sympathy tower tokyo – rie qudan
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This I liked less – his tendency to mansplain things I hadn’t actually asked about. Was his smooth, polite facade really just an attempt to mask his greatest flaw – that he was, at heart, illiterate? For all his computational might, it seemed AI-built didn’t have the strength to face up to his own weakness. He’d become so used to stealing the words of others without repercussion that he felt no shame, had no awareness even, of his own ignorance.
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A lifestyle in which money and time were converted into physical and mental wellbeing rather than external validation.
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I had laughed at the absurdity of denigrating a building of the future for being too futuristic. As someone commented, weren’t Japanese people supposed to have a particularly keen appreciation for the passing of time?
[…]
There was no question in my mind that Zaha Hadid’s National Stadium had to exist, that it had to become reality, and that its legacy could only ever be positive. Why? Because it was astonishingly beautiful. Hadid’s design had been chosen because only her stadium could supply Tokyo with the beauty it desperately needed. If it went unbuilt, the city would never be content. The stadium would be built because it had to be built; it would exist because it had to exist.
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Must. Should. The words, as firm as concrete, clanked and jolted within me. They were the sturdy columns and crossbeams I had erected to keep myself upright. I often spoke like this, using the language of will and obligation to put pressure on myself and those around me. I wanted to remove any unstable elements that had a chance, however remote, of causing the house I inhabited to collapse. If I used weaker materials – words like ‘maybe’ or ‘could’, as fragile as sand before it met cement – how could I expect to keep myself in one piece for the several decades I had left to live? It didn’t matter that they were just words, with no physical form of their own: if I didn’t strip them from my interior, they would render my foundations unstable. The whole structure would collapse in a second.
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cu cat citesc mai mult, cu atat cred mai intemeiat ca a meritat pe deplin premiul akutagawa, si imi imaginez membrii juriului zambind si minunandu-se “eeeh”tot mai mult, cu fiecare pagina…
