To have in general but little feeling, seems to be the only security against feeling too much on any particular occasion.

Because we don’t know, do we? Everyone knows… How what happens the way it does? What underlies the anarchy of the train of events, the uncertainties, the mishaps, the disunity, the shocking irregularities that define human affairs? Nobody knows. ‘Everyone knows’ is the invocation of the cliché and the beginning of the banalization of experience, and it’s the solemnity and the sense of authority that people have in voicing the cliché that’s so insufferable. What we know is that, in an unclichéd way, nobody knows anything. You can’t know anything. The things you know you don’t know. Intention? Motive? Consequence? Meaning? All the we don’t know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing.

Because we don’t know, do we? Everyone knows… How what happens the way it does? What underlies the anarchy of the train of events, the uncertainties, the mishaps, the disunity, the shocking irregularities that define human affairs? Nobody knows. ‘Everyone knows’ is the invocation of the cliché and the beginning of the banalization of experience, and it’s the solemnity and the sense of authority that people have in voicing the cliché that’s so insufferable. What we know is that, in an unclichéd way, nobody knows anything. You can’t know anything. The things you know you don’t know. Intention? Motive? Consequence? Meaning? All the we don’t know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing.

Pavel Pavlovich Gaganov, a man well along in years and even honoured for his service, had adopted the innocent habit of accompanying his every word with a vehement ‘No, indeed, they won’t lead me by the nose!’ Well, there was nothing wrong with that. But on one occasion in the club, when during a heated discussion he uttered this phrase to a handful of club members that had clustered round him (and all of them people of some importance), Nikolay Vsevolodovich, who was standing by himself to one side and to whom no one was paying any attention, seized him unexpectedly but firmly by the nose with two fingers, and managed to drag him two or three steps across the room. He couldn’t possibly have felt any animus towards Mr. Gaganov. It might be thought of as just a schoolboy prank, of the most unforgivable kind, to be sure. And yet, as people subsequently described it, at the very moment of the operation, he was almost in a reverie, ‘as if he had lost his mind’; but that was recalled and reflected on only long afterwards. In the heat of things everyone at first remembered only the next moment, when he must have realized what had actually happened, and not only showed no embarrassment, but on the contrary, gave a malicious and happy smile ‘without the slightest regret’.

-Demons

Review from the Guardian: “In this respect the novel’s explicit (and usually creaking) references to Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (the cult as totalitarian state, “making mindless robots”; the cult leader – or God himself – as “Big Brother”) are something of a red herring; Murakami’s deep concerns here are more Proustian, which he signals when he has Aomame, holed up in hiding, read (or try to) In Search of Lost Time.” What?! I would argue that descending a random staircase is a bittt more sci-fi then dipping a madeleine into tea. Alternate realities are coextensive and overlapping in the Proustian world. Proust doesn’t require his characters to follow the suggestions of a stranger and pass through a random, bizarre tunnel in order to re-conceptualize their own world. It simply happens.  

Review from the Guardian:

“In this respect the novel’s explicit (and usually creaking) references to Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (the cult as totalitarian state, “making mindless robots”; the cult leader – or God himself – as “Big Brother”) are something of a red herring; Murakami’s deep concerns here are more Proustian, which he signals when he has Aomame, holed up in hiding, read (or try to) In Search of Lost Time.”

What?! I would argue that descending a random staircase is a bittt more sci-fi then dipping a madeleine into tea. Alternate realities are coextensive and overlapping in the Proustian world. Proust doesn’t require his characters to follow the suggestions of a stranger and pass through a random, bizarre tunnel in order to re-conceptualize their own world. It simply happens.  

LOVE IS BLIND

LOVE IS BLIND