"A Tale for the Time Being"

So impressed that Ruth Ozeki can narrate her own novel, (fitting as half of the novel is semi-autobiographical,)  and do all kinds of voices too! The book has many fascinating parts -- meditations on bullying, zazen, sky soldiers, marriage with a plant artist, information decay etc, but quantum mechanics as machina deus ex brings the novel down a notch.

• This diary will tell the real life story of my great-grandmother Yasutani Jiko. She was a nun and a novelist and New Woman7 of the Taisho era.8 She was also an anarchist and a feminist who had plenty of lovers, both males and females, but she was never kinky or nasty.
• Assumptions suck. They’re like expectations. Assumptions and expectations will kill any relationship, so let’s you and me not go there, okay?
• Print is predictable and impersonal, conveying information in a mechanical transaction with the reader’s eye. <> Handwriting, by contrast, resists the eye, reveals its meaning slowly, and is as intimate as skin.
• “There are eleven great planetary gyres,” he said. “Two of them flow directly toward us from Japan and diverge just off the BC coastline. The smaller one, the Aleut Gyre, goes north toward the Aleutian Islands. The larger one goes south. It’s sometimes called the Turtle Gyre, because the sea turtles ride it when they migrate from Japan to Baja.” ... “Each gyre orbits at its own speed,” he continued. “And the length of an orbit is called a tone. Isn’t that beautiful? Like the music of the spheres. The longest orbital period is thirteen years, which establishes the fundamental tone. The Turtle Gyre has a half tone of six and a half years. The Aleut Gyre, a quarter tone of three. The flotsam that rides the gyres is called drift. Drift that stays in the orbit of the gyre is considered to be part of the gyre memory. The rate of escape from the gyre determines the half-life of drift.
• You could say it’s a depressing ambience, but personally, I find it relaxing exactly because nobody’s trying too hard. What’s depressing is when everyone is trying too hard, and the most depressing thing of all is when they’re trying too hard and actually thinking that they’re making it.
• She’s a nun, so that’s her job. I swear, sometimes I think the main reason she’s still alive is because of all the stuff I give her to pray about.
• I’m not very good at poetry, but when I read old Jiko’s poem, I saw an image in my mind of this big old ginkgo tree on the grounds of her temple.29 The leaves are shaped like little green fans, and in the autumn they turn bright yellow and fall off and cover the ground, painting everything pure golden. And it occurred to me that the big old tree is a time being, and Jiko is a time being, too, and I could imagine myself searching for lost time under the tree, sifting through the fallen leaves that are her scattered golden words.
• “There are at least eight of them in the world’s oceans,” he said. “According to this book I’ve been reading, two of them, the Great Eastern Patch and Great Western Patch, are in the Turtle Gyre, and converge at the southern tip of Hawaii. The Great Eastern Patch is the size of Texas. The Great Western is even larger, half the size of the continental USA.”
• The smooth skin on her shorn head caught the light. From a distance, where Ruth stood, it looked like two moons, talking.
• It was a complete bust. Dad was sulking around like a jilted lover, and Mom was grim and tight and righteous, but at least they identified as Japanese and still spoke the language fluently. I, on the other hand, was totally fucked, because I identified as American, and even though we always spoke Japanese at home, my conversational skills were limited to basic, daily-life stuff like where’s my allowance, and pass the jam, and Oh please please please don’t make me leave Sunnyvale.
• I don’t know how to write it, but it was like ooo . . . ooo . . . ooooh . . . or ow . . . ow . . . owwww . . . or no . . . no . . . noooo . . . like a young girl getting tortured by a sadist who was kind of mechanical and a little bit bored, but wasn’t ready to stop yet, either.
• I read about how the scientists in the Arctic, or the Antarctic, or somewhere really cold, can drill way down and take ice core samples of the ancient atmosphere that are hundreds of thousands or even millions of years old. And even though this is totally cool, it makes me sad to think of those plugs of ice, melting and releasing their ancient bubbles like tiny sighs into our polluted twenty-first-century air. Stupid, I know, but that’s the way the temple felt to me, like a core sample from another time,
• She studied his clean, chiseled profile and marveled. After everything she’d just read—about Nao’s life, the girl’s father, her situation at school—that his mind would alight upon the crows!
