first off apparently i've been channeling my energy elsewhere ever since i moved to nyc. good thing i think, private thoughts are important, but they're personal indulgence at the end of the day. it's good, i think, to be pre-occupied with more constructive endeavours.
during the last couple of months when i had absolute no time to myself at all, sometimes not even on the weekends, i was going over some of my old books in fragments as a way of reclaiming some personal space - walter benjamin's illumination, wim wenders' once - just before bed every night.
i started re-reading haruki murakami's wind-up bird chronicle, which i read more than five years ago and had always intended to re-read at some point. it's probably one of my favourite stories of all time, with intricacies that were too much for my brain to take in at once. so the second reading is still full of surprises.
for example, i completely forgot how essential kumiko, the wife, was part of the plot. much of her involvement was narrated through toru, the husband, so she felt rather distant and part of the background, passive, static. i was surprised by how much i wasn't engaged with her character the first time. as if i only wanted to know her as part of her husband's tale.
was it only me who can only keep a relationship with two elements of the book at a time? the man being one of course, the history being another. are other people as obsessively monogamous in their relationships with fictional characters?
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