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d17cf81
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For , literally translated, 'Since it must be so,' of all the good-bys I have heard is the most beautiful. Unlike the and , it does not try to cheat itself by any bravado 'Till we meet again,' any sedative to postpone the pain of separation. It does not evade the issue like the sturdy blinking . is a father's . It is - 'Go out in the world and do well, my son.' It is encouragement and admonition. It is hope and faith. But it passes over the significance of the moment; of parting it says nothing. It hides its emotion. It says too little. While ('God be with you') and say too much. They try to bridge the distance, almost to deny it. is a prayer, a ringing cry. 'You must not go - I cannot bear to have you go! But you shall not go alone, unwatched. God will be with you. God's hand will over you' and even - underneath, hidden, but it is there, incorrigible - 'I will be with you; I will watch you - always.' It is a mother's . But says neither too much nor too little. It is a simple acceptance of fact. All understanding of life lies in its limits. All emotion, smoldering, is banked up behind it. But it says nothing. It is really the unspoken good-by, the pressure of a hand, 'Sayonara.
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spanish
emotion
god
japanese
goodbyes
german
farewell
english
french
mother
father
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Anne Morrow Lindbergh |
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bd8676f
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I know I have a pretty good sense for music, but she was better than me. I used to think it was such a waste! I thought, 'If only she had started out with a good teacher and gotten the proper training, she'd be so much further along!' But I was wrong about that. She was not the kind of child who could stand proper training. There just happen to be people like that. They're blessed with this marvelous talent, but they can't make the effort to systematize it. They end up squandering it in little bits and pieces. I've seen my share of people like that. At first you think they're amazing. Like, they can sight-read some terrifically difficult piece and do a damn good job playing it all the way through. You see them do it, and you're overwhelmed. you think, 'I could never do that in a million years.' But that's as far as they go. They can't take it any further. And why not? Because they won't put in the effort. Because they haven't had the discipline pounded into them. They've been spoiled. They have just enough talent so they've been able to play things well without any effort and they've had people telling them how great they are from the time they're little, so hard work looks stupid to them. They'll take some piece another kid has to work on for three weeks and polish it off in half the time, so the teacher figures they've put enough into it and lets them go to the next thing. And they do that in half the time and go on to the next piece. They never find out what it means to be hammered by the teacher; they lose out on a certain element required or character building. It's a tragedy.
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reiko
japanese
talent
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Haruki Murakami |
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ff0f176
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From the girl who sat before me now...surged a fresh and physical life force. She was like a small animal that has popped into the world with the coming of spring. Her eyes moved like an independent organism with joy, laughter, anger, amazement, and despair. I hadn't seen a face so vivid and expressive in ages, and I enjoyed watching it live and move.
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japanese
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Haruki Murakami |
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3c4cc99
|
From the moment of my birth, I lived with pain at the center of my life. My only purpose in life was to find a way to coexist with intense pain.
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|
pain
existence
life
coexist
find-a-way
haruki-murakam
the-wind-up-bird-chronicle
murakami
intense
center
japanese
painful
japan
exist
purpose
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Haruki Murakami |
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1270cca
|
Listening to the music while stretching her body close to its limit, she was able to attain a mysterious calm. She was simultaneously the torturer and the tortured, the forcer and the forced. This sense of inner-directed self-sufficiency was what she wanted most of all. It gave her deep solace.
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|
stretching
murakami
japanese
|
Haruki Murakami |
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33be467
|
When you're in an extreme situation you tend to avoid facing it by getting caught up in little details. Like a guy who's decided to commit suicide and boards a train only to become obsessed with whether he remembered to lock the door when he left home.
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suicide
japanese-literature
japanese
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Ryū Murakami |
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72fb4c5
|
My point is: in this whole wide world the only person you can depend on is you.
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|
life
japanese
|
Haruki Murakami |
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459a852
|
When you're a kid, getting lost isn't just an event or a situation, it's like a career move. You get this thrill of anxiety and fear and a feeling that you've done something that can never be undone.
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japanese-literature
japanese
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Ryū Murakami |
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b5d841e
|
He invited me to his apartment in the wee hours one morning and pulled out a set of children's building blocks. It seems he used to ride around and around on the Yamanote Line with them, building castles on the floor of the train.
