Nostalgia? Love?

Excrepts from Murakami Novel

' I want to reach out and see if I can actually touch her. But I can't. I just stand there drinking her in. I listen to sounds she makes as she bustles around in the kitchen.
She ladles ot stew on to a plain white plate and carries to the table. There's a bowl of salad too, tomatoes and lettuce, and a large loaf of bread. There's potatoes and carrots in the stew. The fragrance brings back fond memories. I breathe it all in deeply and realise I'm starving'.....

After some more paragraphs in the book.....

'To be with her is to feel a pain, like a frozen knife in my chest. An awful pain, but funny thing is I'm thankful for it. It's as though that frozen pain and my existence are one. The pain is an anchor mooring me here. She stands up to boil some water and make tea. While I'm sitting at the table drinking it, she carries dirty dishes over to the sink and starts washing them. I watch her do all this. I want to say something, but when I'm with her words no longer function as they're supposed to. Or maybe the meaning that ties them together has vanished?"....

I read this above passage now. 1:30 am in morn... fantastic cream dorry fried fish and beef mince madras curry  with pilsburry atta rotis nd garlic pickle.. black bacardi white rum (limited edition as listed on bottle) in hand ( i froze the tomato juice last night in freezer by mistake.. bloody mary is not happening tonight). I sit with 'Kafka on the shore' by Haruki Murakmi. I come across this passage and I know why I love Murakami... his stories resonate with me, with my soul, touch some nerve, unveil deep longings, deeper truths..

The above passage.. I've been that guy. I've had that experience.


By the way I researched Franz Kafka and even read his The Trial and its dissertion and its analysis and various opinions on it today.  Sadly I read the Trial first. Depressed me. Utterly operessive. My soul cried at the inadequecies of the character 'K Franz' in the novel. At his utter desperate situation and the clear compulsive repetative misguided misinformed pattern of his behavior.  Sure Kafka is trying to drive home the point about how unable we may be trapped under our ego, delusional about our abilities and smartness, and completely incompetent to understand machanisations and working of authoritative, ubiquitious, controlling, omnipotent big brother. He turned out to be precient. He wrote the book about yr 1915 if I remember. Later he was proved to be so right. But hell I don't need him to make me feel inadequet. I do a pretty good job of it myself. Not for me to read Kafka.

 I had pretty long chat with Lee's wife in Juzhaigo about similar issue. She's doctaral student studying Hemmingway if I remember.. ' To kill a mocking bird' If my memory serves me right. 3 years of studying and disecting one work, by one author. Seems pointless to me. What a waste. I asked her what else she'd read.. We discussed at lenght the fact ( me doing most of the talking and persuading) that seems her definition and by same reason, definition of her curriculum, of the term 'literature'  was by default - a body of text that was morbid, sad, tragic.  I told her literature need not always be tragic. Nd if the text is longworded, complicated, requiring her to refer to dictionary to merely understand it.. then it was not a contemprary lingustical tome and at best should be relegated to niche status and could not qualify as literature, since literature needs to be study of living language with defining mass appeal qualities.. not just elitiest tragedies. Recommended Catch 22 and several other reads for her nd persuaded her to even checkup Dune (frank herbert ones) to really see what I meant. Hope she does it.

Meanwhile .. I drink because I can read the above passage and relive the same feeling, the same pain.. the same satisfaction. I dont drink usually. Thats because I'm a creature of un-habit. Its a phrase I coined for myself. I have analysed myself. One thing I certainly do, is I simply don't do one thing. Be it very very basic things like lets say have tea. I have tea every day every chance I get. But I also don't have tea for long periods of time just for heck of it. I know many a tea drinkers. If you're hooked, ur hooked. I am hooked unhooked. Same with coffee, same with smoking, same with drinking, same with eating.. same with reading, writing, playing guitar or even working. I get hooked and i get unhooked and i go back to being hooked. I can't be in one state for any lenght of time. Strange but true. I wonder if this holds true about love for me too?