Finished reading: Tokyo Ueno Station: A Novel by Yu Miri 📚

For a relatively short book, this took me quite a while to read. According to Libby I first checked it out October 1, 2021. Put it down, then tried again in October 2024. (Why October? It’s a ghost story of a sort. Spooky szn reading.) Now I’ve been chipping away since April.

While that makes it sound like it was a slog, I did enjoy reading it. Just a multiple time casualty of timing I suppose.

Passages I Highlighted

On Poverty & Homelessness

The wages of that sin were poverty, a wage that one could not endure, leading one to sin again, and as long as one could not pull oneself out of poverty, the cycle would repeat until death.

Nobody starts off life in a hovel made of cardboard and tarps, and nobody becomes homeless because they want to be. One thing happens, then another.

If you fall into a pit, you can climb out, but once you slip from a sheer cliff, you cannot step firmly into a new life again.

To be homeless is to be ignored when people walk past while still being in full view of everyone.

On Death

And he would be tomorrow, too. From now on he would always be dead.

because when someone dies, they’re returning to the Pure Land.
“Our people never worried whether a funeral would be on an auspicious day or an inauspicious one, because a funeral’s something to celebrate. And we don’t put a note on the house to warn people we’re in mourning, ‘cause death isn’t an impurity, which is why we don’t purify ourselves with salt after a funeral either.

The judgement as to what kinds of deaths are good or bad is entirely our own.

On Time

A box whose lid is sealed by time should not be opened. Were it opened, I would be plunged at once into the past.

Time does not pass.
Time never ends.

The calendar separates today from yesterday and tomorrow, but in life there is no distinguishing past, present, and future. We all have an enormity of time, too big for one person to deal with, and we live, and we die—

On Deciding & Adjusting

Returning home in a dream isn’t the same as returning home in real life.

The only thing I was guilty of was being unable to adjust. I could adapt to any kind of work; it was life itself that I could not adjust to. The pain of life, the sadness…and the joy…

A number of paths were now behind me.
Only one way was left before me.
Whether it was the way home or not, I wouldn’t know until I tried.

Aphoristic Phrases

Light does not illuminate.
It only looks for things to illuminate.

To speak is to stumble, to hesitate, to detour and hit dead ends. To listen is straightforward. You can always just listen.

but those who hear another’s secret are obliged to share one of their own. Secrets are not necessarily hidden things. Events that do not bear hiding become secrets when one chooses not to speak them.

On Rain

The rain now fell as if it were whispering softly to each of the passerby hiding their heads under their umbrellas.

The scent of rain was stronger just after it had stopped.

No how against this conversation
Of fingers and tongues, this
Rent party above the
Slaughter-house.

from Muddy Waters & the Chicago Blues by Cornelius Eady
inBlues Poems📚

Luxury, then, is a way of
being ignorant, comfortably
An approach to the open market
of least information. Where theories
can thrive, under heavy tarpaulins
without being cracked by ideas.

from Political Poem in Transbluesency by Amiri Baraka 📚

Finished reading: On the Shortness of Life by Seneca 📚

I

we do not receive a short life, but we make it a short one, and we are not poor in days, but wasteful of them.

III

men covetously guard their property from waste, but when it comes to waste of time, they are most prodigal of that which it would become them to be sparing.

You fear everything, like the mortals as you are, and yet you desire everything as if you were immortals.

are you not ashamed to reserve only the leavings of your life for yourself, and appoint for the enjoyment of your own right mind only that time which you cannot devote to any business? How late it is to begin life just when we have to be leaving it!

IV

fortune collapses by its own weight, without any shock or interference from without.

VII

for nothing can take deep root in a mind which is directed to some other subject, and which rejects whatever you try to stuff into it.

but one’s whole life must be spent in learning how to live, and , which may perhaps surprise you more, one’s whole life must be spent in learning how to die.

Every man hurries through his life, and suffers from a yearning for the future, and a weariness of the present:

VIII

Indeed, if the number of every man’s future years could be laid before him, as we can lay that of his past years, how anxious those who found that they had but few years remaining would be to make the most of them?

IX

Life is divided into three parts: that which has been, that which is, and that which is to come: of these three stages, that which we are passing through is brief, that which we are about to pass is uncertain, and that which we have passed is certain:

Our present consists only of single days, and those, too, taken one hour at a time

so in this fast and never-ceasing journey of life, which we make at the same pace whether we are asleep or awake, busy people never notice that they are moving till they are at the end of it.

XVIII

for some diseases must be cured without the patient’s knowledge: many have died through discovering what was the matter with them.

XX

Yet many are of the same mind: they retain their wish for labour longer than their capacity for it, and fight against their bodily weakness; they think old age an evil for no other reason than because it lays them on the shelf.

no one keeps death well before his eyes, no one refrains from far-reaching hopes.

Finished reading: The Boy Who Would Be King by Ryan Holiday 📚

Read this with one of my young sons.

