How does the light get in?

Since I'm between projects ... i.e. I'm not writing ... I'm able to read and, by blogging, think. There is a nice patch of grass between Murakami's Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and Teresita Fernández's commencement address (curated by Maria Popova for Brain Pickings). The sun is out there. The bugs are under control. I have something chilled in the cooler beside where I lie and look up at the sky.

The kanji for Tsukuru could be one of two words: create or make. Tsukuru's father chooses the make or build word. It takes Tsukuru the whole book to find out that whether he is colorless or not isn't really the point, the point is he needs to build a place (like a train station) that will attract others to visit--perhaps his girlfriend Sara will come and decide to stay forever.

Tsukuru's epiphany:

One heart is not connected to another through harmony alone. They are, instead, linked deeply through their wounds. Pain linked to pain, fragility to fragility. There is no silence without a cry of grief, no forgiveness without bloodshed, no acceptance without a passage through acute loss. That is what lies at the root of true harmony.

(A lot of echoes in Naomi Shihab Nye's Kindness.) "Feel the future dissolve in a moment."

Eri is talking to Tsukuru:

"We survived. You and I. And those who survive have a duty.Our duty is to do our best to keep on living. Even if our lives are not perfect."

Tsukuru:

Because I have no sense of self. I have no personality, no brilliant color. I have nothing to offer. That’s always been my problem. I feel like an empty vessel. I have a shape. I guess. As a container, but there's nothing inside. I just can't see myself as the right person for her. I think that the more time passes, and the more she knows about me, the more disappointed Sara will be, and the more she'll choose to distance herself from me.

Eri shook her head slowly. "It's no different from building stations. If something is important enough, a little mistake isn't going to ruin it all, or make it vanish. It might not be perfect, but the first step is actually building the station. Right? Otherwise trains won't stop there.

Build "the kind of station where trains want to stop, even if they have no reason to do so."

Tsukuru:

Yet it was this pain, this sense of being choked, that he needed. It was exactly what he had to acknowledge, what he had to confront. From now on he had to make that cold core melt, bit by bit. It might take a long time, but it was what he had to do. But his own body heat wasn't enough to melt that frozen soil. He needed someone else's warmth.

A reply from Teresita Fernández:

A broken bowl would be valued precisely because of the exquisite nature of how it was repaired, a distinctly Japanese tradition of kintsugi, meaning to “to patch with gold”. Often, we try to repair broken things in such a way as to conceal the repair and make it “good as new.” But the tea masters understood that by repairing the broken bowl with the distinct beauty of radiant gold, they could create an alternative to “good as new” and instead employ a “better than new” aesthetic. They understood that a conspicuous, artful repair actually adds value. Because after mending, the bowl’s unique fault lines were transformed into little rivers of gold that post repair were even more special because the bowl could then resemble nothing but itself.

Patching with gold ... isn't that like Richard Ford's "alloyed with loss" metaphor?

"The specific is harder to name than the general." (Fernandez is driving at the specific, the unique, the individual.)

"Artists always start from nothing."

"Make your unknown known." (borrowed from Georgia O'Keefe)

"There is a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in." (borrowed from Leonoard Cohen)

A tea pot has a lid and a spout. A train station has entrances ... for the trains and for the people ascending or descending stairs, escalators, elevators. If the station is Paddington or Gare d'Orsay, it has lots of windows.

Finished Subtle Bodies

I heard Norman Rush read the early airplane scene from Subtle Bodies … mostly Nina’s voice … at Princeton a couple of years back. I’d been a fan since Rush’s Mating. Who doesn’t love a love story set in the Kalahari savannah with lions?

I picked it up--the smoked turkey between two slices of Murakami. I’d finished the three 1Q84 books and had Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki waiting. So I was viewing Subtle Bodies through the prism of Murakami’s kindness, empathy, generosity to his characters. SB leads with edge. Warmth and empathy is missing in my writing and I was on the lookout for more.

It is a very funny drawing room drama. (And it turns out to be kind as well.)

For example, at the end of chapter 39:

She said, “Sitting here in the gloaming. It’s nice.”
“It isn’t gloaming yet,” Ned said.

Expiating the title:

Ned was having a particularly strong reaction to the idea of Joris leaving.  Partly it was selfish because he hadn’t finished the task of putting together what they had all been, with what they were now. And the question was still there of whether their true interior selves—the subtle bodies inside—were still there and functioning despite what age and accident and force of circumstance may have done to hurt them. He meant something like that … that when they had become friends it had been a friendship established between subtle bodies, by which he meant the ingredients of what they were to be …

This is about what you loved in a friend as a friend…. Maybe there was a window in life and then it closed. … there was that window, before anybody had accomplished anything to speak of, when the ingredients, by which he meant the subtle bodies, shown their light.

Rush (through Ned) is saying friendship is between subtle bodies before walls built by experiences, disappointments, achievements shut the blinds and isolate our interior selves from the world.

Then at the climax, the funeral, when Ned finds his eulogy at page 847 of Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, and reads out loud to the deceased and to the deceased's mourners about cultivating happiness:

One moment's being uneasy or not, seems of no consequence; yet this may be thought of the next, and the next, and so on, til there is a large port of misery. In the same way one must think of happiness, of learning, of friendship.  We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed.

the author fires the arrow prepared for him

“The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - that you’d thought special, particular to you. And here it is, set down by someone else, a person you’ve never met, maybe even someone long dead. And it’s as if a hand has come out, and taken yours.” 
― Alan Bennett, The History Boys

My friend and I have been talking recently about the connection between reader and author, between artist and viewer, calling attention to something already known or felt.  Or, perhaps misapplying a Kafka: "the wound fits perfectly the arrow."  The author fires the arrow, maybe an author long dead, and it fits the reader's wound.

(PS. I went to Goodreads to find the Kafka quote, and its version was: “all that matters is that the wound fit the arrow.”) Really quite a different meaning.  Now I'll have to search out the original.

(PPS. Mark Slouka's article in 2003 Harper's gave me the Kafka quote.)

(PPPS. I'm getting close to finishing chapter four, November, in my rewrite.)

On Cha: an Asian Literary Journal

http://www.asiancha.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=193&Itemid=112