A few days ago I finished Kazuo Ishiguro's A Pale View of Hills.
Until recently I'd only read The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go, but reading his latest, Klara and the Sun, pushed me to follow the rest. Next: The Buried Giant.
When you meet a wonderful work, you build a barrier yourself — this is the peak, exploring further is scary — but fortunately that was needless worry.
The Remains of the Day remains special to me, of course, but the other works also cultivate emotion in various ways.
In busy days, emotional range gets limited, so you need to consciously make time for good reading — or rather, art.
Speaking of which, Haruki Murakami said in a Uniqlo web media interview: "(With SNS,) the writing isn't usually very good, is it. Reading good prose and listening to good music — that's enormously important for life." That stuck with me.
Incidentally, I found that article on SNS. Hopeless. (Still, SNS seems suited to "discovery." I stumbled on that piece myself.)
Even when I read a wonderful book, pitifully, I can't get past "it was wonderful" and can't express well what made it so.
To put it into language, I need to take notes and read more carefully over more time.
Thankfully, A Pale View of Hills had commentary by translator Ken Onodera and writer Natsuki Ikezawa.
Not so much about the content of the commentary itself, but I learned that a basic technique for putting a work into words is "relativizing" — comparing it with other works or other works by the same author. (Academic grounding is another typical approach, I suppose.)
In Onodera's comments: "Several of Ishiguro's works share a theme of how an individual facing a transformation of values that accompanies changes in the era environment grasps and settles their own past."
Purely interesting — and it also brought back scenes from works I'd already read.
As time passes, situations change, and holding present values against past ones can leave you troubled. Sometimes you can't accept the values of a new era.
People of one generation and another often can't share values in a deep sense.
Surprisingly, the gap between "same culture, different generation" can be larger than "different culture, same generation." Counterintuitive, but it fits well enough.
The passage of time is strange. Lately I think more situations change — more problems resolve — only because time has passed than you'd expect.
This blog has been going a bit over a year, and reading posts from a year ago lately, I remember how much frustration had piled up then.
In my new work I'm still mostly feeling my way through unknowns.
Is the work difficult? YES — but do I need special ingenuity or thinking? Probably not; dig down and it's simple knowledge gaps.
And that knowledge isn't the kind you acquire by studying alone — it's inside the work flow, learned through the job.
So time will solve it. A year from now I shouldn't be stuck on the same things. By then I'll be stuck on something new — but it must not be a mere extension of today. And if it's still a knowledge gap, as long as it's expertise you can train as a craft, that's fine.
Writing that, I noticed: expertise at work should connect to the work (not literally as theory) — but there's probably what's inside the current internal workflow and what isn't. "Not in the current workflow, but in demand" seems to fit the latter.
The other day someone I asked for advice said: "Your thinking will definitely change from here. The world is changing. If someone says your ideas keep flipping, just answer that of course they do. And whatever idea comes up, don't get trapped by it."
Exactly — which is why days that pass only absorbing operational knowledge don't feel healthy.
"Stay calm and wait" isn't quite that simple, so you need time to think properly in a settled environment, and time with good writing like the quote at the start.
And it's not that planning is useless (probably better than none) — even if you don't score prediction accuracy, you need to take time to look back at the gap between the future you expected and where you are now.
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