What Happens When I Am Up Way Too Late

 

 

 

“But even so, every now and then I would feel a violent stab of loneliness. The very water I drink, the very air I breathe, 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 four o’clock in the morning.”
— Haruki Murakami (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle)

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1Q84

From the excellent all-things-Murakami website, http://www.exorcising-ghosts.co.uk

 

Haruki Murakami’s magnum opus, 1Q84,  sits in my lap as I write this. I’ve been approaching it cautiously, like a wildlife photographer approaching a sleeping Bengal tiger. Almost 1,000 pages of pure awesome…I don’t want to start reading it for fear that I will devour it all in the course of a weekend and then it will all be over. What if he never writes another book again? I feel like I should put it in a beautiful box behind glass with a tiny hammer attached and a note that reads, “Only read in case of Dire Emergency.” I already have one emergency book that I’ve been holding on to for 15 years: The Brothers Karamazov. I’ve read everything else Dostoyevsky’s written, but I can’t bring myself to read that book because I know it’s the end.

I’ve been thumbing through 1Q84, randomly opening it and looking for perfect sentences or hidden messages. Pretty soon I am going to have to take the plunge.

“Things can be seen better in the darkness,” he said, as if he had just seen into her mind. “But the longer you spend in the dark, the harder it becomes to return to the world above ground where the light is”

“The writer improves only when he writes constantly. Like a caterpillar which eats up the leaves.”