A Tale for the Time Being

Author:: Ruth Ozeki Full Title:: A Tale for the Time Being Tags:#media/book

• themes::
  • theme 1
• Summary::
  • summary 1

* highlights from 2021-02-08

* Assumptions suck. They’re like expectations. Assumptions and expectations will kill any relationship, so let’s you and me not go there, okay? ([Location 251](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008EKMB82&location=251))
* Print is predictable and impersonal, conveying information in a mechanical transaction with the reader’s eye. Handwriting, by contrast, resists the eye, reveals its meaning slowly, and is as intimate as skin. ([Location 321](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008EKMB82&location=321))
* I find it relaxing exactly because nobody’s trying too hard. What’s depressing is when everyone is trying too hard, and the most depressing thing of all is when they’re trying too hard and actually thinking that they’re making it. ([Location 386](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008EKMB82&location=386))
* the day I bought the diary, I was skipping school and feeling especially blue, so I decided to go shopping in Harajuku to cheer myself up. ([Location 443](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008EKMB82&location=443))
    * **Note**: Interesting way of conveying  this point gives away wht happened in the preposition 
* Everybody I know is the same, except for old Jiko. Just wasting time, killing time, feeling crappy. And what does it mean to waste time anyway? If you waste time is it lost forever? And if time is lost forever, what does that mean? It’s not like you get to die any sooner, right? ([Location 475](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008EKMB82&location=475))
* And when I multiplied that sad feeling by all the millions of people in their lonely little rooms, furiously writing and posting to their lonely little pages that nobody has time to read because they’re all so busy writing and posting, ([Location 528](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008EKMB82&location=528))
* It’s the opposite of a blog. It’s an antiblog, because it’s meant for only one special person, and that person is you. ([Location 540](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008EKMB82&location=540))
* Time itself is being, he wrote, and all being is time . . . In essence, everything in the entire universe is intimately linked with each other as moments in time, continuous and separate. ([Location 587](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008EKMB82&location=587))
* From a distance, where Ruth stood, it looked like two moons, talking. ([Location 754](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008EKMB82&location=754))
* Sometimes little clumps of dust and dead insects would drop from the fluorescent light fixture and land in my milk and, like, I wasn’t supposed to say anything? ([Location 828](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008EKMB82&location=828))
    * **Note**: Imagery
* like we were bad actors in terrible costumes in a play that was guaranteed to tank, but we had to go out on stage anyhow. ([Location 843](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008EKMB82&location=843))
* The important thing was that we were being polite and not saying all the things that were making us unhappy, which was the only way we knew how to love each other. ([Location 862](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008EKMB82&location=862))
* A name, Ruth thought, could be either a ghost or a portent depending upon which side of time you were standing. ([Location 1034](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008EKMB82&location=1034))
* The great matter of life and death is the real subject of “The Merits of Home-Leaving.” When D gen exhorts his young forest monks to continue, moment by moment, to summon their resolve and stay true to their commitment to enlightenment, what he means is simply this: Life is fleeting! Don’t waste a single moment of your precious life! Wake up now! And now! And now! ([Location 1102](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008EKMB82&location=1102))
* but I haven’t gotten around to it yet because I’m too busy living my life or trying to figure out how not to. ([Location 1189](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008EKMB82&location=1189))
* It was like the muscles in my throat had turned into a murderer’s hands, strangling my voice as it tried to rise. ([Location 1325](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008EKMB82&location=1325))
* I was unreal and my life was unreal, and Sunnyvale, which was real, was a jillion miles away in time and space, like the beautiful Earth from outer space, and me and Dad were astronauts, living in a spaceship, orbiting in the cold blackness. ([Location 1351](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008EKMB82&location=1351))
* believe it doesn’t matter what it is, as long as you can find something concrete to keep you busy while you are living your meaningless life. ([Location 1362](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008EKMB82&location=1362))
* Japan isn’t a great place to be a free anything, because free just means all alone and out of it. ([Location 1398](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008EKMB82&location=1398))
* Death is certain. Life is always changing, like a puff of wind in the air, or a wave in the sea, or even a thought in the mind. So making a suicide is finding the edge of life. It stops life in time, so we can grasp what shape it is and feel it is real, at least for just a moment. It is trying to make some real solid thing from the flow of life that is always changing. ([Location 1473](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008EKMB82&location=1473))
* By making shadows bleed. ([Location 1481](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008EKMB82&location=1481))
* At one extreme, when Ruth was gripped by the compulsive mania and hyperfocus of an Internet search, the hours seemed to aggregate and swell like a wave, swallowing huge chunks of her day. At the other extreme, when her attention was disengaged and fractured, she experienced time at its most granular, wherein moments hung around like particles, diffused and suspended in standing water. There used to be a middle way, too, when her attention was focused but vast, and time felt like a limpid pool, ringed by sunlit ferns. An underground spring fed the pool from deep below, creating a gentle current of words that bubbled up, while on the surface, breezes shimmered and played. ([Location 1541](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008EKMB82&location=1541))
