[b]Haruki Murakami
Perhaps most people in the world aren’t trying to be free, Kafka. They just think they are. It’s all an illusion. If they really were set free, most people would be in a real pickle. You’d better remember that. People actually prefer not being free.[/b]
Lots of really smart people say this. But no one is ever smart enough to know what it means.
Most human activities are predicated on the assumption that life goes on. If you take that premise away, what is there left?
Well, for starters, you can’t.
Whenever an occasion arose in which she needed an opinion on something in the wider world, she borrowed her husband’s. If this had been all there was to her, she wouldn’t have bothered anyone, but as is so often the case with such women, she suffered from an incurable case of pretentiousness. Lacking any internalized values of her own, such people can arrive at a standpoint only by adopting other people’s standards or views. The only principle that governs their minds is the question "How do I look?”
Occasionally though it’s the husband borrowing the wife’s.
He once told me about polar bears - what solitary animals they are. They mate just once a year. One time in a whole year. There is no such thing as a lasting male-female bond in their world. One male polar bear and one female polar bear meet by sheer chance somewhere in the frozen vastness, and they mate. It doesn’t take long. And once they are finished, the male runs away from the female as if he is frightened to death: he runs from the place where they have mated. He never looks back - literally. The rest of the year he lives in deep solitude. Mutual communications - the touching of two hearts - do not exist for them. So, that is the story of polar bears - or at least it is what my employer told me about them.
How very strange.
Yes, it is strange. I remember asking my employer, Then what do polar bears exist for? Yes, exactly, he said with a big smile. Then what do we exist for?
Of course polar bears don’t fuss with memes.
You can see a person’s whole life in the cancer they get.
You know, if that’s what you’re looking for in it.
Sometimes we don’t need words. Rather, it’s words that need us. If we were no longer here, words would lose their whole function. They would end up as words that are never spoken, and words that aren’t spoken are no longer words.
Obviously, this is as deep as you’ll ever need it to be.