A Tale for the Time Being Read Online Free PDF Page A

time out so that she’ll have more of it and live longer, and then she laughs so you know she is telling
you a joke. I mean, she understands perfectly well that time isn’t something you can spread out like butter or jam, and death isn’t going to hang around and wait for you to finish
whatever you happen to be doing before it zaps you. That’s the joke, and she laughs because she knows it.
    But actually, I don’t think it’s very funny. Even though I don’t know old Jiko’s exact age, I do know for sure that pretty soon she’ll be dead even if she
hasn’t finished sweeping out the temple kitchen or weeding the daikon patch or arranging fresh flowers on the altar, and once she’s dead, that will be the end of her, timewise. This
doesn’t bother her at all, but it bothers me a lot. These are old Jiko’s last days on earth, and there’s nothing I can do about that, and there’s nothing I can do to stop
time from passing or even to slow it down, and every second of the day is another second lost. She probably wouldn’t agree with me, but that’s how I see it.
    I don’t mind thinking of the world without me because I’m unexceptional, but I hate the idea of the world without old Jiko. She’s totally unique and special, like the last
Galapagos tortoise or some other ancient animal hobbling around on the scorched earth, who is the only one left of its kind. But please don’t get me going on the topic of species extinction
because it’s totally depressing, and I’ll have to commit suicide right this second.
    6.
    Okay, Nao. Why are you doing this? Like, what’s the point?
    This is a problem. The only reason I can think of for writing Jiko’s life story in this book is because I love her and want to remember her, but I’m not planning on sticking around
for long, and I can’t remember her stories if I’m dead, right?
    And apart from me, who else would care? I mean, if I thought the world would want to know about old Jiko, I’d post her stories on a blog, but actually I stopped doing that a while ago. It
made me sad when I caught myself pretending that everybody out there in cyberspace cared about what I thought, when really nobody gives a shit. 30 And
when I multiplied that sad feeling by all the millions of people in their lonely little rooms, furiously writing and posting to their lonely little pages that nobody has time to read because
they’re all so busy writing and posting, 31 it kind of broke my heart.
    The fact is, I don’t have much of a social network these days, and the people I hang out with aren’t the kind who care about a hundred-and-four-year-old Buddhist nun, even if she is
a bosatsu who can use email and texting, and that’s only because I made her buy a computer so she could stay in touch with me when I’m in Tokyo and she’s at her falling-down old
temple on a mountain in the middle of nowhere. She’s not crazy about new technology, but she does pretty well for a time being with cataracts and arthritis in both her thumbs. Old Jiko and
Marcel Proust come from a prewired world, which is a time that’s totally lost these days.
    So here I am, at Fifi’s Lonely Apron, staring at all these blank pages and asking myself why I’m bothering, when suddenly an amazing idea knocks me over. Ready? Here it is:
    I will write down everything I know about Jiko’s life in Marcel’s book, and when I’m done, I’ll just leave it somewhere, and you will find it!
    How cool is that? It feels like I’m reaching forward through time to touch you, and now that you’ve found it, you’re reaching back to touch me!
    If you ask me, it’s fantastically cool and beautiful. It’s like a message in a bottle, cast out onto the ocean of time and space. Totally personal, and real, too, right out of old
Jiko’s and Marcel’s prewired world. It’s the opposite of a blog. It’s an antiblog, because it’s meant for only one special person, and that person is
you
. And
if you’ve read