* The past is weird. I mean, does it really exist? It feels like it exists, but where is it? And if it did exist but doesn’t now, then where did it go? ([Location 1629](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008EKMB82&location=1629))
* No matter how fast you write, you’re always stuck in the then and you can never catch up to what’s happening now, which means that now is pretty much doomed to extinction. ([Location 1638](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008EKMB82&location=1638))
* NOW felt like a big fish swallowing a little fish, and I wanted to catch it and make it stop. ([Location 1648](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008EKMB82&location=1648))
* Then is the opposite of now. So saying now obliterates its meaning, turning it into exactly what it isn’t. It’s like the word is committing suicide or something. So then I’d start making it shorter . . . now, ow, oh, o . . . until it was just a bunch of little grunting sounds and not even a word at all. It was hopeless, like trying to hold a snowflake on your tongue or a soap bubble between your fingertips. Catching it destroys it, and I felt like I was disappearing, too. ([Location 1656](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008EKMB82&location=1656))
* No matter what I chose to do, for this one moment I owned Daisuke and I owned his future. It was a strange feeling, creepy and a little too intimate, because if I killed him now we would be joined for life, forever, ([Location 1756](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008EKMB82&location=1756))
* In reality, every reader, while he is reading, is the reader of his own self. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument, which he offers to the reader to permit him to discern what, without the book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself. The reader’s recognition in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its truth. —Marcel Proust, Le temps retrouvé ([Location 1809](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008EKMB82&location=1809))
* What is the half-life of information? Does its rate of decay correlate with the medium that conveys it? Pixels need power. Paper is unstable in fire and flood. Letters carved in stone are more durable, although not so easily distributed, but inertia can be a good thing. In towns up and down the coast of Japan, stone markers were found on hillsides, engraved with ancient warnings: ([Location 1860](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008EKMB82&location=1860))
* Does the half-life of information correlate with the decay of our attention? Is the Internet a kind of temporal gyre, sucking up stories, like geodrift, into its orbit? What is its gyre memory? How do we measure the half-life of its drift? ([Location 1866](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008EKMB82&location=1866))
* These images, a minuscule few representing the inconceivable many, eddy and grow old, degrading with each orbit around the gyre, slowly breaking down into razor-sharp fragments and brightly colored shards. Like plastic confetti, they’re drawn into the gyre’s becalmed center, the garbage patch of history and time. ([Location 1872](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008EKMB82&location=1872))
* Not a place, but a feeling, of nonbeing, sudden, dark, and prehuman, which filled her with such an inchoate horror that she cried out and brought her hands to her face, only to find that she no longer had one. There was nothing there. No hands, no face, no eyes, no glasses, no Ruth at all. Nothing but a vast and empty ruthlessness. ([Location 2002](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008EKMB82&location=2002))
* On email it’s never now. It’s always then, ([Location 2025](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008EKMB82&location=2025))
* I swear, even on the Internet people can give off a virtual smell that other people pick up on, although I don’t see how that’s possible. ([Location 2043](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008EKMB82&location=2043))
* We were an army of two, him and me, marching up a mountain, but not to conquer it. We were in retreat, a defeated army on the run. ([Location 2579](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008EKMB82&location=2579))
* Do all kids have to worry about their parents’ mental health? The way society is set up, parents are supposed to be the grown-up ones and look after the kids, but a lot of times it’s the other way around. Honestly, I haven’t met very many adults in my life who I could call really grown up, but maybe that’s because I lived in California, where all my friends’ parents seemed really immature. ([Location 2601](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008EKMB82&location=2601))
* I thought she looked ghostly—part ghost, part child, part young girl, part sexy woman, and part yamamba,105 all at once. All the ages and stages, combined into a single female time being. ([Location 2699](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008EKMB82&location=2699))
* it was okay just to feel grateful sometimes, even if you don’t say anything. Feeling is the important part. You don’t have to make a big deal about it. ([Location 2715](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008EKMB82&location=2715))
* “Yes,” she agreed. “It was a stupid thing to ask. I see that you’re angry. I don’t need to ask such a stupid thing to understand that.” “So why did you ask?” Slowly she turned herself around, pivoting on her knees, until finally she was facing me. “I asked for you,” she said. “For me?” “So you could hear the answer.” ([Location 2752](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008EKMB82&location=2752))
* When the power came on, the house slammed back into the twenty-first century: lights blazed, appliances hummed, aquarium pumps gurgled, the taps sighed, and Ruth jumped over the cat and scrambled through the tangle of extension cords on her way upstairs to check her email. The world was restored to its place in time, and her mind was back online. ([Location 2784](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008EKMB82&location=2784))
* I don’t know why I keep asking you questions. It’s not like I expect you to answer, and even if you did answer, how would I know? But maybe that doesn’t matter. Maybe when I ask you a question like “You doing okay?” you should just tell me, even if I can’t hear you, and then I’ll just sit here and imagine what you might say. ([Location 2822](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008EKMB82&location=2822))
