Interminable Distances

"The woman down there had no mind, she had only strong arms, a warm heart and a fertile belly. He wondered how many children she had given birth to. It might easily be fifteen. She had had her momentary flowering, a year, perhaps, of wildrose beauty, and then she had suddenly swollen like a fertilised fruit and grown hard red and coarse, and then her life had been laundering, scrubbing, darning, cooking, sweeping polishing, mending, scrubbing, laundering, first for children, then for grandchildren, over thirty unbroken years. At the end of it she was still singing. The mystical reverence that he felt for her was somehow mixed up with the aspect of the pale, cloudless sky, stretching away behind the chimney pots into interminable distances. It was curious to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurosia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky were also very much the same - everywhere, all over the world, hundreds of thousands of millions of people just like this, people ignorant of one another's existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same - people who had never learned to think by who were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world."

Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell

Footprints

Moonshadows

Those were the times that we didn't know where to go.
Those were the times that the silence descended on us.
Those were the times that we prayed for each of us.

The Infinity

The phrase "a long story" brought to mind a tall stake in the desert, where nothing else stood as far as the eye could see. As the sun began to sink, the shadow of the stake grew longer and longer, until its tip was too far away to be seen by the naked eye.

The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, H. Marukami

EmmaLuna

Emma Luna and Laura!

Sunset at Clearwater!

Questioning

"Is it possible, finally, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another?

We can invest enormous time and energy in serious efforts to know another person, but in the end, how close are we able to come that person's essence? We convince ourselves that we know the other person well, but do we really know anything important about anyone.

...

That night, in our darkened bedroom, I lay beside Komiko, staring at the ceiling and asking myself just how much I really knew about this woman. The clock said 2:00 a.m. She was sound asleep. In the dark, I thought about blue tissues and patterned toilet paper and beef and green peppers. I had lived with her all this time, unaware how much she hated these things. In themselves they were trivial. Stupid. Something to laugh off, not make a big issue out if. We'd had a little and would have forgotten about it in a couple of days.

But this was different it was bothering me in a strange way, digging at me like a little fish bone caught in the throat. Maybe - just maybe - it was more crucial than it had seemed. Maybe this was it: the fatal blow. Or maybe it was just the beginning of what would be the fatal blow. I might be standing in the entrance of something big, and inside lay a world that belong to Komiko alone, a vast world that I had never known. I saw it as a big dark room. I was standing there holding a cigarette lighter, it's tiny flame showing me only the smallest part of the room.

Would I ever see the rest? Or would I grow old and die without ever really knowing her? If that was all that lay in store for me, then what was the point of married life I was leading? What was the point of my life at all if I was spending it in a bed with an unknown companion?"

The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, H. Marukami

Cardinals

Words

Someone and someone were down by the pond
Looking for something to plant in the lawn.
Out in the fields they were turning the soil
I'm sitting here hoping this water will boil
When I look through the windows and out on the road
They're bringing me presents and saying hello.

Singing words, words between the lines of age.
Words, words between the lines of age.

If I was a junkman selling you cars,
Washing your windows and shining your stars,
Thinking your mind was my own in a dream
What would you wonder and how would it seem?
Living in castles a bit at a time
The King started laughing and talking in rhyme.

Singing words, words between the lines of age.
Words, words between the lines of age.