Norwegian Wood

that we are in here not to correct the deformation but to accustom ourselves to it: that one of our problems was our inability to recognize and accept our own deformities.

Thelonious Monk playing “Honeysuckle Rose”.

Death exists, not as the opposite but as a part of life. It’s a cliché translated into words, but at the time I felt it not as words but as that knot of air inside me. Death exists – in a paperweight, in four red and white balls on a pool table – and we go on living and breathing it into our lungs like fine dust.

“Balzac, Dante, Joseph Conrad, Dickens,”

no truth can cure the sadness we feel from losing a loved one. No truth, no sincerity, no strength, no kindness, can cure that sorrow. All we can do is see that sadness through to the end and learn something from it, but what we learn will be no help in facing the next sadness that comes to us without warning.

What if somewhere inside me there is a dark limbo where all the truly important memories are heaped and slowly turning into mud?

Everything was too sharp and clear, so that I could never tell where to start – the way a map that shows too much can sometimes be useless. Now,

Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain.

“A gentleman is someone who does not what he wants to do but what he should do.”