notepad

Last night, I trudged home with a headache that has taken form in my head like a storm that slowly materialized from out of nowhere. I tucked myself in bed relatively early, reading a book while waiting for sleep to come. The book, “The Elephant Vanishes”, is a collection of short stories by Haruki Murakami, a Japanese writer.

I had started to read the book in the office the day before. The writer has the curious ability to turn an ordinary event into something interesting. Indeed, the book was difficult to put down. When I finished reading the first short story, I remembered getting caught by a teacher reading a novel while pretending to follow our discussion by silently “reading” our textbook. I didn’t want a similar thing to happen now that I’m *cough, cough* a “professional” so I decided to bring the book home. Otherwise, I would be tempted to read the book in the office for the whole day. Hehehe.

As I read the other stories in the book, I realized that those stories have at least two things in common: they were written in the first person, the “first person” is usually an adult, and the setting is usually an ordinary place in life. Of course, I’ve read many stories written in the first person and whose main characters are adults What bothered me was the slow pacing of the story and the ordinary setting (a house inhabited by a couple, an apartment shared by yuppie siblings). The stories were not of the fast-paced, dog-eat-dog world of the corporate West. Neither were they the fictional town divided from the fantastical world by a wall. The stories seem closer to home. They made me think that these could be the stories of people I know (my parents when they were just starting out, my friend who shared an apartment with a relative) or… it could be my story. I found myself thinking, “Will my life be this boring when I reach the age of 30? A life whose only spark of interest is a call from a stranger or the mysterious disappearance of a cat (I would be lucky if I get to own a cat)? Still an unwilling slave of routine? Resigned to the bidding of fate?” The thought made me cringe. But I knew it was a possibility. I slept with that thought in mind. The good news is I have a choice. The question is what I will do with that choice.

To view the current path, either of the following commands work:

1.
$ echo $PATH

or

2.
$ set | grep PATH

To set the $PATH  environment variable in Linux (add a new directory to the current path while retaining the other directories):

$ export PATH=$PATH:<new_directory>

Below is a sample screen display:

$ echo $PATH
/usr/kerberos/bin:/usr/local/bin:/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin:/home/user/bin

$ export PATH=$PATH:/home/user/temp
$ echo $PATH
/usr/kerberos/bin:/usr/local/bin:/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin:/home/user/bin:/home/user/temp

His wrinkled right hand gently wiped away the thick layer of dust that covered the thick black book his table.

Beneath the flickering light of his gas lamp, light and shadow danced on the black cover whose edges had been slowly eaten away by time.

A smile formed beneath the long gray beard, deepening the wrinkles that lined his mouth.

He had devoted thirty years of his life for finding the Tanaka no Hon, the Rosetta Stone of Japanese language scholars.

He carefully flipped through the pages and stopped on a random page near the middle of the book.

“あなたの願い事は本当にそれなの？”と小さい白いウサギが聞きました, a line on the page said. He mouthed the words, savoring every syllable as if it was honey flowing lazily on his tongue: “Anata no negaigoto wa hontou ni sore na no?” to chiisai shiroi usagi ga kikimashita.

“Do you really wish that?” asked the little white rabbit.

Ten years ago, far from home, hungry and broke, he was teased by young children on the streets of Kyoto as he struggled to find his way to an old street marked on his ancient map.

“Jiji! Jiji!”

He was on the verge of giving up.

But he continued his search, more out of sheer obstinacy than out of pure need. He had mastered the Japanese language in the first eight years of his search.

He had no more need of it, but he was happy. The book was his at last.

—
This story is based on a large body of text called the Tanaka Corpus from which the Japanese sentence in this story was taken. The Tanaka Corpus is not ancient, though.