 Haruki Murakami - Train Whistle | | Naruto's Theme song

The girl has a question for the boy: “How much do you love me?”

He thinks for a moment, then quietly replies, “As much as a train whistle in the night.”

She waits in silence for him to go on. Obviously there has to be a story there.

“Sometimes, just like that, in the dead of night, I wake up,” he begins. “I don’t know what time it is exactly. Maybe two or three, around then, I’d say. The time doesn’t actually matter. The point is that it’s the dead of night, and I’m totally alone, not a soul around. I want you to imagine that for me, ok? It’s completely dark, you can’t see anything. And there’s not a sound to be heard. You don’t even hear the hands of the clock, ticking out the time – for all I know, the clock could well have stopped. And then all of a sudden, it hits me that I’ve become isolated, that I’m separated some unbelievable distance from everyone I know, from every familiar place. I realize that no one in this wide world loves me anymore, that no one will talk to me, that I’ve become the kind of person no one even wants to remember. I could just disappear and no one would even notice. I feel like I’ve been pushed into a box with thick iron sides and sunk way down to the very bottom of the ocean. The pressure is so intense it makes my heart ache, I feel like I’m going to explode, to be torn in two – you know that feeling?”

The girl nods. She thinks she knows what he means. 

The boy continues. “I think that’s one of the most painful experiences a person can have in life. I feel so sad and it hurts so much that I wish I could just go ahead and die, seriously. Actually, I take that back, it’s not that I wish I could die: I can tell that if things go on in this way, the air in the box is going to get so thin that I really will die. It’s not just a metaphor. It’s reality. That’s what it means to wake up all alone in the dead of night. You still following me?”

The girl nods again, saying nothing. The boy lets a moment go by.

“And then, way off in the distance, I hear a train whistle. It’s really incredibly far off, this whistle. I don’t even know where the train tracks could be. That’s how far away the sound is. And it’s so faint that it’s right on the edge of being inaudible. Only I’m certain it’s a train whistle. There’s no doubt about that. So I lie perfectly still, in the darkness, listening as hard as I can. And then I hear it again. My heart stops aching. The hands on the clock start moving. The iron box begins to rise up, nice and slow, toward the surface of the sea. And it’s all thanks to that little whistle, you see. A whistle so faint I could barely hear it. And the point is, I love you as deeply as that whistle.”

With that, the boy’s brief story is over. And the girl begins telling her own. 


بيبليومانياك Bibliomaniac | Haruki Murakami - Train Whistle | إلقاء : سلمى وعمرو

حفلة التفاهة | كيف يولَد مُعتذِر؟ | ميلان كونديرا

نحن سنقرأ. وأنتم ستسمعون 

Moroccan Bibliomaniac

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