Thwap! (or) The Sound of a Weighty Idea Hitting You in the Brain

Having forgotten my book and not managed to print my class reading today, I found myself facing the prospect of a five hour shift at work with no reading material. My shifts consist of about a half hour of hauling risers, hefting chairs, and occasionally opening doors during recitals, so the thought of not having anything to occupy my mind for the rest of the time was pretty dismal. So I hopped on the 57 that was driving by at the time (the fact that we waited for 40 minutes for one this morning is a juicy little bit of irony for the day) and went down to the BU bookstore. I bought Atonement which is the next book for our friends' book group, and read about 90 pages. The book I forgot at home is The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami that a friend gave me for Christmas. I'm not sure that reading these two books at once won't destroy my soul in some convulsion of profundity. McEwan keeps writing things like "It wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you."
Take a minute to digest that. There, in a lovely, well turned phrase, is an underlying kernel of my own personal understanding of the world, in a scene where a thirteen-year-old girl is contemplating her fingers and the nature of intentionality. Murakami is a little more subtle about his incredible depth (no pun intended), and mixes is with a bit more humor. But his protagonist is currently sitting at the bottom of a well in suburban Tokyo, where he has gone after his wife left him, and after an old veteran described his own experience of being abandoned in a dry well by Soviets in Outer Mongolia after having watched a man get skinned alive. Upon reflection, I think Atonement will have to wait until I get Toru out of his well and see if his wife and lost cat come back to him, with or without the help of slightly off-balance clairvoyant sisters. 1930's thirteen-year-olds just aren't quite as colorful.