Soseki Natsume - I Am a Cat
by mapogatari · 41 things on Twos
- Volume One
- Chapter One
- 5 passage about a school teacher seemingly working hard but actually slacks off
- Proprietary Rights
- Dyspeptic
- Rhodomontade
- 14 “The master, even in his dreams, seems burdened with regrets about his watercolors. And men who accept the burdens of regret, whether in respect to watercolors or of anything else, are not the stuff that men of the world are made of.”
- 16 “The autumn leaves, arranged in two or three scarlet terraced among the pine trees, have fallen like ancient dreams.”
- Chapter Two
- Chapter Three
- Volume Two
- Chapter One
- 119 “What one does once, one wants to do again, and things tried twice invite a third experience.”
- 123 “it’s quite astonishing how they behave; as if the rich had robbed them personally of things they never owned.”
- Skullduggery
- 145-146 thinking too highly of yourself to do something as mundane as write a thesis
- Chapter Two
- Chapter Three
- Chapter Four
- Volume Three
- Chapter One
- 265 might as well name your house something impressive because there are no taxes for this; the cast names his home The Cave of the Sleeping Dragon
- 267 cat uses the fun of the names to point out they don't usually serve as good indicators of character; the middle school is the target of this point.
- 270 "One must, of course, recognize that there is a vast fund of pleasure to be drawn from the provocation of human beings."
- 272 comparison of monkeys on a leash to teachers with a salary.
- 277 "madness" as "inspiration," a rush of blood to the head.
- 305 jeremiad
- Positivism
- 306 western civilization striving for the ideal is a fool’s effort; it cannot be done, there is always something else.
- 307 “Nobody, however mighty, can do as he likes with the world. None can stop the sun from setting, none reverse the flow of rivers. But any man is able to do as he likes with his own mind.”
- Chapter Two
- Abrogation
- Inalveolate
- 316 man is always studying himself: “all studies undertaken by human beings are always studies of themselves. The proper study of mankind is self. The heavens, earth, the mountains and the rivers, sun and moon and stars—they are all no more than other names for the self.”
- 406 cut through lightning by dashing your sword through the winds of spring
- Ictrine
- 441 the condition of society in Sneaze’s opinion (detectives, burglars, realization of the self)
- 448 short poem about little birds not seeing the world in the same way as greater birds
- 456-457 individualism will continue to intensify to the point that art dies because anything written by other people holds no interest for anyone
- High-falutin
- published in 1906, serialized in 10 installments in the literary journal Hototogisu