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| photo by Anna Reavis |
"Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart."
Ms Saeki in Kafka on the Shore
The past, the past...is it ever truly past? Does time even exist? How about identity? Does it exist? Is identity stable, stationary, immovable? Or are our identities just part of a grand stream of being that temporarily break off and become part of the physical world, only to be reabsorbed and recreated at different times? Does anything truly exist within the boundaries we understand? Being? Nothingness?
If you don't like pondering questions like these that can make your head hurt, don't read Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami. I feel like I would have to read and re-read the book multiple times to grasp some of what it's saying. Borrowing from one of the themes of the novel, the best way for me to describe it is to say that there is a labyrinth inside each of us and a labyrinth outside each of us, and they are one and the same, and we are lost in them both. And while it took me forever to finish this novel, I enjoyed being tangled up in its web for a time.