• ... whales with a new and extremely efficient weapon called a bomb lance. The bomb lance was a heavyweight shoulder rifle that fired a special harpoon, fitted with a bomb and time-delay fuse, which exploded inside the whale just seconds after penetrating its skin.
• A name, Ruth thought, could be either a ghost or a portent depending upon which side of time you were standing. The name Whaletown had become a mere specter of the past, a crepuscular Pacific shimmer, but the name Desolation Sound still hovered in a liminal space and felt to her both oracular and haunted.
  Her own name, Ruth, had often functioned like an omen, casting a complex shadow forward across her life.
• Sugako wrote a diary called Reflections on the Way to the Gallows, which I’m supposed to read, too. It’s a great title, but why did these anarchist women have to write so much?
• It was oddly peaceful. I didn’t mind the silent laughter so much, because at least it didn’t leave scars on my body, and I could almost feel happy to see Ugawa Sensei scoring points and getting in good with the popular kids in our class. Substitute teachers are even lower than transfer students,
• He started with Socrates and did approximately a philosopher per week. I don’t think it was helping him find the meaning of life, but at least it gave him a concrete goal, which counts for something. I believe it doesn’t matter what it is, as long as you can find something concrete to keep you busy while you are living your meaningless life.
• He only used the minds he didn’t like for folding, so we ended up with lots of insects made from Nietzsche and Hobbes.
• Compared with that, furiitaa probably sounds pretty great, but it isn’t. Japan isn’t a great place to be a free anything, because free just means all alone and out of it.
• A rapprochement was what was needed. An unfinished book, left unattended, turns feral, and she would need all her focus, will, and ruthless determination to tame it again.
• Death is certain. Life is always changing, like a puff of wind in the air, or a wave in the sea, or even a thought in the mind. So making a suicide is finding the edge of life. It stops life in time, so we can grasp what shape it is and feel it is real, at least for just a moment. It is trying to make some real solid thing from the flow of life that is always changing...
  Maybe you would like to ask me how does suicide make life feel real?
  Well, by cutting into illusions. By cutting into pixels and finding blood. By entering the cave of mind and walking into fire. By making shadows bleed. You can feel life completely by taking it away.
• At the other extreme, when her attention was disengaged and fractured, she experienced time at its most granular, wherein moments hung around like particles, diffused and suspended in standing water.
  There used to be a middle way, too, when her attention was focused but vast, and time felt like a limpid pool, ringed by sunlit ferns.
• If you’ve ever tried to keep a diary, then you’ll know that the problem of trying to write about the past really starts in the present: No matter how fast you write, you’re always stuck in the then and you can never catch up to what’s happening now, which means that now is pretty much doomed to extinction... So saying _now obliterates its meaning, turning it into exactly what it isn’t. It’s like the word is committing suicide or something.
• I almost felt proud of him, which I know sounds kind of perverse but I think maybe you get a little fond of the people you’ve tortured and whose future you’ve owned.
• In reality, every reader, while he is reading, is the reader of his own self. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument, which he offers to the reader to permit him to discern what, without the book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself. The reader’s recognition in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its truth.     — Marcel Proust, Le temps retrouvé
• What is the half-life of information? Does its rate of decay correlate with the medium that conveys it? Pixels need power. Paper is unstable in fire and flood.
• but landing with a full payload was dangerous, so they would discharge their bombs into the sea. From the cockpit of the plane, they could see the large shadows of whales, moving below the surface of the water. From so high up, the whales looked small. They used them for target practice.
  “It was fun,” the old man told Callie over the phone. “What did we know?”
• “Not good,” he said. “The covenant holder wants me to stop planting, but I’m arguing that given the rapid onset of climate change, we need to radically redefine the term native and expand it to include formerly, and even prehistorically, native species.”
• I hate email. It’s so slow. On email it’s never now.
• I can’t blame her for not understanding. When she finally wrote me back, it was this tight, bright, cheerful little email that made it clear that she really wasn’t interested in me if I was going to be a whiner.
