Time, Impermanence, and the Present Theme Analysis

Hi! My name is Nao, and I am a time being. Do you know what a time being is? Well, if you give me a moment, I will tell you.

A time being is someone who lives in time, and that means you, and me, and every one of us who is, or was, or ever will be. As for me, right now I am sitting in a French maid café in Akiba Electricity Town, listening to a sad chanson that is playing sometime in your past, which is also my present,
writing this and wondering about you, somewhere in my future. And if you’re reading this, then maybe by now you’re wondering about me, too.

But since these are my last days on earth, I want to write something important. […] I want to leave something real behind.

But what can I write about that’s real? Sure, I can write about all the bad shit that’s happened to me, and my feelings about my dad and my mom and my so-called friends, but I don’t particularly want to.

What if you never even found this book, because somebody chucked it in the trash or recycled it before it got to you? Then old Jiko’s stories truly will be lost forever, and I’m just sitting here wasting time talking to the inside of a dumpster. […]

Okay, here’s what I’ve decided. I don’t mind the risk, because the risk makes it more interesting. And I don’t think old Jiko will mind, either, because being
a Buddhist, she really understands impermanence and that everything changes and nothing lasts forever.

But here, on the sparsely populated island, human culture barely existed and then only as the thinnest veneer. Engulfed by the thorny roses and massing
bamboo, she stared out the window and felt like she’d stepped into a malevolent fairy tale. She’d been bewitched. She’d pricked her finger and
had fallen into a deep, comalike sleep. The years had passed, and she was not
getting any younger. […] Now that her mother was dead, Ruth felt that her own life was passing her by. Maybe it was time to leave this place she’d hoped would be home forever. Maybe it was time to break the spell.

When I was a little kid in Sunnyvale, I became obsessed with the word
now. […] The word now always felt especially strange and unreal to me because it was me, at least the sound of it was. Nao was now and had this whole other meaning.

[..] [N]ow felt like a slippery fish, a slick fat tuna with a big belly and a smallish head and tail […].

NOW felt like a big fish swallowing a little fish, and I wanted to catch it and make it stop. I was just a kid, and I thought if I could truly grasp the meaning of the big fish NOW I would be able to save little fish Naoko, but the word always slipped away from me.

Every few hours, another horrifying piece of footage would break, and she would play it over and over, studying the wave as it surged over the tops of the seawalls, carrying ships down city streets, picking up cars and trucks and depositing them on the roofs of buildings. She watched whole towns get crushed and swept away in a matter of moments, and she was aware that while these moments were captured online, so many other moments simply vanished. […]

But always, from the vantage point of the camera, you could see how fast the wave was traveling and how immense it was.

It’s the cold fish dying in your stomach feeling. You try to forget about it, but as soon as you do, the fish starts flopping around under your heart and reminds you that something truly horrible is happening.

Jiko felt like that when she learned that her only son was going to be killed in the war. […] In fact, she said she had lots of fishes, […] but the biggest fish of all belonged to Haruki #1, and it was more like the size of a whale. She also said that after she became a nun and renounced the world, she learned how to open up her heart so that the whale could swim away. I'm trying to learn how to do that, too.

Over and over, I ran at the sea, beating it until I was so tired I could barely stand. And then the next time I fell down, I just lay there and let the waves wash over me, and I wondered what would happen if I stopped trying to get
back up. Just let my body go. Would I be washed out to sea? The sharks would eat my limbs and organs. Little fish would feed on my fingertips. My beautiful white bones would fall to the bottom of the ocean, where anemones
would grow upon them like flowers. Pearls would rest in my eye sockets.

The Earthquake Catfish is not solely a malevolent fish, despite the havoc and calamity it can wreak. It has benevolent aspects as well. A subspecies of the
Earthquake catfish is […] World-Rectifying Catfish,
which is able to heal the political and economic corruption in society by shaking things up. […]

The World-Rectifying Catfish targeted the business class, the 1 percent […].
The angry catfish would cause an earthquake, wreaking havoc and destruction, and in order to rebuild, the wealthy would have to let go of their assets, which would create jobs […] for the working classes.

