Busy catching up with myself to understand who I’m evolving into.
Apart from listening to and making music, I really enjoy reading, especially books that present the reader with ambiguous and contradictory characters – because isn’t that exactly how life unfolds? Somewhat for my own reference, here are some of my favorite authors and their respective works that resonate particularly well with me:
- Kōbō Abe
- The Woman in the Dunes
- Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Crime and Punishment
- The Gambler
- The Idiot
- Yukio Mishima
- Forbidden Colors
- Amélie Nothomb
- Tokyo Fiancée
- Hygiene and the Assassin
- The Enemy’s Cosmetique
And here some quotes that make me feel seen:
忙碌變成逃脫的偽飾
(Busyness becomes a disguise for escape)
Yujun Wang – Concave
人は人を恋する権利を持つが、人は人に恋される権利は持たない。[…]
つらかったので、ますますニシノさんを恋しくおもった。(A person has the right to love another, but not to be loved in return. […] And as I suffered so much, my infatuation grew.)
Hiromi Kawakami – The Ten Loves of Nishino, p.8
D’ailleurs, on a toujours quelque chose à fuir. Ne serait-ce que soi-même. La bonne nouvelle, c’est que l’on peut échapper à soi-même. […]. On prend ses cliques et ses claques et on s’en va : le moi est tellement étonné qu’il oublie de jouer les geôliers. On peut se semer comme on sèmerait des poursuivants.
(And indeed, there is always something to flee from. And if it’s just yourself. It’s good to know that you can escape yourself. […] You take your belongings and leave. And the ego is so amazed by it that it forgets to play the prison guard. You can outrun yourself like you outrun a prison guard.)
Amélie Nothomb – Tokyo Fiancée, p. 156
I have been to over 40 countries and lived, worked and studied in seven of them: Germany, Spain, Vietnam, Japan, Thailand, Mexico, and Taiwan, where I live now.
My balm-for-the-ego-just-that-you-know-I’m-a-cosmopolitan map:
