Did you ever try to share something that impresses you very much with someone who impresses you very much, only to receive an impressive lack of appreciation?
Its like taking landscape pictures from your vacation, and then showing them around. Just dont bother.
This happeo me with Haruki Murakami. Murakami is a very talented, abs, inspiring writer who wrote the best short story I have ever read, "Sleep." He also wrote the following story (which is shorter than "Sleep" and thus more transcription-friendly), which I numbed my little fiyping out one day at work, risking my job, eyesight and circulation for the sake of e-mailing it to three ingrates whose puzzled, lackluster reaade them unworthy of my suffering. (I mean, I was also really bored and, irospect, potentially a bit touched that day; but thats beside the point.)
I guess we must choose our cultural battles carefully.
But if at least one person is searg for some eleic Murakami and is gratified by this page, my labor will not have been in vain.
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The Sed Bakery Attack, by Haruki Murakami
Im still not sure I made the right choice when I told my wife about the bakery attack. But then, it might not have been a question ht and wrong. Which is to say that wrong choices produce right results, and vice versa. I myself have adopted the position that, in fact, we never choose anything at all. Things happen. Or not.
If you look at it this way, it just so happens that I told my wife about the bakery attack. I hadnt been planning t it up--I had fotten all about it--but it wasnt one of those now-that-you-mention-it kind of things, either.
What reminded me of the bakery attack was an unbearable hunger. It hit just before two oclo the m. We had eaten a light supper at six, crawled into bed at hirty, and goo sleep. For some reason, we woke up at exactly the same moment. A few minutes later, the pangs struck with the force of the tornado in The Wizard of Oz. These were tremendous, overp hunger pangs.
Our refrigerator tained not a siem that could be teically categorized as food. We had a bottle of French dressing, six s of beer, two shriveled onions, a stick of butter, and a box of refrigerator deodorizer. With only two weeks of married life behind us, we had yet to establish a precise jugal uanding with regard to the rules of dietary behavior. Let alone anything else.
I had a job in a law firm at the time, and she was doiarial work at a design school. I was either twe or twenty-nine--why t I remember the exact year we married?--and she was two years a months younger. Groceries were the last things on our minds.
We both felt too hungry to go back to sleep, but it hurt just to lie there. Oher hand, we were also too hungry to do anything useful. We got out of bed and drifted into the kit, ending up across the table from each other. What could have caused such violent hunger pangs?
We took turns opening the refrigerator door and hoping, but no matter how many times we looked ihe tents never ged. Beer and onions and butter and dressing and deodorizer. It might have been possible to saute the onions iter, but there was no ce those two shriveled onions could fill our empty stomachs. Onions are meant to be eaten with other things. They are not the kind of food you use to satisfy an appetite.
"Would madame care for some French dressing sauteed in deodorizer?"
I expected h