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yamanote
japanese-literature
japanese
train
|
Ryū Murakami |
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ec30eae
|
They needed a reason why a little kid would commit murder, someone or something to point the finger at, and I think they were relieved when they hit upon horror movies as the culprit. But there's no reason a child commits murder, just as there's no reason a child gets lost. What would it be - because his parents weren't watching him? That's not a reason, it's just a step in the process.
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|
murder
japanese-literature
japanese
japan
|
Ryū Murakami |
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f690325
|
When I went on anyway, my body began to grow cold, and I thought I was dead. Face pale, my dead self sat down on a bench and began to turn toward my real self, who was watching this hallucination on the screen of the night. My dead self came nearer, just as if it might want to shake hands with my real self. That's when I panicked and tried to run. But my dead self pursued me and finally caught me, entered me and controlled me. I'd felt then just the way I felt now. I felt as if a hole had opened in my head from which consciousness and memory leaked out and in their place the rash crowded in, and a cold like spoiled roast chicken. But that time before, shaking and clinging to the damp bench, I'd told myself, Hey, take a good look, isn't the world still under your feet? I'm on this ground, and on this same ground are trees and grass and ants carrying sand to their nests, little girls chasing rolling balls, and puppies running.
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|
world
murakami
japanese
self
|
Ryū Murakami |
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cb9058b
|
The better you were able to imagine what you wanted to imagine, the farther you could flee from reality.
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|
reality
imagination
the-wind-up-bird-chronicle
haruki-murakami
murakami
flee
japanese
flight
japan
imagine
|
Haruki Murakami |
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ce1c58f
|
Lady #1, Maki, had never once given any thought to what was really right for her in her life, simply believing that if she surrounded herself with super-exclusive things, she'd become a super-exclusive person.
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|
japanese-literature
japanese
|
Ryū Murakami |
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9d5b558
|
And, well, mine are kind of on the heavy side anyway. The first day or two, I don't want to do ANYTHING. Make sure you keep away from me then.' I'd like to, but how can I tell?' I asked. O.K., I'll wear a hat for a couple of days after my period starts. A red one. That should work,' she said with a laugh. 'If you see me on the street and I'm wearing a red hat, don't talk to me, just run away.
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|
japanese
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Haruki Murakami |
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240a632
|
Great art projects a sense of inexhaustibility. In literature, particularly in poetry, this may be accomplished through ambiguity: Beneath each and every meaning that I can descry lie others, so that rereading holds out the prospect of new subtleties, inversions, secret codes and ineffabilities
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noh
vollmann
japanese
theater
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William T. Vollmann |
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cd325b5
|
And then there was her face: her white skin, her brown eyes, and her expression, so soft and beautiful; she looked as though she were constantly getting ready to ask a question. Even an immaculately crafted doll could not have been as lovely.
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japanese
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Natsuo Kirino |
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f5334e0
|
To study the self is to forget the self. Maybe if you sat enough zazen, your sense of being a solid, singular self would dissolve and you could forget about it. What a relief. You could just hang out happily as part of an open-ended quantum array.
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|
spirituality
science
life
japanese
quantum-mechanics
meditation
sense-of-self
physics
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Ruth Ozeki |
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d4bac8f
|
White bread in Japan is a steroidal megaloaf called . Brioche-like and great for toasting, shokupan is sold in bags of four, six, or eight perfectly square slices, without heels. Where do the heels go? Out back with the imperfect vegetables? I bought shokupan several times before figuring out why the four-, six, and eight-slice sacks all sold for the same price. It's the same loaf, cut into thicker or thinner slices. Eight-slice shokupan is similar in thickness to Wonder bread. Six-slice shokupan is like what we buy in Seattle as Texas Toast (the fresh kind, not the frozen garlic bread). A piece of four-slice shokupan is like a Stephen King paperback. It would make a slot toaster cry out in pain. Iris and I liked the six-slice bread best and usually ate it toasted with melted butter and a sprinkle of sea salt.
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|
shokupan
slices
white-bread
japanese
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Matthew Amster-Burton |
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dc2f9cf
|
In a time like this, let us trust in God even more. To trust when life is easy is no trust.
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faith
trust
god
canadian
japanese
japan
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Joy Kogawa |
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573e1c9
|
in this world there probably isn't anyone whom you can dislike from the heart!
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|
japanese
manga
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Ai Yazawa |