibility of an immediate and wholesale decimation of civilization was not half as frightening as the simple realization that our individual passing had no impact on the order of things, and life would go on the same with or without us. Now THAT, she had always thought, was terrifying."

"Why do people wage war? Why do hundreds of thousands, even millions of people group together and try to annihilate each other? Do people start wars out of anger? Or fear? Or are anger and fear just two aspects of the same spirit?"

"People need a place they can go back to. There's still time to make it."
Somehow it's this kind of lines with the appearence of light meaning that strike a chord with me.

"The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory."
Murakami sure is obsessed with Anton Chekhov. This is the second time I read about Chekhov's pistol in his books.

It's escalating super quickly again

"in everybody's life there's a point of no return. And in a very few cases, a point where you can't go forward anymore."
"Silence, I discover, is something you can actually hear"
There's also a super interesting story about Adolf Eichmann's trials after WWII for his war crimes. I strongly urge people who don't know him to read about him.

"..a certain type of perfection can only be realized through a limitless accumulation of the imperfect. I find that encouraging"
"He has no sense that It was something he decided to do himself, or that he had a choice. He's like totally passive. But I think in real life people are like that. It's not so easy to make choices on your own"

"I stare at the ceaseless, rushing crowd and imagine a time a hundred years from now. In a hundred years, everybody here - me included - will have disappeared from the face of the earth and turned into ashes or dust. A weird thought,but everything in front of me starts to seem unreal, like a gust of wind could blow it all away."

"Wasn't It better if they kept this desire to see each other hidden within them, and never actually got together? That way there would always be hope in their hearts -small yet a vital flame that warmed them to their core, a tiny flame to cup one's hands around and protect from the wind, a flame that the violent winds of reality might extinguish." MY GOD.

Spoiler alert but as close as Ushikawa was close to figuring out wherr Aomame was, I'm so sad his life had to end that way. Tamaru seems to understand how capable Ushikawa was, which just made it all the more sad.

Go Tamaru!

The timeline is getting a little bit shaky.. Aomame sees Tengo and Ushikawa and theeen Ushikawa talks about the events that led to it, and Murakami made sure there was a certain continuity to the whole story so naturally I'm lost now

"This is what it means to live on. When granted hope, a person uses it as fuel, as a guidepost to life. It is impossible to live on without hope."
It's very weird how some evident idea like this one can just hit you in a very different way every time you come across it.