Anyway, to cut off one's biological dreams seems to me the most fundamental form of psychic castration that you could imagine.

You focus on the here and now in order to escape existence forever and vanish into Nirvana. There is another religious impulse that is the opposite of this. It uses a world elsewhere in order to affirm life and give a reason to "go forth and multiply".

I never seem to find what I'm looking for, though. I suppose I feel, these days, too aware of schedules and things, to let myself get lost in the rain. Anyway, I came back home, and it was still raining, and as I was approaching the driveway of the house, and the front garden with its bushy flower bed, I caught a cooking smell from somewhere on the air. I don't know why, exactly, but it appealed to me as a Nagai Kafu moment.

My muse can take the form of a landscape, an era, a style of writing, a piece of music, and, perhaps that which I find strangest of all for a muse, a human female. Of course, she's also adept at taking the form of toothless old Japanese men or young English lads with tattoos.

If we do overcome linear time, I would hope this means dwelling more directly in the fertility of the imagination rather than denying it, as some aspects of Buddhism seem to.

This strong sense of who I am that I've always had, since I was very young, is what makes me write.

I seem to be less depressed but also less hopeful now in my thirties. My widow's peak bothers me. I think a lot about the end of the human race. And so on.