Roland Barthes wrote that the centre of Tokyo is occupied by a void...it is a quiet forest that lies at Tokyo's heart.
...The centre of Tokyo is certainly a void, but one that is protected by a circular train line, the Yamanote, which forms a 40-km (25-mile) loop around it. It seems to me that this ring of steel emphasizes the importance of the void, and the depth of its significance.
This is the first site along the tour. In here we have a void. I remember the building that used to stand here, it was painted blue. Passing through it, you can imagine how us, as ghosts – should the building be standing here – would have to actually be invisible to pass through these walls and now it’s the reverse. The building is the ghost and we’re passing through these walls.
Japanese music is above all a music of reticence, of atmosphere. When recorded, or amplified by a loudspeaker, the greater part of its charm is lost. In conversation, too, we prefer the soft voice, the understatement. Most important of all are the pauses. Yet the phonograph and radio render these moments of silence utterly lifeless. And so we distort the arts themselves to curry favor for them with the machines.
Could that delicate and complex instrument that lies in the human breast ever really produce a reading that was absolutely clear and truthful, like a clock’s hands pointing to numbers on its dial?
I could not know that even then the little light was being drawn irresistibly into the great soundless whirl of darkness and that I was watching a light that was destined soon to blink out and disappear.
If you count off a circle of beads, you never reach an end. At what point, and with what feelings, would his fingers cease to move those beads? This may be a silly question, but it haunts me.