Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being was Multnomah County Library's selection for their Everybody Reads program of 2023. Sometime in January, my cousin invited me and gave me a copy. I attended Ruth's author talk mid-March in Portland and have only now finished reading the book. I can't adequately explain my slowness. It is long, but more than that, it is steeped in complex issues of memory and philosophy and quantum physics and parallel worlds. It hits all the major social issues as well, from environment and climate to bullying and suicide. The book follows a writer (Ruth's own self!) and her discovery of a packet of interesting items on the Pacific coast, likely having floated over from Japan, perhaps as a result of the earthquake and tsunami in 2011. The book alternates between the diary of a teen girl and Ruth's life, which somehow becomes a dialogue over space and time. The interaction between Ruth and her husband as they read the diary is beautiful and probing. There are some pretty heady conversations around being, observing, knowing, and conjuring. It's a wonderful book. Writing is Ruth Ozeki's superpower, and from reading this story, it's clearly not her only one.
Some interesting quotes:
Page12: Print is predictable and impersonal, conveying information in a mechanical transaction with the reader's eye. Handwriting, by contrast, resists the eye, reveals its meaning slowly, and is as intimate as skin.
Page 31: Ruth snapped the book shut and closed her eyes for good measure to keep herself from cheating and reading the final sentence, but the question lingered, floating like a retinal burn in the darkness of her mind: What happens in the end?
Page 84: An unfinished book, left unattended, turns feral, and she would need all her focus, will, and ruthless determination to tame it again.
Page 159: Dad kept climbing. One step. Another. Higher and higher. We were an army of two, him and me, marching up a mountain, but not to conquer it. We were in retreat, a defeated army on the run.
Page 188: He held out an oyster. His fingers were wet and raw.
Page 246: "Life is full of stories. Or maybe life is only stories."
Page 317: I unscrew the cap on my fountain pen, worried that the ink might run dry and be insufficient for my thoughts. My last thoughts, measured out in drops of ink.
Page 345-6: "Think about it. Where do words come from? They come from the dead. We inherit them. Borrow them. Use them for a time to bring the dead to life."
Page 389: He's stopped reading The Great Minds of Western Philosophy completely, and spends all his time programming, which really is his superpower. I mean there are lots of superheroes with different superpowers, and some of them are big and flashy, like superstrength, and superspeed, and molecular restructuring, and force fields. But these abilities are really not so different from the superpower stuff that old Jiko could do, like moving superslow, or reading people's minds, or appearing in doorways, or making people feel okay about themselves just by being there.
