At The Millions Kevin Hartnett writes about formative encounters with the work of Haruki Murakami.
What appealed to me most about Murakami’s essay was the way it joined something very big, like writing a novel, with something very small, like what time each day to go to bed. I was twenty-seven at the time and still very much befuddled by the large-scale project of adult life. Murakami’s essay was not a panacea, but it did sketch a type of path that I thought I might be capable of following. While I may not have known exactly what I wanted from the next fifty years, with a little reflection I could parse the minor decisions in my days—what to eat, who to see, how to spend the last hour before bed. I hoped, maybe against odds, that the answers to larger questions would resolve themselves out of the gradual buildup of small but deliberate choices.
