Sunday 31 August 2014

my favourite ~bits~ from "the wind up bird chronicle"

"I lived in a world that I had chosen through an act of will. It was my home. It might not be perfect, but the fundamental stance I adopted with regard to my home was to accept it, problems and all, because it was something I myself had chosen. If it had problems, these were almost certainly problems that had originated within me."

"If people lived for ever - if they never got any older - if they could just go on living in this world, never dying, always healthy - do you think they'd bother to think hard about things, the way we're doing now? I mean, we think about just about everything, more or less - philosophy, psychology, logic. Religion. Literature. I think, if there were no such thing as death, that complicated thoughts and ideas like that would never come into the world."

"'Why do you like jellyfish so much?' I asked.
'I don't know. I think they're sweet,' she said. 'But one thing did occur to me when I was focusing on them. What we see before us is just one tiny part of the world. We get into the habit of thinking, This is the world, but that's not true at all. The real world is a much deeper and darker place than this, and most of it is occupied by jellyfish and things. We just happen to forget all that.'"

"Every now and then I would feel a violent stab of loneliness. The very water I drank, the very air I breathed, would feel like long, sharp needles. The pages of a book in my hands would take on the threatening metallic gleam of razor blades. I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping through me when the world was hushed at 4 o'clock in the morning."

"The houses were all small but pleasant. I wondered what kind of people might live in such houses: probably normal people living normal lives. None of them had inscrutable women coming out of nowhere to buy them suits and shoes and watches. None of them had to calculate the huge funds they would need to gain possession of some dried up well. I felt a stab of envy for people living in such a normal world."

"Maybe the world was like a revolving door, it occurred to him as his consciousness was fading away. And which section you ended up in was just a matter of where your foot happened to fall. There were tigers in one section, but no tigers in another. Maybe it was a simple as that. And there was no logical continuity from one section to another. And it was precisely because of this lack of logical continuity that choices didn't mean very much."

"I feel as if the world is just listening for my next thought. But I can't think of anything.  Sorry, but I just can't think of anything."