* In fact, she said she had lots of fishes, some that were small like sardines, some that were medium-sized like carp, and other ones that were as big as a bluefin tuna, but the biggest fish of all belonged to Haruki #1, and it was more like the size of a whale. She also said that after she became a nun and renounced the world, she learned how to open up her heart so that the whale could swim away. ([Location 2898](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008EKMB82&location=2898))
* Zazen is better than a home. Zazen is a home that you can’t ever lose, and I keep doing it because I like that feeling, and I trust old Jiko, and it wouldn’t hurt for me to try to see the world a little more optimistically like she does. ([Location 2944](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008EKMB82&location=2944))
* Jiko also says that to do zazen is to enter time completely. ([Location 2946](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008EKMB82&location=2946))
* How do you think not-thinking? Nonthinking. This is the essential art of zazen. ([Location 2948](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008EKMB82&location=2948))
* The sharp cold felt good, and the violence of the waves felt powerful and real, and the bitterness of salt in my nose tasted harshly delicious. ([Location 3084](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008EKMB82&location=3084))
* “A wave is born from deep conditions of the ocean,” she said. “A person is born from deep conditions of the world. A person pokes up from the world and rolls along like a wave, until it is time to sink down again. Up, down. Person, wave.” ([Location 3104](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008EKMB82&location=3104))
* Information is a lot like water; it’s hard to hold on to, and hard to keep from leaking away. ([Location 3136](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008EKMB82&location=3136))
* first, when I woke up, my face and arms were swollen from the bites, but little by little, my blood and skin grew tough and immune to their poison and I didn’t break out in bumps no matter how much I’d been bitten. And soon there was no difference between me and the mosquitoes. My skin was no longer a wall that separated us, and my blood was their blood. ([Location 3229](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008EKMB82&location=3229))
* This agitation was familiar, a paradoxical feeling that built up inside her when she was spending too much time online, as though some force was at once goading her and holding her back. How to describe it? A temporal stuttering, an urgent lassitude, a feeling of simultaneous rushing and lagging behind. ([Location 3599](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008EKMB82&location=3599))
* “Premonitions are coincidences waiting to happen,” ([Location 3614](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008EKMB82&location=3614))
* When you beat a drum, you create NOW, when silence becomes a sound so enormous and alive it feels like you’re breathing in the clouds and the sky, and your heart is the rain and the thunder. ([Location 3741](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008EKMB82&location=3741))
* Jiko says that this is an example of the time being. Sound and no-sound. Thunder and silence. ([Location 3742](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008EKMB82&location=3742))
* “A free man, that is to say, a man who lives according to the dictates of reason alone, is not led by fear of death, but directly desires the good, that is to say, desires to act, and to preserve his being in accordance with the principle of seeking his own profit. He thinks, therefore, of nothing less than death, and his wisdom is a meditation upon life.” ([Location 4020](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008EKMB82&location=4020))
* Do not think that time simply flies away. Do not understand “flying” as the only function of time. If time simply flew away, a separation would exist between you and time. So if you understand time as only passing, then you do not understand the time being. ([Location 4046](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008EKMB82&location=4046))
* If I could only smash the clock and stop time from advancing! Crush the infernal machine! Shatter its bland face and rip those cursed hands from their torturous axis of circumscription! ([Location 5001](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008EKMB82&location=5001))
* “To study the Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all the myriad things.” ([Location 5017](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008EKMB82&location=5017))
* Both life and death manifest in every moment of existence. Our human body appears and disappears moment by moment, without cease, and this ceaseless arising and passing away is what we experience as time and being. They are not separate. They are one thing, and in even a fraction of a second, we have the opportunity to choose, and to turn the course of our action either toward the attainment of truth or away from it. Each instant is utterly critical to the whole world. ([Location 5033](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008EKMB82&location=5033))
* “Everyone calls barbarity that to which he is not accustomed.” ([Location 5076](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008EKMB82&location=5076))
* I felt so stupid and young, and at the same time something was cracking open inside me, or maybe it was the world was cracking open to show me something really important underneath. I knew I was only seeing a tiny bit of it, but it was bigger than anything I’d ever seen or felt before. ([Location 5944](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008EKMB82&location=5944))
* but memories are time beings, too, like cherry blossoms or ginkgo leaves; for a while they are beautiful, and then they fade and die. ([Location 5984](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008EKMB82&location=5984))
* Quantum information is like the information of a dream,’” he said. “‘We can’t show it to others, and when we try to describe it we change the memory of it.’” ([Location 6069](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008EKMB82&location=6069))
* how not-knowing is the most intimate way, or did I just dream that? Anyway, I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and I think maybe it’s true, even though I don’t really like uncertainty. I’d much rather know, but then again, not-knowing keeps all the possibilities open. It keeps all the worlds alive. ([Location 6184](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008EKMB82&location=6184))