Sublime

Die Krise der Gegenwart besteht darin, dass alles, was dem Leben Sinn und Orientierung geben könnte, wegbricht. Das Leben wird nicht mehr vom Haltenden und Haltbaren getragen. Rilkes Vers aus den Duineser Elegien »Denn Bleiben ist nirgends« bringt die Krise der Gegenwart am besten zum Ausdruck. Nie war das Leben so flüchtig, vergänglich und sterbli

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m the only one here. The two

I had to make this thing I called ‘I’—or, rather, make the things that constituted me.

The Yalu River separates China and North Korea. A lot of people cross over it, and even more try to. Bizarrely, some thirty years earlier, many Chinese Koreans and Chinese had tried to escape to North Korea during China’s “Great Leap Forward” and Cultural Revolution, that country’s own attempt at mass starvation. Now the whole migration had been th

one of the privileges given to those who’ve avoided dying young is the blessed right to grow old.

Nonomiya at home, but he took the wrong street near the Ochiai crematorium and ended up at Takata. He took the train home from Mejiro.

That life is not for me. Clearly I did not inherit whatever gene it is that makes it so that when you linger in a place you start to put down roots. I’ve tried, a number of times, but my roots have always been shallow; the littlest breeze could always blow me right over. I don’t know how to germinate, I’m simply not in possession of that vegetable