Skillful Water Carrier

“To my eyes, this system I was observing, this ‘trial’ thing itself, began to take on the appearance of some special, weird creature…like, say, an octopus. A giant octopus living way down deep at the bottom of the ocean. It has this tremendously powerful life force, a bunch of long, undulating legs, and it’s heading somewhere, moving through the darkness of the ocean. I’m sitting there listening to these trials, and all I can see in my head is this creature. It takes on all kinds of different shapes – sometimes it’s ‘the nation’, and sometimes it’s ‘the law’, and sometimes it takes on shapes that are more difficult and dangerous than that. You can try cutting off it’s legs, but they just keep growing back. Nobody can kill it. It’s too strong, and it lives far down in the ocean. Nobody knows where it’s heart is. What I felt then was deep terror. And a kind of hopelessness, a feeling that I could never run away from this thing, no matter how far I went. And this creature, this thing doesn’t give a damn that I’m me or you’re you. In its presence, all human beings lose their names and their faces. We all turn into signs, into numbers.”

-Haruki Murakami, After Dark