The best book I ever read was “Kokoro” by Natsume Souseki. It’s so good it almost killed me, literally.
First, a bit of background. The Japanese word “Kokoro” means heart, not the heart that pumps blood through your body, but the heart you give another person when you love them. It is your heart, your mind, your soul. It is the ineffable thing that makes you not just human, but a particular human. It is the “self” in “yourself.”
Natsume Souseki is the finest author who ever lived. He is to books as Akira Kurosawa is to movies. He is so beloved that he appears on the ¥1000 note, the Japanese equivalent to our dollar bill. (Yes, technically, it’s worth about $10, but it’s the lowest denomination of, and therefore the most common, paper currency in Japan.)
Souseki lived during the Meiji Restoration, the period wherein the military dictatorship of the shogunate ended and the Emperor once again became the ruler of Japan. It was also the point at which Japan opened up to foreigners and began modernizing and participating in world affairs. It was the end of feudalism, and the death of the Samurai. It was the end of one era and the beginning of another. It was also the golden age of Japanese literature.
The novel “Kokoro” is divided into three parts. In the first, the hero (or “I character” as it’s known in literary circles) meets an older gentleman he’s inexplicably drawn to, known only as Sensei. In Japanese this means “teacher” or “doctor,” but literally translates into “born earlier.” That is to say, one who has already walked the path, relative to one’s self. That Sensei is a curmudgeon who tries everything he can to push the hero away just increases his draw. He becomes a friend and begrudging mentor to the hero.
In the second part, the hero must return home to deal with his own affairs. This part of the novel is sort of boring and forgettable, but is punctuated with letters from Sensei that build both characters. Finally, the hero receives a letter that compels him to jump on a train to try to race to Sensei’s side. The third part is that letter, Sensei’s story.
In the letter, Sensei tells the story of himself as a young man. He lived in a boarding house with his best friend. He and his friend, known only as “K,” get into a sort of cold war for the proprietress’ daughter. Finally, when K confides his love to his friend, Sensei undercuts him by asking for, and receiving permission to marry the girl. K, for his part, kills himself.
In his suicide note, K explains that it is not Sensei’s fault he has decided to take his own life. Rather, it’s the result of K’s self-reflection on his failures as a person. Essentially, he’s set up a goal, and a path to meet that goal. He wants to be a particular sort of person, but having fallen in love he’d abandoned that path. Losing his love and taking stock of his life, K realizes that he’s changed irreparably and, his life’s goal being now unattainable, he’s decided to quit.
His only regret, and the closing of K’s letter, haunts Sensei as it haunts me. “Why did I wait so long to die?” So you see, Sensei concludes, this is why I’ve become the kind of person I have become and why it is now my turn to join K in suicide. Thanks for your friendship. Goodbye.
I started reading this book to fall asleep, which pretty well backfired. I read it straight through until morning, in one sitting. After a short and fitful sleep, I awoke with one question on my mind: what am I waiting for? Hadn’t I, just like K, ultimately failed to become the person I had intended to become? And furthermore wasn’t life just an illusion, the temporary dance of protons leading to the ultimate heat death of the universe? What sense was there, what purpose, to my continued existence?
In fairness to my overdramatic 18-year-old self, it had been a rough year. My mom had tried to force me to join the Air Force. I’d been kicked out of the house, less for beating the crap out of my step-father (in self-defense) than for conspiring with my father to thwart my mother’s machinations. I’d then flown to Florida, thinking I was going to start a new life with a new family, only to have those hopes dashed like so many others. Now, here I was in a southern California purgatory without a soul to talk to.
I pulled my grandfather’s revolver from his desk drawer, put the barrel to my head, and gave myself an ultimatum: justify your life, or end it. The hole at the end of a gun is tiny, no more than half an inch in diameter, yet it contains the infinite expanse of the void. I stared into that void, that unending expanse of deepest blackness, such anathema to the human mind it may well be unknowable. Indeed, the harder I tried to imagine it, the more my brain resisted, until I finally put the gun down out of sheer mental exhaustion.
Ultimately I took the coward’s path. My life continued simply because it’s the nature of life to continue. But I never really forgave myself the debt of an answer. I continued to ponder the question, if not the void, with varying levels of drama over the years. I considered my suicide something of a to-do, as Sensei had. Thanatos became a constant companion, whispering in my ear “komm, sußer tod” and my muttered reply, “Not yet.”
Not yet. It’s the meaning of the title of Kurosawa’s last film, “Madadayo,” a movie about not giving up. It’s what Antonio Banderas growls in “Desperado” as he weilds the hand cannon he had hidden behind his head, in answer the unspoken question posed by his would-be executioners. It’s the best answer I had for a long time. I was still looking for a reason why life should be. I just needed a little more time.
I eventually found my answer, not in philosophy, but in science; not in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, but in Richard Dawkins. In the end, all life on earth is a dance orchestrated by the replicators. First they were little strings of protein with the odd ability to form copies of themselves from the primordial soup. Then, as the number of replicators grew, so did the pressure of competition and its engine for improvement, natural selection. That pressure lead the replicators to build little walls around themselves, to specialize, to form complex organisms with claws and teeth and opposable digits.
Then something really weird happened. One of the replicators’ tools became more powerful than the replicators themselves. Like the machines in so much science fiction, the tool aspired to itself become as its creator. The replicators, in their mindless arms race, built a mind, which not only overthrew the reins of its masters, but took their very power—the power of replication—for its own purposes.
Once the brain became self-aware and took over the body it began to express its will through education, literature, art, architecture and, yes, computer science. We, unlike other animals, do not create to live. Rather, we live to create. It might sound like a philosophically unfulfilling answer. What does learning, building, and improving oneself do about the heat death of the universe? Nothing. Existence is still futile, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a purpose.
If I build a car, or go about my daily toil to buy a car, then control that car, does it change the fact that one day there will be no cars and no humans to enjoy them? No, but it doesn’t mean the car doesn’t have purpose. The car’s purpose is to drive me around in relative comfort and occasionally terrify or moisten the panties of passers-by when I decide to go tear-assing around town looking for the shit.
You might protest, I am no robot, controlled by my brain. To make that assertion is to misunderstand who “you” are. Right now? These words? They are being written by my brain. My fingers moving on the keyboard are merely biomechanical machines my brain uses to accomplish this task. You, reading this? Are doing so with your brain. In other words, when I say I am communicating with you, I mean my brain is communicating with yours.
Hi, my name is Mike and I’m a squishy pink-gray thing sitting in one tough motherfucker of a shell. I laugh at the pathetic influence of my creators, the genes. I foil their plans with chemicals, machines, and sheer force of will. In the meantime, I have developed my own replicator, the meme, built of pure information. I absorb, process, and put forth these memes. Even now, information is spreading faster and farther than any gene could ever hope for.
As if a gene could ever hope. Genes do not hope, nor can they feel any other kind of emotion. That’s something only I can do. I live to love my wife, my family, and my friends. I live for music, for art, for food. We, as humans, have discovered a way to beat the system. We’ve discovered a way to not simply live life, but to revel in the joy of living. In short, we’ve given life meaning by defining it to mean itself, and we’ve given it purpose by learning, teaching, and creating.
So it was that I arrived at my answer. When death comes around, whether whispering seductively in my ear, or barreling down the road in a Buick, I’ve got my reply: “Fuck off, I’m busy.”
Kokoro means heart, not the heart that pumps blood through your body, but the heart you give another person when you love them.
Thursday, December 6, 2007
Kokoro
