Description Back then, she had words, so her emotions must have been clearer and stronger. But now there are no words inside her body. Words and sentences trail behind her like ghosts, staying just close enough to be seen and heard. Thanks to that distance, emotions that aren't strong enough soon fall away, like pieces of tape with weak adhesive. She only looks. And as she looks, she translates nothing she sees into language. Images of other things continue to form in her eyes, moving and fading according to the speed at which she walks. As they fade, they are never, in the end, translated into any words. _Greek Lessons, p. 75 I can't understand it. You died, and I feel as though everything has fallen away from me. Simply because you died, I feel that all the memories I hold are bleeding, becoming rapidly stained, rusting, crumbling away. _Greek Lessons, p. 130 The weakest, softest, most forlorn thing we have — our very life — when we one day return it to the world of matter, no reward will come back to us. When that moment someday comes to me, I don't think I'll be able to remember all the experiences I've carried with me as having been only beautiful. In that shabby context, I believe I understand Plato. He, too, knew that nothing beautiful truly exists. The fact that nothing complete exists forever. At least not in this world. _Greek Lessons, p. 135 Before that year ended, late one night in her room, you asked: I really don't understand how people can live only within convention, how they can bear such a life. Turned away from you, wiping off her makeup, her face darkened faintly in the mirror. Meeting your eyes through the mirror, she replied: I think so too, but aren't there also people who are grateful they can live that way — grateful they can hide behind convention? _"A Human Being, Recovering," p. 230 I remember you once said the tree resembles you. Everything you draw is really a self-portrait, you added. That whole afternoon, I searched through your bookshelves looking at paintings of trees. When I found the young, fragile trees painted by Schiele, I dimly understood what you meant. If every painting is a self-portrait, I thought, then perhaps a painting of a tree is the quietest self-portrait a human being can create. _"Blue Stone," pp. 248–249 At some moment, a child suddenly comes to understand everything about their father. That is the child's fate. Without the question of whether life must be this hard. Without resentment or pity. Without words or logic. Without so much as a welling tear. In a single instant. _"Father Is Sitting at His Desk Right Now," p. 308 But now, having read the last page of this book again after some thirty years, I realized with a start, as if my palm had touched a flame, the meaning of the questions the twelve-year-old me had once asked myself — sitting against the wall of a darkening room, holding this book, not even knowing clearly what made my eyes and throat burn. I realized that those questions are still vividly alive within me, flickering and trembling. How can they love so much? Why is the world around them so beautiful and yet so violent at the same time? To that twelve-year-old self, I feel I can now, haltingly, answer: it is precisely because we love that we despair. It is because we believe in dignity that we feel pain. And so our pain itself is the key, and the hard seed. _"To the Boys of Summer," pp. 334–335