Well Bottom Blues

Not my current state of mind but a part of the blog title’s genesis.

The well bottom is like the bottom of the sea. Things down here stay very still, keeping their original forms, as if under tremendous pressure, unchanged from day to day.

A round slice of light floats high above me: the evening sky. Looking up at it, I think about the October evening world, where “people” must be going about their lives. Beneath
that pale autumn light, they must be walking down streets, going to the store for things,
preparing dinner, boarding trains for home. And they think – if they think at all – that these
things are too obvious to think about, just as I used to do (or not do). They are the vaguely
defined “people,” and I used to be a nameless one among them. Accepting and accepted, they live with one another beneath that light, and whether it lasts forever or for a moment, there must be a kind of closeness while they are enveloped in the light. I am no longer one of them, however. They are up there, on the face of the earth; I am down here, in the bottom of a well. They possess the light, while I am in the process of losing it. Sometimes I feel that I may never find my way back to that world, that I may never again be able to feel the peace of being enveloped in the light, that I may never again be able to hold the cat’s soft body in my arms. And then I feel a dull ache in the chest, as if something inside there is being squeezed to death.

Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles