Discover the pearls of wisdom from one of the greatest novelists ever.
Reading Murakami always has a disturbing effect on me.
Murakami speaks to me of existential emptiness and loneliness and a dream world we can’t understand, which exists and is just as accurate as the real one.
And although sometimes it scares me, I can look my demons in the face through his sentences, which makes me feel alive.
Today, I want to share three phrases that make my hair stand on end every time I read them. And analyze them for you.
1. About death
“I thought I was someone special. But the years rob us little by little of life. You don’t die when the time comes. One slowly dies inside and, at the end, faces that last liquidation. No one can escape. Everyone must pay for what he gets.” — Haruki Murakami (1Q84 book 3)
Life is a gift that is paid for every day.
We waste away like melting candles as we light up the darkness.
The price for illuminating the darkness is to return to it.
Life is lost. It’s something we should have been taught as children. But no one dares
In Murakami’s words, “The lapse of a blink of an eye is enough for a huge number of things to transit from the realm of existence to the realm of non-existence.” And those things include you and everything you know.
- You’re going to lose your friends.
- You’re going to lose your family members.
- You’re going to lose your partners.
- And in the end, you’re going to lose your own life.
Growing old is like a chronic degenerative disease that kills you.
Death is egalitarian; it does not understand social classes; it comes to everyone equally, sooner or later.
And the most paradoxical thing is that the sensation of speed increases with age.
As Murakami writes in his short story On a Stone Pillow, “It is enigmatic that we grow old in the blink of an eye, that everything seems so brief and that there is no turning back, that every moment is one more step towards decadence, ruin, and extinction.”
What, then, is the meaning of life?
Let me answer you with something Murakami wrote in his short story Cream, “You have a head for editing complicated things, for making the incomprehensible comprehensible. That is the crème de la crème of life. Everything else is futile and banal.”
Lesson: don’t waste your life chasing what success is supposed to be, don’t get stuck on the hamster wheel, and dare to ask yourself the big questions of life, “Who are you?” “Where did you come from?” “Where are you going?” “What is the purpose of your life?”.
Everything else is futile and banal; dedicate every second of your existence to discovering the mystery of this miracle we call intelligent life.
2. On the subconscious
“Einstein once said that for him, death would be not being able to listen to Mozart again. For me, death would be not being able to write fiction ever again.” — Haruki Murakami (Interview with Raúl Pérez Torres)
In the same interview, Murakami says something disturbing. “There are two worlds, the real world and the world of dreams. The difference is that writers can return to the same dream daily and live it awake. You can try too, but don’t forget to go back.”
For Murakami, writing is like traveling to the center of his existence. It is the way he knows himself.
And that inner world, for him, is more accurate than the external one.
We all learned over the years that you can go on vacation to Mars in an Elon Musk rocket or stay at home, but in both cases, you are always in the same place: inside yourself.
We can all access the subconscious.
Many people do it through affirmations before sleep, others by meditating to have lucid dreams, and others with hypnotherapy. The truth is that dreams are how the subconscious has to connect with the conscious.
Communication, whether we are aware of it or not, that happens every night in our dreams, is one of the most essential parts of life.
It’s like we live on the physical plane during the day to inform the subconscious in dreams, like downloading information to the universal hard drive.
We are like bees that collect pollen during the day and turn it into honey in the hive of the collective unconscious when we dream every night.
Lesson: Dreaming is more important than we think. In dreams, the wisdom of the unconscious helps our conscious self after analyzing the data. So try to respect your circadian cycles 🙂
3. On Memory
“The most detailed map may not serve us on occasion for the same reason.” — Haruki Murakami (Norwegian Wood).
Too much information turns into noise, into fog, into bewilderment.
In the novel Norwegian Wood, Watanabe’s character is initially unable to write about his former love, Naoko. But over the years, the memory of Naoko fades in his memory, and he becomes imperfect.
That imperfection allows Watanabe to fill in the gaps of what happened in his relationship with her.
As the author says in the mouth of the novel’s protagonist, “I’m the kind of person who doesn’t quite understand things until I put them down on paper.”
Lesson: when we have a recent situation, we need time to detach ourselves from it. We need the excess information to be diluted so that the skeleton of what happened tells us what is essential. Then, we can nuance it with our minds at a future moment.
This is the only way to understand life, as Steve Jobs would say, “Connecting the dots backward.”
A virtual hug
AG
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