... All I could see was nothingness. And I was part of this nothingness. I closed my eyes and listened to the sound of my heart, to the sound of the blood circulating through my body, to the bellows-like contractions of my lungs, to the slippery undulations of my food-starved gut. In the deep darkness, every movement, every throb, was magnified enormously. This was my body: my flesh. But in the darkness, it was all too raw and physical.

,,,,,Soon my conscious mind began to slip away from my physical body.

,,,,,I saw myself as the wind-up bird, flying through the summer sky, alighting on the branch of a huge tree somewhere, winding the world's spring. If there really was no more wind-up bird, someone would have to take on its duties. Someone would have to wind the world's spring in its place. Otherwise, the spring would run down and the delicate mechanism would grind to a halt. The only one who seemed to have noticed that the wind-up bird was gone, however, was me.

,,,,,I tried my best to imitate the cry of the wind-up bird in the back of my throat. It didn't work. All i could produce was a meaningless, ugly sound like the rubbing together of two meaningless, ugly things. Only the wind-up bird could make the sound. Only the wind-up bird could wind the world's spring the way it was supposed to be wound.

,,,,,Nonetheless, as a voiceless wind-up bird unable to wind the world's spring, I decided to go flying through the summer sky - which turned out to be fairly easy. Once you were up, all you had to do was flap your wings at the right angle to adjust direction and altitude. My body mastered the art in a moment and sent me flying effortlessly wherever I wanted to go. I looked at the world from the wind-up bird's vantage point. Whenever I had had enough flying, I would land on a branch and peer through the green leaves at rooftops and roads. I watched people moving over the ground, carrying on the functions of life. Unfortunately, though, I could not see my own body. This was because I had never once seen the wind-up bird and had no idea what it looked like.

,,,,,For a long time - how long could it have been? - I remained the wind up bird. But being the wind-up bird never got me anywhere. The flying part was fun, of course, but I couldn't go on having fun for ever. There was something I had to accomplish down here in the darkness at the bottom of the well. I stopped being the wind-up bird and returned to being myself.

'The Wind-up Bird Chronicle' - Haruki Murakami


listening to: ,,,the rain
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,and a documentary 'who killed stalin?'