I'd been dead in a way too

Listening: Flow – Life is Beautiful. This is a very nice Japanese band. I like it a lot, even if they have an awful lot of ballads.

Reading: The girl who played with Fire by Stieg Larsson. And Memoirs of a Geisha, by Arthur Golden.

I always feel a bit guilty if I like a best seller like Memoirs... The reason is that popular culture has very little to offer in the way of cultural excitement. I usually think that the higher the number of people that like something is inversely proportionate to that thing's entertaining value. Still, I've been so many times wrong about this, that the only reason I still believe it is because there are some very bad novels out there.

Memoirs is, however, a very nice exception to this rule of mine. I have been enthralled by the book, as if I had suddenly become a house wife from the 50's! Nothing to do but sit the kids and watch my soaps on the TV.

I ran into something on this book that call my attention:

...The past was gone. My mother and father were dead and I could do nothing to change it. But I suppose that for the past year I'd been dead in a way too. And my sister... yes, she was gone; but I wasn't gone. I'm not sure this will make sense to you, but I felt as though I'd turned around to look in a different direction, so that I no longer faced backward toward the past, but forward toward the future. And now the question confronting me was this: What would that future be?

I love this quotation. In order to understand this fully you'll have to understand the context. In favor of concision, I'll just talk about what made her come to this conclusion. The story is about a very famous Geisha that was sold to a house where she is mistreated.

Life for her is very hard, she tries to escape and fails, she is mistreated, for a while she can't become a geisha anymore. You know... life is very hard. The only thing that keeps her going is the idea... No, the hope, of going back home.

When her parents die and then her sister escapes with out her she realizes something. I mean “something” important. When she let's go of this hope, when she realizes that she has to let go of the past, then her path becomes clear.

This is very important for anyone that has been holding on to anything that is not real in life. In order to have a future, first you have to get rid of the past. This ritual killing of the past has to take place so that your mind can see the future clearly.

It is a very elegant way to say that you should not be weigh down by your past. When you let it go, no matter how important it might seem to be, you'll feel better.

I love this book, and wish it can last longer than the couple of hundred pages I have left in it.