Jones' Jarbs
... Things to say
| 98. J.A.R.B - Breathe | 97. J.A.R.B - A short goodbye | 96. J.A.R.B - Questions | Grad Speech | 95. J.A.R.B - Solemly | 94. J.A.R.B - Always | 93. J.A.R.B - Futures | 92. J.A.R.B - Endings | 91. J.A.R.B - Outcomes | 90. J.A.R.B - Control | Current
Saturday, July 08, 2006
99. J.A.R.B - Memoirs of a Geisha.
I’ve been reading the book “Memoirs of a Geisha” by Arthur Golden. It’s a very good book about the life and times of a geisha named Chiyo. “Geisha” the word, simply means artist. And that’s what they were; artists of conversation, of music, dance, and beauty. Geisha entertained men at teahouses, basically party houses, except more formal. This particular geisha has gained a great understanding of the world around her in general, with some top-notch metaphors. And here they are; quotes from the book.I'll be gone from the 9th until the 22nd, so i'm leaving you with a long one. To satisfy all of your Jarbing needs.
These are from the Pre-geisha days, when Chiyo was just a slave.
- “Was life nothing more than a storm that constantly washed away what had been there only a moment before, and left behind something barren and unrecognizable? I’d never had such a thought before. To escape it, I ran down the path until the village came into view below me.”
- “He lived in a world that was visible, even I it didn’t always please him to be there. I knew he noticed the trees, and the mud, and the children in the street, but I had no reason to believe he’d ever taken notice of me.”
- “That night while lying on my futon, I tried to picture the whole confusing situation from every angle to persuade myself that things would somehow be all right.”
- “I felt as a sore rock must feel after a waterfall has pounded on it all day long.”
- “Yet somehow the thing that startled me most, after a week of two had passed, was that I had in fact survived. I remember one moment drying rice bowls in the kitchen, when all at once I felt so disoriented I had to stop what I was doing to stare for a long while at my hands; for I could scarcely understand that this person drying the bowls was actually me.”
- “Couldn’t the wrong sort of living turn anyone mean?”
- “But I had no time to waste being afraid.”
- “Despite the moonlight, I could see only a sheet of blackness.”
- “I can’t imagine any package that can save a girl from slavery; I had trouble imagining it even then. But I truly believed in my heart that somehow when that package was opened, my life would be changed forever.”
- “I never did manage to reach the house in these fantasies; perhaps I was too afraid of what I would find there, and in any case, it was the trip along the path that seemed to comfort me.”
- “We lead our lives like water flowing down a hill, going more or less in one direction until we splash into something that forces us to find a new course.”
- “I was living only half in Gion; the other half of me lived in dreams of going home. This is why dreams can be such dangerous things: they smoulder on like a fire does, and sometimes consume us completely.”
- “I had been sent to wash some rags one afternoon, when a moth came fluttering down from the sky onto my arm. I flicked it off, expecting that it would fly away, but instead it sailed like a pebble across the courtyard and lay there upon the ground. I didn’t know if it had fallen from the sky already dead, or if I had killed it, but it’s little insect death touched me. I admired the lovely pattern on its wings, and then wrapped it in one of the rags I was washing and hid it away beneath the foundation of the house.”
- “Why, it’s too pretty a day to be so unhappy.”
These quotes are from Chiyo’s days as a Geisha. Her new geisha name becomes “Sayuri”
- “We human beings are only a part of something very much larger. When we walk along, we may crush a beetle or simply cause a change in the air so that a fly ends up where it might never have gone otherwise. And if we think of the same example, but with ourselves in the role of the inset, and the larger universe in the role we’ve just played, it’s perfectly clear that we’re affected every day by forces over which we have no more control than the poor beetle has over our gigantic foot as it descends upon him. What are we to do? We must use whatever methods we can to understand the movement of the universe around us and time our actions so that we are not fighting the currents, but moving with them.
- “We all know that a winter scene, though it may be covered over one day, with even the trees dressed in shawls of snow, will be unrecognizable the following spring. Yet I never imagined such a thing could occur within our very selves.”
- “One afternoon during World War 2, some years after these events I’m telling you about now, and officer took his pistol out of its holster during a party beneath the boughs of a maple tree and laid it on the straw mat to impress me. I remember being stuck by its beauty. The metal had a dull grey sheen; its curves were perfect and smooth. The oiled wood handle was richly grained. But when I thought of its real purpose as I listened to his stories, it ceased to be beautiful at all and became something monstrous instead.”
- “Grief is a most peculiar thing; we’re so helpless in the face of it. It’s like a window that will simply open of its own accord. The room grows cold and we can do nothing but shiver. But it opens a little less each time, and a little less, and one day we wonder what has become of it.”
- “I had the sudden insight that nothing in life is ever as simple as we imagine.”
- “In my day we viewed ourselves as pieces of clay that forever show the fingerprints of everyone who has touched them.”
- “Would I really have to take each of my hopes and put them away where no one would ever see them again, where not even I would ever see them?
- “We were like two wet spots in the midst of burning charcoal.”
- “He was a small man; but keep in mind that a stick of dynamite is small too.”
- “Adversity is like a strong wind. I don’t mean just that it holds us back from places we might otherwise go. It also tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that afterward we see ourselves as we really are, and not merely as we might like to be.”
- “I felt I was standing on a stage many hours after the dance had ended, when the silence lay as heavily upon the empty theatre as a blanket of snow.”
- “We had given up our past; this was something that I understood fully, for I had done it myself once. If only I could find a way of giving up my future…”
- “Since the day I’d left Yoroido, I’d done nothing but worry that every turn of life’s wheel would bring yet another obstacle into my path; and of course, it was the worrying and the struggle that had always made life so vividly real to me. When we fight upstream against a rocky undercurrent, every foothold takes some kind of urgency.”
- “How curious it is, what the future brings us. You must take care, Sayuri, never to expect too much.”
- “Sometimes,’ he sighed, ‘I think the things I remember are more real than the things I see’”
- “I cannot tell you what it is that guides us in this life; but for me, I fell toward the Chairman just as a stone must fall toward the earth. When I cut my lip and met Mr. Tanaka, when my mother died and I was cruelly sold, it was all like a stream that falls over rocky cliffs before it can reach the ocean. Even now that the Chairman is gone I have him still, in the richness of my memories. I’ve lived my life again just by telling it to you.”
- “It’s true that sometimes when I cross Park Avenue, I’m struck with the peculiar sense of how exotic my surrounding are. The yellow taxicabs that go sweeping past, honking their horns; the women with their briefcases, who look so perplexed to see a little old Japanese woman standing on the street corner in kimono. But really, would Yoroido [her home town, which she was separated from at the age of 8] seem any less exotic if I went back there again? As a young girl I believed my life would never have been a struggle if Mr. Tanaka hadn’t torn me away from my tipsy house. But now I know that our world is no more permanent than a wave rising on the ocean. Whatever our struggles and triumphs, however we may suffer them, all too soon they bleed into a wash, just like watery ink on paper.”
-Arthur Golden.
hehehehehhee. futon.. hahahahahahahha. futon. i read about two quotes into the geisha section and i grew weary. but like...yeah sounds like a good book. maybe i should consider reading :S..... hahahahah jks jks jks.... but seriously.lol jks again...btw nice comments page. im actually gonnado sumtin like this....youll see. rofl... like in my media blog.
This bad boy was brought to you by 
on 12:42 AM
