Updates stopped for a while.
I had a fairly serious injury and was not fully well, and there was other trouble, so I was not in a state to think carefully — and I could not write the blog.
But because I could not think much, I ended up with more time to trial-and-error how to get back to normal, and to reflect. Or rather, that is how it turned out.
Lately I have been writing blogs that quote works or other people's words more often, and this time is no different. I often read a favorite book while vaguely remembering something or sorting my thoughts, so when I write a blog those things come out too.
This time: thoughts from rereading one of my favorite novels, Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day. The work feels too beautiful to reduce to a simple label, and rereading it moved me deeply again.
As usual I will not go into plot detail, but briefly: the protagonist is a butler serving in an English aristocratic house around the time before World War II, and the novel is told in the first person from his point of view.
The earnest, refined protagonist reflects on what it means to be a good butler, on how operations should work when receiving guests at the house, and on the delicate shifts of feeling in his exchanges with a fellow housekeeper.
He has firm principles of his own and regulates his conduct by them. And he likes to linger in thought and examine things.
He used to enjoy discussing his thinking with the housekeeper and with butlers employed at other houses — but with colleagues leaving and the employer's situation changing, those chances dwindled, and the story shows him worrying more.
In other words, he lost opportunities to spread out his thinking.
The sense that when you have nowhere to spread out your thinking, you end up fretting about all sorts of things — that felt very familiar.
In my case too, when I have a chance to eat with friends, I relatively prefer serious talk where our values mix.
It does not have to be as complex as what I write on this blog, but something that conveys each person's values is good. (Of course it must not be only me talking.)
But in my experience, not many people like that kind of topic — and to put it vulgarly, you get dismissed as an annoyingly "high-minded" type. Whether I am high-minded or not aside, being annoying is probably fair. To a greater or lesser degree, such talk puts some stress on people.
So, as you might expect, conversations with friends or exchanges at work have often not really been places to spread out thinking. Chatting lightly with close friends is very fun, but I feel somehow unsatisfied. For example, even when talk starts to edge toward debate, it often settles into "everything is about balance," which I find disappointing.
I am not being self-deprecating, just stating a fact: for many people I am probably not an interesting conversationalist, and my phrasing may feel roundabout and overly logical.
As places to spread out my thinking, this blog and my diary — dialogue with myself — are the main ones. Precisely because it is dialogue with myself, part of the spreading-out works. But selfishly, I would be glad to have places to talk with other people too.
Lately I have had more chances to talk through ideas with close friends, and a few work meetings that required real thinking, so places to spread out thinking have increased a little.
I used to think it was better to spread out and finish thinking inside myself — but when those chances come, the time feels valuable and my intellectual curiosity is satisfied.
A place to spread out thinking is not something you are given, and it is not easy to find. Probably, if you become the kind of person others want to discuss things with, those chances arise on their own.
I do not have a concrete plan, but maybe by deepening professional expertise and building meaningful results, you come to be trusted as someone who can hold fairly abstract discussion. (There is not necessarily a correlation between professional results and the ability to hold abstract discussion.) Either way, I feel I have to raise my own value.
Finally — and this may sound presumptuous — I hope to write a blog that can be one place for readers to spread out their thinking too.
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