Word: phlegm
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...moon is mute. And the magnificent swirl of the cosmos simply marks time: it cannot tell us of history, cannot instruct us on what to remember, what to proscribe, what to avoid. Memory is born of biological time, and it is borne on blood and bone and phlegm. Can the stars shudder at sacrifice? Only humankind can grasp the need for heroism amid the persistence of warfare simply by noticing that virtually across the street from the bronze soldiers, who fought a war spawned in the Balkans, is Yugoslavia's mission to the U.N. And only we can repent...
Like any regular Thursday morning, I was busily scribbling notes from The Crimson's cliquey front row of Professor Harvey "C -" Mansfield's moral reasoning lecture, when from a few seats behind me I heard an old woman burst into a garbled, phlegm-filled hacking fit. If I were mature, I would have disregarded this disruption of Book Eight of Plato's Republic like everyone else in the class. But I'm not, so I giggled at the funny noise. My outburst was audible for just a second because I clenched my body to hold in the laughter. I shook...
Like any regular Thursday morning, I was busily scribbling notes from The Crimson's cliquey front row of Professor Harvey "C -" Mansfield's moral reasoning lecture, when from a few seats behind me I heard an old woman burst into a garbled, phlegm-filled hacking fit. If I were mature, I would have disregarded this disruption of Book Eight of Plato's Republic like everyone else in the class. But I'm not, so I giggled at the funny noise. My outburst was audible for just a second because I clenched my body to hold in the laughter. I shook...
...down when you're supposed to go down...When there's no flow, stay still. If you resist the flow, everything dries. If everything dries up, the world is darkness." This is the philosophy impressed upon Okada by Mr. Honda, an elderly psychic with a weird fascination with phlegm. This analogy, intended to emphasize the nature of Okada's adventures in existential wackiness, is repeated throughout the novel ad nauseum. Although it's meant to serve to focus the book's many themes, it seems jarringly unoriginal in comparison with Murakami's cool, prose and inventive characters...
...that takes most of its victims in childhood. His daft wit even turned his affliction into a Mary Poppins-style ditty: "Supermasochistic Bob has cystic fibrosis/ He should've died when he was young, but he was too precocious.../ A lifetime of infection and his lungs all filled with phlegm/ The CS would have killed him if it weren't for S&M/ Hum-diddle-iddle-iddle I'm gonna...