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Talking to the dead is such a sad habit of the human race.
Still, I can't help but think an even sadder habit of our race is that until we reach the world after death we have to Uve here as human beings.
The feeling of similarity between the fate of plants and the fate of man is the eternal theme of all lyric poetry. I've forgotten the name of the philosopher who wrote those words and I don't know what words followed, but remembering just that much I wonder whether a plant's soul amounts to anything more than blossoming and withering or whether there's something deeper. I don't know. These days, though, I think of the assorted Buddhist sutras as lyric poems deserving of supreme gratitude. Here I am talking to you after you're dead and in the other world, and I'm happier now, perhaps, dreaming up the fairytale that you've been reincarnated as this apricot plant sprouting early buds before my eyes and sitting face to face with the plant it rests in my living room alcove than I ever was with the form you actually took in this world. Of course, it isn't necessary that you be this particular familiar kind of flower sitting here in front of me. Things would be just the same if I thought you'd been reincarnated as some strange variety of flower growing on a mountain I'd never heard of, in France or some other faraway land, and I were talking to that flower. That's how much I still love you.
But when all at once I pretend to be really looking out at a faraway land, I don't see anything at all. I just take in the scent of this room.
"This scent has died," I mumbled to myself and started to laugh.
When I was a girl I never used perfume.
Do you remember - that night four years ago now when I was in the bath and suddenly was assailed by that violent scent? I was so embarrassed to be stark naked, smelling the strong scent of that perfume I didn't know the name of. I got dizzy and felt like I was going to pass out. You'd just cast me aside and gotten...