Q. Back to the mine? A. It's the only place I have to go.

When I met Chozo and the tea lady, for example, I took in everything they said without a peep - not a hint of my usual argumentative, self-assertive behavior. Of course, it would be reasonable to try to account for this by reference to the fact that I was starving at the time, but hunger was surely not the whole explanation. Any way you look at it, it's a contradiction. Here I go with the contradictions again. Never mind.

I have a habit of recalling the adventures I experienced back then whenever I have a few spare moments. It was the most colorful period of my life. Each time I bring back those images to savor, I wield my scalpel mercilessly (you can do this with old memories) in an attempt to chop up my own mental processes and examine every little piece. The results however are always the same: I don't understand them. Now, don't tell me I've just forgotten because it happened so long ago. I'll never have such an intense experience again in my lifetime. And especially don't tell me that the lines are tangled because those were the frantic acts of a confused adolescent. The acts themselves were confused and misguided, but the only way to understand the processes leading to those misguided acts is to examine them calmly with the brain I have today. It's precisely because I can now look at my trip to the mine as an old dream that I am able to describe it for some people with even this degree of clarity. I'm not just saying that I have the courage to write down everything that happened because the passions have faded; I could never have managed to put down even this much on paper if I didn't have the detachment to drag out the old me out to where the present me can see it and study every wart and pimple. Most people imagine that the most accurate account of an experience would be the one written at the time and place, but this is a mistake. Driven by the passions of the moment, a description of the immediate situation tends to convey preposterous misconceptions. If I had kept a diary, say, of my feelings just as they were at the moment, I'm sure the result would have been an infantile, affected thing full of lies - certainly nothing that I could have presented to people like this and asked them to read. -The Miner by Natsume Sōseki.