Running for Your Life: In Praise of Haruki

So You Want to Live in Park Slope Dept.

Memorial Day Run With Thurb:

He’s better now – with the e-collar, doesn’t pull me, like a shopping cart coupled to freight train engine; it’s elementary and not seemingly hard on Ole UnReliable, not like he’s suddenly a rag dog when I use the e-collar device.

In any event, I go out on an ill-advised run, 90-plus degrees yet with a slight breeze at 7ish p.m., prime picnic time in Prospect Park.

(Particulars: I don’t zap T-Bone with the E-C, rather he gets a vibration on the neck collar akin to a cellphone’s vibrate mode, upon two select commands:

EASY! Which has him literally east up on the leash-pull and

LEAVE IT! When T’s showing interest in anything not to do with a straight-ahead run, i.e. a child, chicken bone, deliveryman, mutt on leash, etc.)

Let it be said only that we survived, to wit:

1. At Ninth Street, Barbecue Central (there are thousands upon thousands of people on the grass and pathways in the park, free on this holiday Monday to take up the space that Thurber knows so well), a boy is playing football-catch with another boy who hurls the loaf-size pigskin and hits me hard on the right elbow, spurring Thurb to lunge toward the ball, me to curse toward the boy, a girl to swing some colorful paddle as if to hit Thurb so that I bark, LEAVE HIM! at her, causing the male parental figures to bristle.

2. At The Lake a Snow Cone vendor shoves his clattering pushcart off a curb two feet away from us, sparking T to abruptly stop right under my running feet, and I narrowly avoid crashing over him onto the hard pavement. Dozens of onlookers find this near-calamity hilarious.

3. At the Lakeside Center, the park’s infinitely delayed twin-rinks project, a man, bent over in the shade, suddenly flings his arms up like a water bird, my rushin’ redbone stops abruptly again and once more we somehow escape a T&L collision.

Thankfully, we do make it home in one piece. Where our front steps are being painted the color of Thurb.

*

Last night (May 29) I finished “1Q84 http://bit.ly/ppPGo2,” the very-long novel by Haruki Murakami. Nine hundred-plus pages, small type. Think Moby-Dick for the adventure-scape Zeitgeist of the mid-twenty-first century stedda the mid-nineteenth century of Herman Melville. Like Melville’s classic in his day, Murakami’s has not been given its due in his. The probability of seeing someone reading “1Q84” on the subway much less likely than seeing someone reading the similarly demanding “Moby-Dick.” (Oddly enough, while the Kindle, iPad, Nook e-readers have taken off in terms of sales, their users still represent only a small percentage of the subway-traveling reading public.)

The Japanese HM is distinguished from his peers in a similar way that the American HM was distinguished from his. It comes down to a matter of commitment to a vision that not only sees into the human heart but mines the changes that are going on in the human experience so that one can imagine reading “1Q84” in 2273 with the same level of excitement that we read the American HM’s “M-D” in 2012.

Here is the adventure of our day, and our days to come, set in 1984, but with all the echoes of our current time, and the seeds of what our future will hold.

In “M-D,” Ahab fails to capture M-D. The whale defeats all, save the scribe of the story, in this cautionary counter-narrative.

In “1Q84” the battleground isn’t the physical – the oceans and how we humans are transforming them – but the psychological. How in these bodies we’re in, we’re imprisoned. That the adventure is what is imagined. But not like some disembodied video game that leaves us empty and gasping, rather with the wonder of a hard-won understanding of the human heart.

Nothing is a given, no relations can be trusted. The individual is all and in the hands of the Japanese HM it is enough. (Until the end of the novel, though, which . . . )

At the end of these classic novels we feel uplifted and depleted because we’ve been in the company of genius that has seen something special: a future in which mankind is playing a role that we could never have conceived on our own – and that rings as true as anything that we have ever read – or could hope to read.

Next: Running for Your Life: Keeping Cool