• We had a lifestyle. Here we were barely managing a life.
• Dad kept climbing. One step. Another. Higher and higher. We were an army of two, him and me, marching up a mountain, but not to conquer it. We were in retreat, a defeated army on the run.
• He was standing a few steps above me, and he looked really tall, and as I watched him, I thought maybe I could understand his faraway expression. Maybe it was happiness. I think my dad was happy.
• You have to remember that she is a hundred and four years old, and if you’ve never hung out with an extremely old person before, well, I’m telling you, it’s intense. What I mean is that even though they still have arms and legs and tits and crotches like other human beings, extremely old people look more like aliens or beings from outer space. I know that’s probably not very PC to say, but it’s true. They look like ET or something, ancient and young all at the same time, and the way they move, slow and careful but also kind of spastic, is like extraterrestrials, too.
• until you happen to notice the few wisps of long grey hair hanging down like an old man’s beard. In the shadows of the bathhouse, watching her pale, crooked body rise from the steam in the dark wooden tub, I thought she looked ghostly—part ghost, part child, part young girl, part sexy woman, and part yamamba,105 all at once. All the ages and stages, combined into a single female time being.
• “I asked for you,” she said.
  “For me?”
  “So you could hear the answer.”
• I told her about the fish in my stomach, and she said she knew exactly what I was talking about, and that she had a fish, too, for many years. In fact, she said she had lots of fishes, some that were small like sardines, some that were medium-sized like carp, and other ones that were as big as a bluefin tuna, but the biggest fish of all belonged to Haruki #1, and it was more like the size of a whale.
• Islanders kept a lot of secrets: secret clam gardens and oyster beds, secret pine mushroom and chanterelle patches, secret underwater rocks where sea urchins grew, secret marijuana grow-ops, secret telephone lists for salmon and halibut, meat and cheese and unpasteurized dairy.
• Jiko bowed to them again, and nudged me, so I bowed, too, but I did it half-assed, so she made me do it again, which made things even because now it was like old Jiko was the girl boss of our gang, and I was the fat screwup who couldn’t bow properly. I didn’t think this was so funny, but the gangbangers thought it was hilarious, and Jiko smiled, too,
• Jiko looked out across the ocean to where the water met the sky. “A wave is born from deep conditions of the ocean,” she said. “A person is born from deep conditions of the world. A person pokes up from the world and rolls along like a wave, until it is time to sink down again. Up, down. Person, wave.”
• Information is a lot like water; it’s hard to hold on to, and hard to keep from leaking away. Tepco and the Japanese government tried to contain the news of the reactor meltdown,
• A subspecies of the Earthquake Catfish is the yonaoshi namazu or World-Rectifying Catfish, which is able to heal the political and economic corruption in society by shaking things up.
  Belief in the World-Rectifying Catfish was especially prevalent during the early nineteenth century, a period characterized by a weak, ineffective government and a powerful business class, as well as extreme and anomalous weather patterns, crop failures, famine, hoarding, urban riots, and mass religious pilgrimages, which often ended in mob violence.
• Muji’s stubbles were tiny and black, like dead ants falling off a clean white page, but old Jiko’s stubbles were bright and sparkling silver, like glitter or fairy dust.
• “That’s what Nao wrote. So she’s hiding her diary inside Proust, and he’s hiding his diary by writing in French. Secret French diaries seem to run in the family.”
• When you’re beating a drum, you can hear when the BOOM comes the teeniest bit too late or the teeniest bit too early, because your whole attention is focused on the razor edge between silence and noise. Finally I achieved my goal and resolved my childhood obsession with now because that’s what a drum does. When you beat a drum, you create NOW, when silence becomes a sound so enormous and alive it feels like you’re breathing in the clouds and the sky, and your heart is the rain and the thunder.
• The word she used was ijime, and hearing it, suddenly I felt very small. Me and my stupid classmates. My little pricks and pokes and stabbings. I thought I knew all about ijime, but it turned out I didn’t know anything about it at all.
