The Changeling

if we resist the tendency to break—that is, to fall apart—not only will we ourselves remain intact, but we won’t hurt other people

That might have been, in part, because he was intrigued by the concept of self-sufficient living off the grid of civilization.

At times like that, he couldn’t help seeing himself as a lonely, isolated symbol of the generation gap, eating modernity’s dust.

But I think that just as there’s infinity and also a single instant in time, and just as the entire cosmos can coexist with a single particle,

he had somehow exiled himself to a solitary island with its own peculiar languag

He even began to wonder whether, by surrounding himself with beloved, familiar books and writing

The trick is figuring out how to protect your original voice while stripping away the veneer of borrowed styles.

According to Fukuzawa, virtually every word that’s used to describe people can be a two-sided coin. For example, depending on your tone, frugal can mean admirably thrifty or despicably stingy, while rough and ready could imply either courageousness or bellicosity. The exception, he says, is enbo. No matter how you look at it, enbo is a complete waste of time; there’s no way you can put a positive spin on envy, bitterness, and

, would be slighted or even looked upon with disdain. That reason was pure enbo: bitter, envious resentment.

Anyway, it seems as if almost everything is already an apparition to me, you know? Everyday life seems like television, and I can’t tell whether somebody is really here with me or not. I’m surrounded by apparitions. One day soon I, too, will stop being real, and I’ll become nothing more than a phantasm myself!