Michael > Recent Status Updates

“…[T]his is the age of an anonymous public blurting out opinions. The leaders only lose their minds and run around in confusion. In this situation, it is clear that the public is being abandoned. A general election is approaching, but all we hear are weird speeches that result in the public increasingly making fun of the representatives.”

“The smile of one flower permeates those who live next to death more than the problem of life and death […] I’ve come to feel that living or dying is not the key that determines a person’s happiness or sorrow. The dead are complete, and the living stand on the deck of the ship about to set sail with their hands together. The ship glides away from the pier.”

“Last evening, while the two of us were drinking, I turned to my uncle and asked in jest, ‘Define life for me — in just a word or two.’
‘I don’t know about life,’ he replied, ‘but the world’s nothing but sex and greed.’”

“You suffer because you think the only life you can have is in the place you were born. ‘Green hills are where you find them’ — isn’t that a line from a poem you scholars are always quoting?”

“The discovery of quantum theory, I believe, is the discovery that the properties of any entity are nothing other than the way in which that entity influences others. It exists only through its interactions. Quantum theory is the theory of how things influence each other. And this is the best description of nature that we have.”

“It’s because people have aspirations and ambitions that solitude wears on them. If you don’t give a damn what the rest of the world is up to, you can be alone for a hundred years — a thousand years — with no difficulty whatsoever.”

“The calculation scheme by Heisenberg, Born, Jordan and Dirac, the strange idea of ‘limiting yourself to only what’s observable’, and to substituting physical variables with matrices, has never yet been wrong. It is the only fundamental theory about the world that until now has never been wrong — and which we still do not know the limits of.”

“He was often seen, rope over one shoulder, a pack on his back, headed out. He was off for a stroll, he would say. In the morning he woke among peaks incredibly white against the muted sky. There is something greater than the life of the cities, greater than money and possessions; there is a manhood that can never be taken away. For this, one gives everything.”

“He remembered the girl from Kauai who had cut his hand. She believed in the occult. She was humorless, intense. Write down the names, she had said, of your three closest friends and I will circle the name of your deadliest enemy.”

“The first lesson that turns a youth into an adult is that you cannot trust people. An adult is a youth betrayed.”
(from “Tsugaru”)

One of his bedside books … was a treatise on morals called “The Art Of Not Speaking.” Ever since childhood, he had always tried to practice that particular art, a very difficult art, the one he admired most and that could be applied to any domain, even literature. Hadn’t his professor taught him that prose and poetry are made not only of words, but especially of silences?

Once upon a time, people used to consult sleepwalkers for their gift of second sight. He felt no different from them. What mattered was not to slip off the ridgeline and to know just how far one can dream one’s life.

“His teacher had once told him, back in the day, that the different stages of life—childhood, youth, middle age, senescence—corresponded to several successive deaths. It was the same for the scraps of memory he tried to set down as fast as he could: scattered images from a period of his life that he watched flit by before they disappeared forever into oblivion.”

“Things have harmonics, and if you’re true to an idea as much as you can be, then the harmonics will be there and they’ll be truthful even though they may be abstract. You could come back in ten years and see it in a completely different way, and you may see more in it — that potential is there if you’ve been true to the original idea.”