• Now, when he calls me out, it’s almost as if he is seeking my collaboration in making each exercise more exquisite than the last. He refers to his training as an act of kindness, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he goes over our sessions in his mind afterward, in order to hone his artistry. If his medium had been words instead of war, he would have been a poet.
• You remember it exactly. September 11 is like a sharp knife slicing through time. It changed everything.
• “But I just don’t understand you. The girl is attacked, tied up and almost raped, her video gets put up on some fetish website, her underpants get auctioned off to some pervert, her pathetic father sees all this and instead of doing anything to help her he tries to kill himself in the bathroom, where she has to find him—after all that, the only thing you can say is Babette is cool? It’s sad about the bugs?”
• He traveled down to Vancouver to create an urban forest called Means of Production, growing plants and trees for local artists to use: wood for instrument makers, willow for weavers, fiber for papermakers. Wherever they traveled, he collected seeds and cuttings: ghetto palms from Brooklyn; metasequoia from Massachusetts; ginkgos, a living Chinese fossil, from the sidewalks in the Bronx... (medlar)  best eaten rotten, in spite of their nasty, unmistakable smell. <> “Kind of like sugar-frosted baby shit.”
• Before, when he went through his Pretending to Have a Job Phase, and then his Hikikomori Phase, and the Great Minds Phase, and the Insect Origami Phase, you could say that at least he was interested and engaged with his insanity.
• While his company was primarily involved in interface development for the gaming market, the U.S. military had an interest in the enormous potential his research might have for applications in semi-autonomous weapons technology. Harry was concerned that the interface he was helping to design was too seamless. What made a computer game addictive and entertaining would make it easy and fun to carry out a massively destructive bombing mission.
• “This is why I think shame must be different from conscience. They say we Japanese are a culture of shame, so maybe we are not so good at conscience? Shame comes from outside, but conscience must be a natural feeling that comes from a deep place inside an individual person. They say we Japanese people have lived so long under the feudal system that maybe we do not have an individual self in the same way Westerners do. Maybe we cannot have a conscience without an individual self.
• Fiction had its own time and logic. That was its power. But the email she’d just written to the professor was not fiction. It was real, as real as the diary.
• “The eternal now,” he said. “She wanted to catch it, remember? To pin it down. That was the point.”
  “Of writing?”
  “Or suicide.”
  “I’ve always thought of writing as the opposite of suicide,” she said. “That writing was about immortality. Defeating death, or at least forestalling it.”
• I unscrew the cap on my fountain pen, worried that the ink might run dry and be insufficient for my thoughts. My last thoughts, measured out in drops of ink.
• fates of all the Japanese soldiers and citizens that these same Americans (enemies, whose lives I save) may live to kill. And so on and so on, until you could even say that the very outcome of this war will be decided by a moment and a millimeter, representing the outward manifestation of my will. But how am I to know?
  My, how grandiose one can become in the face of death!
• Montaigne wrote. “Everyone calls barbarity that to which he is not accustomed.”
• I mean, after all the baths Jiko and I had taken together and all the times I’d scrubbed her back, I knew how to do it, right? It was like I’d been practicing for this. I knew exactly how hard to rub, and it didn’t feel strange just because now she was dead. It felt pretty normal.
• You do this with a partner, and each pair picks up a bone together and puts it in the funeral urn. You start with the feet bones and move up to the head, because you don’t want her to be upside down for the rest of eternity.
• There was no smoke coming from it, but they could see a dense column of shimmering heat, which was all that was left of her mother’s body as she became air. Oliver said that in this etheric form she could ride the trade winds back to Hilo and be there in no time.
• “What you’re describing is interesting,” Muriel said, twisting the end of her braid around her finger. “The reader confronting the blank page. It’s like writer’s block, only in reverse.”
• Oliver looked up from the magazine. “ ‘Quantum information is like the information of a dream,’ ” he said. “ ‘We can’t show it to others, and when we try to describe it we change the memory of it.’
• Anyway, I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and I think maybe it’s true, even though I don’t really like uncertainty. I’d much rather know, but then again, not-knowing keeps all the possibilities open. It keeps all the worlds alive.