You can say plenty about the man whose favorite moment was 6 a.m. You could invoke any number of clichés already worn smooth in everyone's mind. That man is tired. He's tired every single day. He wakes at 6, and by 7 he's off to school again, and it has nothing to do with watching the sunrise. For him, morning is as ordinary as the 4 o'clock sun is for us. He's exhausted from explaining why he gets up at that hour. But for us, he makes an exception. "It's simple," he says, "everything is cleaner, clearer. Well, that's more of a bonus. That's just how I've gotten used to it." What makes him different from the rest of us—you can't quite put your finger on it. Though there are visible differences, to be sure. For him, what is real, what is dream, and what is memory—they all have a fluid way of bleeding into one another. There's little to say about the woman who feeds the birds. She worked her entire life at an industrial plant and raised two children who've been living abroad for several years now. She surrounds herself with knick-knacks and objects half her age. She's just one of thousands of old women feeding animals on the streets. We don't know what goes on in the mind of someone who feeds birds, but we can allow that it brings him joy in some way or another. This woman doesn't do it for joy. She feeds them so they won't starve, so they know they're not unwanted on this earth. The more she feeds the birds, the more she realizes she can't spend her entire pension on them. There's only one thing to say about the gentleman who learned to ride a bike at 39. He learned to ride one so he could take his son to school. We might also note that his son has been absent from his life for some time lately, but he's recovering, so we'd better leave it at that. The young man at the funeral home—well, he defies simple description. He spent six years in his youth as a children's entertainer. "I find children strangely quiet, and the dead strangely restless." Part joke, part truth—he really does feel that way. He's raising money to go back to college. He barely admits that sometimes, when he sits in the room with the coffins, he reads to the dead. Many people say he does and says things just to provoke. We don't know if they're right.
# You Can Tell People Everything
You can tell people everything. And ever since mankind learned to speak, pretty much everything there was to say has been said. Now they’re talking about microscopic things. Now they talk differently, every time. Now it’s rare to fall silent. Now they talk about stories as if they were realities. It cuts so deep that you finally forget the purpose you came here for. If you look at the world, no matter how narrow your view, you can say whatever you want about people. The question that remains is: “Why are you doing it?” No one’s pretending they shouldn’t. About the people above, I said as much as I could—or couldn’t. For instance, “Did he help anyone?” “Was he a righteous person?” I don’t know; I don’t know. Now not everyone likes the conclusions. Ironically, it seems worthwhile when someone opens up several discussions about people. One day the people above met to talk about us. They’ll let us talk about themselves.