On the holiest of holy books in my room, the A to Z telephone directory, I swear to tell the truth. Life is empty. But of course, there is some salvation. That is to say, it wasn’t so utterly empty from the very outset. It takes real effort upon effort, an all-out struggle, for us to wear it down, to reduce it to an empty nothing. Here is not the place to go into just how we struggle, how each and every way we wear it down to nothing. Too much trouble. Anyone who simply must know has only to read Romain Rolland’s Jean Christophe. It’s all there.
From the non-existant novel One and a Half Times around the Rainbow by the fictional author Derek Heartfield (who comitted suicide in 1938 by walking of the Empire State Building with a portrait of Hitler in his right hand and an open umbrella in his left) imagined by Huraki Murakami for Hear the Wind Sing.