Choosing this death has various benefits associated with it. First, and most important, it guarantees a posthumous promotion of two ranks, which of course is meaningless, but it comes with a substantial increase in the pension paid to you upon my death. […]

So that is one benefit, and it is practical. The other benefit is perhaps more philosophical. By volunteering to sortie, I have now regained a modicum of agency over the time remaining in my life. Death in a ground offensive or bombing attack seems random and imprecise. This death is not. It is pure, clean, and purposeful. I will be able to control and therefore appreciate, intimately and exactly, the moments leading up to my death.

[…] I climbed up on [my chair] and then onto my desk, and I stood there, tall and straight. Then, when everybody was looking, I flipped back my hoodie.

A gasp went around the room that sent shivers up my spine. The supapawa of my bald and shining head radiated through the classroom and out into the world, a bright bulb, a beacon, beaming light into every crack of darkness on the earth and blinding all my enemies. I put my fists on my hips and watched them tremble, holding up their arms to shield their eyes from my unbearable brightness. I opened my mouth and a piercing cry broke from my throat like an eagle, shaking the earth and penetrating into every corner of the universe. I watched my classmates press their hands over their ears, and saw the blood run through their fingers as their eardrums shattered.

I have written to you of my decision to die. Here is what I did not tell you. […] [T]he ticking of the clock is the only sound I am able to hear now. Second by second, minute by minute…tick, tick, tick…the small, dry sounds fill every crevice of silence. […] [M]y being is attuned only to one thing, the relentless rhythm of time, marching toward my death.

If I could only smash the clock and stop time from advancing! […] I can almost feel the sturdy metal body crumpling beneath my hands, the glass fracturing, the case cracking open, my fingers digging into the guts, spilling springs and delicate gearing. But no, there is no […] way of stopping time, and so I lie here, paralyzed, listening to the last moments of my life tick by.

I don’t want to die, Maman! I don’t want to die!

Making the decision to end my life really helped me lighten up, and suddenly
all the stuff my old Jiko had told me about the time being really kicked into
focus. There’s nothing like realizing that you don’t have much time left to
stimulate your appreciation for the moments of your life. I mean it sounds
corny, but I started to really experience stuff for the first time, like the beauty
of the plum and cherry blossoms […]. I spent whole days […] wandering up and down these long, soft tunnels of pink clouds and gazing overhead at the fluffy blossoms […]. Everything was perfect. When a breeze blew, petals rained down on my upturned face, and I stopped and gasped, stunned by the beauty and sadness.

But the fact is, you’re a lie. You’re just another stupid story I made up out of
thin air because I was lonely and needed someone to spill my guts to. I wasn’t
ready to die yet and needed a raison d’etre. I shouldn’t be mad at you but I am! Because now you’re letting me down, too.

The fact is, I’m all alone.

[…] Everyone I believed in is dying. My old Jiko is dying, my dad is probably already dead by now, and I don’t even believe in myself anymore.

“[M]y theory is that this crow from Nao’s world came here to lead you into the dream so you could change the end of her story. Her story was about to end one way, and you intervened, which set up the conditions for a different outcome. […] .”

[…]

“I see. So what’s your second theory?”

“[…] That it’s your doing. It’s not about Nao’s now. It’s about yours. You haven’t caught up with yourself yet, the now of your story, and you can’t reach her ending until you do.”

Ruth thought about this. “You're right,” she said. “I don’t like it. I don’t like having that much agency over someone else’s narrative.”

Muriel laughed. “That’s a fine way for a novelist to talk!”

To study the self is to forget the self. Maybe if you sat enough zazen, your sense of being a solid, singular self would dissolve and you could forget about it. What a relief. You could just hang out happily as part of an open-ended quantum array.

[…]

Had Dogen figured all this out? He’d written these words many centuries before quantum mechanics [.]