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Wednesday, August 2, 2017

A Rumination on a Rumination

"...the pain he was feeling now was different. All he felt was sorrow, as if he'd been abandoned at the bottom of a deep, dark pit. That's all it was -- sorrow."

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki is such a perfectly relentless, melancholy rumination over self-doubt, the fragility of identity, the seeming durability of moments which nonetheless teeter on the edge of extinction, that the reader finds himself swallowed up in an irrepresible, dusky sea, doing well to keep his lips above water level in order to suck in the uncertain air. One feels the thinness of life in his bones, strives automatically for the next breath, acknowledges the chance that he may breath in saltwater. He persists, he endures, he hopes and regrets. And he visits, revisits, the changing landscape of his own life memories, looking at each once again, tilting it sideways, holding it to a new, another light. Did we truly love as I seem to remember; and, if so, what became of what had seemed unassailable? How had all this happened, at what point were mutual moments, words, hopes and dreams parted, and by what blade? Was it I, really I, who had wielded the blade that pierced my own heart? And now where had she gone, where had he gone, whose hand had lain so naturally, yet so very impermanently in mine? What happened to us, the depot through which the train of the world had once passed on its predictable, unwavering way? Memory kneels before the court of time and faces an objective, implacable judge whose gavel eternally knocks at the door of time.

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