Finished reading: The Skimming Stone A short story about courage by Dominic Wilcox 📚

Finished reading: The Path of a Doer A Simple Tale of How to Get Things Done by David Hieatt 📚

Finished reading: The Greatest Sentence Ever Written by Walter Isaacson 📚

Another timely read and one I enjoyed the structure of. A detailed breakdown of one sentence. One sentence from a document we should probably focus on a bit more, instead of spending all our time on its successor.

The declaration they were writing was intended to herald a new type of nation, one in which our rights are based on reason, not the dictates or dogma of religion.

It was, and remains, a constant American struggle to make the phrase “all men are created equal” truly inclusive.

I highlighted a lot in the Common Ground chapter, but I’m only going to share two here (for now).

One way to restore stability to our politics is to look at issues through the two ideals that are at the heart of the Declaration’s key sentence: common ground and the pursuit of the American Dream.

Compromisers may not make great heroes, Franklin liked to say, but they do make great democracies.

The philosopher Michael Sandel calls this the “skyboxification” of America, whereby places and practices that used to be in commons are now roped off.

The technology that promised to connect us found a better business model in dividing us.

Finished reading: Address Unknown: A Novel by Kathrine Kressmann Taylor 📚

Another in my unplanned series of short, timely reads. An epistolary tale from 1938 that feels unfortunately modern.

Two passages:

I am always castigating myself, but I continue to do as before. Alas, we are vain and we are dishonest because it is necessary to triumph over other vain and dishonest persons.

Despair overthrown often turns us in mad directions.

Finished reading: The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han 📚

I waited too long after ready to fully remember my thoughts on this book, nor can I credibly claim to have definitely understood the entire argument. But I remember being glad I read it.

A certain flatness of modern life coupled with an ever-present mirror of self lead us to focus on achievement. Waging battles of our own creation and we their only casualties.

its inhabitants are no longer “obedience-subjects” but “achievement-subjects.” They are entrepreneurs of themselves.

Unlimited Can is the positive modal verb of achievement society.

Rage has a characteristic temporality incompatible with generalized acceleration and hyperactivity, which admit no breadth of time. The future shortens into a protracted present. It lacks all negativity, which would permit one to look at the Other. In contrast, rage puts the present as a whole into question. It presupposes an interrupting pause in the present.

The computer calculates more quickly than the human brain and takes on inordinate quantities of data without difficulty because it is free of Otherness. It is a machine of positivity.

One might also say that overexcited efforts to maximize performance are abolishing negativity because it slows down the process of acceleration.

for positive potency, the preponderance of positivity, only permits anticipation and thinking ahead.

Walls and partitions, the elements of disciplinary architecture, traverse the entire narrative.

“On errands of life, these letters speed to death”; this is the central message of the tale. All effort to live lead to death.

Less I means more world

As a character disorder, narcissism is the very opposite of strong self-love. Self-absorption does not produce gratification, it produces injury to the self; erasing the line between self and other means that nothing new, nothing “other,” ever enters the self; it is devoured and transformed until one thinks one can see oneself in the other-and then it becomes meaningless….The narcissist is not hungry for experiences, he is hungry for Experience. Looking always for an expression or reflection of [onself]….one drowns in self.

The real is a stay in the double meaning of the word. It not only offers interruption and resistance, but also affords stopping and support.

Deficit filled, apathy stimulated, impulses regulated, compulsion tamed—all of this has made dependency he flipside of depression. With the gospel of personal development on the one hand and the cult of performance on the other, conflict does not disappear; however, it loses its obvious quality and can no longer be counted on to guide us.

Now, the totality of capital, which seems to be absorbing everything, represents consensual violence.

Achievement society is the society of self-exploitation. The achievement-subject exploits itself until it burns out. In the process, it develops auto-aggression that often enough escalates into the violence of self-destruction. The project turns out to be a projectile that the achievement-subject is aiming at itself.
In view of the ego ideal, the real ego appears as a loser buried in self-reproach. The ego wages war with itself. The society of positivity, which thinks itself free of all foreign constraints, becomes entangled in destructive self-constraints. Psychic maladies of the twenty-first century, all display auto-aggressive traits. Exogenous violence is replaced by self-generated violence, which is more fatal than its counterpart inasmuch as the victim of such violence considers itself free.

Today violence issues more readily from the conformism of consensus than from the antagonism of dissent. In this sense—contra Habermas—one might speak of the violence of consensus.

The capitalist economy absolutizes survival. It is not concerned with the good life. It is sustained by the illusion that more capital produces more life, which means a greater capacity for living. The rigid, rigorous separation between life and death casts a spell of ghostly stiffness over life itself. Concern about living the good life yields to the hysteria of surviving.

The inner logic of achievement society dictates its evolution into a doping society. Life reduced to bare, vital functioning is life to be kept healthy unconditionally. Health is the new goddess. That is why bare life is holy.