“The world of the grotesque is the darkness within us. Well before Freud and Jung shined a light on the workings of the subconscious, this correlation between darkness and our subconscious, these two forms of darkness, was obvious to people. It wasn’t a metaphor, even. If you trace it back further, it wasn’t even a correlation. Until Edison invented the electric light, most of the world was totally covered in darkness. The physical darkness outside and the inner darkness of the soul were mixed together, with no boundary separating the two. They were directly linked.†– Haruki Murakami, ‘Kafka On The Shore’
“But today things are different. The darkness in the outside world has vanished, but the darkness in our hearts remains, virtually unchanged. Just like an iceberg, what we label the ego or consciousness is, for the most part, sunk in darkness. And that estrangement sometimes creates a deep contradiction or confusion within us.†– Haruki Murakami, ‘Kafka On The Shore’
“Artists are those who can evade the verbose.†– Haruki Murakami, ‘Kafka On The Shore’
“Freedom and the emancipation of the ego were synonymous. And art, music in particular, was at the forefront of all this… Eccentricity was seen as almost the ideal lifestyle. The age of Romanticism, they called it. Though I’m sure living like that was pretty hard on them at times.†– Haruki Murakami, ‘Kafka On The Shore’
