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December 10, 2003
Living Like A Wind-Up Bird
I'm more than halfway through Murakami''s very gripping Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. I refuse to go the Strand bookstore to acquire more books until I finish this one. I guess I create lil motivations as such for myself. Pico Iyer's Global Soul(another great read, by the way) introduced this book to me, and I love it....it provides an extremely wonderful alternate reality for me to escape into when New York City and its bright lights and sounds are not enough to distract me from my own afflictions. I guess Mr Wind-Up Bird's loneliness is so intense that I can forget my own, even for only a little while...I guess it's marvellous that it's more than 600 pages long then.
This passage elucidates the six-month-life I carved for myself just before I came to New York:
Between the end of that strange summer and the approach of winter, my life went on without change. Each day would dawn without incident and end as it had begun. It rained alot in September. October had several warm sweaty days. Apart from the weather, there was hardly anything to distinguish one day from the next. I worked at concentrating my attention on the real and the useful. I would go to the pool almost every day for a long swim, take walks, make myself three meals.
But even so, every now and then I would feel a violent stab of loneliness. The very water I drank, the very air I breathed, would feel like long sharp needles. The pages of a book in my hands would take on the threatening metallic gleam of razor blades. I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping through me when the world was hushed at 4 oçlock in the morning.
Of course Mr Wind-up Bird and I do not lead parallel lives. I had .... more variations in my life. I had a couple of weeks of S, and 22 hours with J...and a very wrong one month with T. It seems that in Singapore, where we get unchanging weather, I mark the passing of time with different men instead of with the changing seasons. Now in New York, time is spent exploring everybit of a new city. But how new is it? And how different can it be? How can it hold my attention for so long that I can be distracted from the fact that I'm still alone, naturally.
I still crawl out of bed in the middle of the night. No matter where I am, no matter what I do.
What I'm most scared of is that , when I go back to Singapore, this will be the life I will lead. That each passing day is marked by a turn of the Calendar page, that my life is filled up with activities meant to merely conceal the gaps of silences. I do not yearn not to be alone. Because I take pride and enjoyment in being alone. I'm terrified of the loneliness that ensues. Loneliness that nobody, no activity, no drug, can remedy.
So I am jealous of Mr Wind-Up Bird, because I have a suspicion that at the end of the story, his loneliness will be quelled, and mine will only just begin.
Posted by lainey at December 10, 2003 10:16 AM