Norwegian Wood

Reiko moved on to the Beatles, playing “Norwegian Wood”, “Yesterday”, “Michelle”, and “Something”. She sang and played “Here Comes the Sun”, then played “The Fool on the Hill”. I laid seven matches in a row.

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

I realize that all I can place in the imperfect vessel of writing are imperfect memories and imperfect thoughts.

That’s what distinguishes us from the outside world: most people go about their lives unconscious of their deformities, while in this little world of ours the deformities themselves are a precondition.

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.

“People are strange when you’re a stranger.”

Thelonious Monk playing “Honeysuckle Rose”.

All we are doing is telling each other things that can only be told by the rubbing together of two imperfect lumps of flesh.

If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.