Weird Murmur

  Robert Aickman, "The Fully-Conducted Tour" in Compulsory Games edited by Victoria Nelson   (New York Review of Books, 2018). The magic of Aikman is that he always creates a pervasive and unsettling sense of wrongness that a reader just catches out of the corner of the eye. From the paperwork necessary for the tour to the flaking paint and general untidiness of the manor to the lack of any commentary on an ornate door by a tour guide who has been otherwise thorough, all this contributes to a strange atmosphere wrapped around the theme of being left behind. The thought of being left behind has a strong emotional valence for human beings. It can be a source of fear and alienation but also a source of relief. Like hanging out at the back of a fully conducted tour, we both want to be alone and part of the group. As our protagonist faces being left behind by his wife, who is dying of a terminal illness, he leaves his wife behind at the hotel to tour an old Italian villa alongsid...

Haruki Murakami, "Birthday Girl" translated by Jay Rubin from  Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman  (2006). This story is a different approach to typical grant-your-wish tales and raises questions about how one tries to decide what wish to make. What you wish for is certainly tied up with your identity—your hopes, desires, and fears. But, if you don’t know what you would wish for because you don’t know what kind of person you’ll be in the future, and you don’t know what you would’ve wished for 10 years ago because you were different then. What the hell are we?  We start to look rather ephemeral. 

  Chi Hui, "The Woman Carrying a Corpse" translated from Chinese by Judith Huang, from The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories , 2023. Read for free at Reactor Magazine This story is thought provoking. Issues of futility, how our lives and actions come to have meaning, and our relationship to the dead are all interesting topics brought out in Hui's story; however, I'm going to murmur about something else: The story brings to mind how explanations that involve citing reasons for actions are different than explanations that involve citing causes for actions. While it might be natural on first reflection to think of reasons as simply causes, and as such, reduce all explanations to causal, the story points to a couple of features of reasons-explanations that distinguish them from causal explanations. We tend to muddle the two up, but reasons have a normative component that causal explanations simply don't have; reasons justify an action, but causes can't justif...