Minae Mizumura Quotes

Life is a tiring business indeed.Soy sauce runs out. Milk runs out. Dishwashing detergent runs out. Lancôme lipsticks—I thought I had stockpiled several years' worth—run out. Dust underneath the dining table becomes dust balls. Newspapers and magazines pile up, and so does laundry. E-mail and junk mail keep coming. When occasion demands, I make myself presentable and I present myself. I listen to my sister's same old complaints on the phone. I withdraw money for my elderly mother, whose tongue works fine but whose body is a mess. I contact her caseworker. And now I have reached a stage in life when my own health is prone to betray me.

In years past, a person died, and eventually all those with memories of him or her also died, bringing about the complete erasure of that person's existence. Just as the human body returned to dust, mingling with atoms of the natural world, a person's existence would return to nothingness.How very clean.Now, as if in belated punishment for the invention of writing, any message once posted on the Internet was immortal. Words as numerous as the dust of the earth would linger forever in their millions and trillions and quadrillions and beyond.

The first prerequisite for fine literature is that the writer must see the language not as a transparent medium for self-expression or the representation of reality, but as a medium one must struggle with to make it do one's bidding.