We have reached an interesting fork in the road on our collective journey. One way is a short cut to the promised land. The other way takes us home. Speaking as both a runner and an analyst, I’ve made my choice – how about you?
consciousness
Place of Mystery/Center of the Universe
Bump — wheels down, LAX, right on schedule. Baggage secured, I’m on the bus to the rental car center and then barreling along the freeway to my cousin’s home to hang with his family for ten days. And climb some mountains, too – why, I have a long list of them.
From the highway, I see big peaks floating to the north. Faint silhouettes cloaked by haze and ocean mist. Baking in the late afternoon glare…
What We Think About When We Run: Murakami
(An updated version of this post was published in The New Rambler)
“What are they thinking?”
In a recent New Yorker article, Kathryn Schulz ponders the 50,000 participants in the New York City Marathon, curious about what running could teach us of the “deep strangeness” of the human brain. Her essay discusses research studies and books about running, including Haruki Murakami’s memoir, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. Murakami is not only an internationally acclaimed author who’s been lauded as one of the world’s greatest living novelists, he is also a long-distance runner who’s completed thirty marathons including New York City. I was therefore somewhat surprised when Schulz dismissed his book as doing “very poor justice” to the question of what people think about while running. She found it “neither inspirational nor aspirational nor descriptive.” Rather, it was “banal.”
It’s true, Murakami’s book has an ordinary tone and lacks the whimsical, surreal touches that grace his fiction. But in re-reading the book, I found it addressed Schulz’ question head-on, just not in the way she might have expected. You see, when you’re running, what may matter more is what you’re not thinking….
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The Long Brown Path 