Florian’s Reviews > 1Q84 > Status Update

The size of the human brain had increased four times over the past two and a half million years. In terms of weight, the brain occupied only two percent of the human body, but it consumed some forty percent of the body's total energy (according to a book he had recently read). Owing to the dramatic expansion of the brain, human beings had been able to acquire the concepts of time, space and possibility.

For a man living alone, he keeps his place clean. He had even scrubbed the gas stove. The inside of his fridge was very neat, no rotten cabbage or anything tucked away in the back. I could see he had done some ironing as well. Not a bad partner for you to have. As long as he isn't gay, I mean.

Then the two of them left the windowless little room and went to the cafeteria. There was no one else. Brught sunlight shone in through the large window facing the garden. Tengo stepped into that light and breathed a sigh of relief. There was no sign of dead there. This was the world of the living-no matter how uncertain and imperfect a world it might be.

It ws a windless night. The kind of clouds that watercolor artists like lingered faintly in the sky, a test of the artist's delicate brushstrokes.

"Tell me, Tengo, as a novelist, what is your definition of reality?"
"When you prick a person with a needle, red blood comes out-that's the real world," Tengo replied.

But his father did not return to the room for a long time. The light coming in the window grew slowly weaker, but Tengo did not turn on the lamp. If he did so, he felt, something important here would be lost.

People need things like that to go on living - mental landscapes that have meaning for them, even if they can't explain them in words. Part of why we live is to come up with explanations for these things.

What killed your friend, surely, was something she had inside of her. The same kind of tragedy that would have happened sooner or later. Her life was filled with risk. All they did was to provide the stimulus. Like changing the setting on a timer.

Setting on a time?

She was no electric oven! She was a living human being! So what if her life was full of risk? She was a dear friend of mine...

The only thing left was the bargain-sale rubber plant on the balcony, which she had bought instead of goldfish. She could hardly believe she had spent years of her life in this place without question or discontent. "Goodbye," she murmured, bidding farewell not so much to the apartment as to the self that had lived here.

The size of the human brain had increased four times over the past two and a half million years. In terms of weight, the brain occupied only two percent of the human body, but it consumed some forty percent of the body's total energy (according to a book he had recently read). Owing to the dramatic expansion of the brain, human beings had been able to acquire the concepts of time, space and possibility.