A review by blyttgh
A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki

5.0

09/01/24 the provenance of a story, the intimacy of knowing a stranger, post mortem exhumation

I’m reaching forward through time to touch you… you’re reaching back to touch me. 

He described it as a collaboration with time and place, whose outcome neither he nor any of his contemporaries works ever live to witness, but he was okay with not knowing.
61 

unbounded nature of not knowing
Appendix B

It was hard to get a sense from the diary of the texture of time passing. No writer, even the most proficient, could re-enact in words the flow of life lived
64

it doesn’t matter what it is, as long as you can find something concrete to keep you busy while you are living your meaningless life.
79-80

If you’ve ever tried to keep a diary, then you’ll know that the problem of trying to write about the past really starts in the present: No matter how far you write, you’re always stuck in the then and you can never catch up to what’s happening now, which means that now is pretty much doomed to extinction. It’s hopeless, really. Not that now is ever all that interesting. Now is usually just me, sitting in some dumpy café… moving a pen back and forth a hundred billion times across a page, trying to catch up with myself. 
97-98  

I felt a sense of calm, knowing that all these creatures had lived and died before me, leaving almost no trace. 
265 

I got confused. In my mind, she’s still sixteen. She’ll always be sixteen.
The eternal now. She wanted to catch it, remember? To pin it down. That was the point.
Of writing?
Or suicide.
I’ve always thought of writing as the opposite of suicide. That writing was about immortality. Defeating death, or at least forestalling it.
314 

The amount of ink I waste on foolish outpourings, smashing clocks in my mind, crying out in my imagination. Forget the clock. It has no power over time, but words do, and now I am tempted to to rip up these pages. Is this how I want to be remembered? By these words? By you? 
322-323
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