Changer

Been staying up to 3AM these days for no reason, other than insomnia tinged with a slight fever.
Been waiting for the big one to hit. I religiously check the US Gov's earthquake site. I keep imagining how that big tower in Komazawa Park is going to go all jenga when it comes. I sometimes wonder how I'll be able to escape the subway tunnels when they fill with seawater.

Been reading Murakami's Kafka on the Shore (海辺のカフカ) and it provides some slight succor. I'm no longer locked into the idea that literature can provide a 'message' or an 'answer'. Yet, I am still in some way inspired, consoled, and reassured by the litany of beautiful things that I've found in the book: libraries, solitude,meticulously sharpened pencils, gazing at the sea. It's a relief in a way because his world is removed from my own, which is inundated (mediated) by an opposite set of values: success, ambition, money, fame, power, pride.

These are powerful things, and are certainly external engines of influence and change (but they don't make the world go round. the world just conserves its angular momentum). What I sense in Murakami's writing is a concern instead for internal transformation, ephiphany, growth (whichever term works for you).

And his faith in transformation and change despite our quotidien and bureaucratized lives is one spiritual conviction I can share. My logic is strong, but I know that I am not strong enough to plot my escape from my own frame of mind. After all, can you choose to forget something, someone? In that sense, perhaps it should be reassuring to know that nothing can remain the same, just like that tower can not remain standing forever.