Then she 'peeled a mandarin orange.' Literally that's what she did: She had a glass bowl of oranges to her left and another bowl for the peels to her right- so went the setup- in fact, nothing was there. She proceeded to pick up one imaginary orange, then slowly peel it, pop pieces into her mouth, and spit out the pulp one section at a time, finally disposing of the skin-wrapped residue into the right-hand bowl when she'd eaten the entire fruit. She repeated this maneuver again and again. In so many words, it doesn't sound much, but I swear, just watching her do this for ten or twenty minutes- she and I kept up a running conversation the whole while, almost without a second thought- I felt the reality of everything around me being siphoned away.
“Seems you’re quite talented,” I said.
“Oh, this is nothing. Talent’s not involved. It’s not a question of making yourself believe there is an orange there. You have to forget there isn’t one. That’s all.” from Burning Bridges, Haruki Murakami
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| image via the selby |
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