{"id":476,"date":"2003-11-26T23:48:09","date_gmt":"2003-11-27T03:48:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/2003\/11\/26\/essence-not-desired\/"},"modified":"2003-11-26T23:48:09","modified_gmt":"2003-11-27T03:48:09","slug":"essence-not-desired","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/2003\/11\/26\/essence-not-desired\/","title":{"rendered":"Essence not desired"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

Near the beginning, as an opening to Chapter 2 of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle<\/a>, Haruki Murakami writes,<\/p>\n

Is it possible, finally, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another?<\/p>\n

We can invest enormous time and energy in serious efforts to know another person, but in the end, how close are we able to come to that person’s essence? We convince ourselves that we know the other person well, but do we really know anything important about anyone?<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s unnerving me a bit to realise that I have never desired “perfect understanding” of another person, nor considered it desirable to strive for closeness to another’s “essence.” It’s discombobulating me to realise that there are people who want these effects. Am I too casual in thinking that we’re all changing constantly, that our “essence” is a condition of our relationship to other people and things and events and social structures, and that it’s therefore pointless to seek perfect understanding or essence? Is it a mark of insanity? Shallowness? Comfort? Alienation? Or is it a guy-girl thing, viz. that guys keep believing in some essential beingness? I don’t mind that my children keep changing on me. This is ok, it’s their right. I couldn’t imagine fixing<\/i> them, and part of my love for them is expressed through the constant dance I have to execute to keep up with their changing coordinates. And vice versa. It’s a form of movement that keeps our lives lively, that keeps us literally on our toes, and young. If I’m really lucky, I sometimes forget how old I am because I have to move. <\/p>\n

I recently watched the movie Das Boot<\/a>, which ends in a bloodbath whose context is quite ironic: after months of escaping dangers at sea, after surviving a disabling sinking, the crew of the submarine, along with various other marines and dignitaries, are mowed down on land in an air attack. The young hero — a journalist — had cried at one point that he wanted, just once, to feel “real” life in its fullness, without the shielding hand of a nurturing mother, without a gentle maiden blurring its outline for him, diluting its essence, or muffling its sound. And then, physically ricocheting through the carnage at the film’s end, he realises that his quest for reality and the reality itself have merged and simultaneously exposed themselves as a materiality (death, mayhem) that never ever will alchemically transmute or transfigure into some “real” or heroic “essence” which the women supposedly were preventing him from accessing. The quest for a higher essentiality was all in his head, and projecting its inaccessibility (or its accessibility) unto women was a self-deluding ruse. <\/p>\n

Wars have been fought with this quest as a subtext. I’ve heard that in Wind-Up Bird Chronicle<\/i> there is a flaying, presumably another quest to reach into the soul. Pain, torture: I suppose that presents a baseline for “essence”-quests, but for anyone who has survived it, we know it ends with just another air attack, from the head this time, with shortcircuits and fainting. Not more life, just less. The other Murakami books I’ve read were full of relationships that kept the stories’ balls in the air, countering or questioning essential conclusions, and I’ll read on in this one. But if it gets too essential<\/i>, I might not make it through the whole book….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Near the beginning, as an opening to Chapter 2 of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami writes, Is it possible, finally, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another? We can invest enormous time and energy in serious efforts to know another person, but in the end, how close are we able to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":311,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[600],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-476","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-yulelogstories"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/476","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/311"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=476"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/476\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=476"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=476"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=476"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}