CHAPTER 78
Aware that under Okusan’s kind treatment I myself had grown cheerful, I set about applying the same process to K. From my long acquaintance with him I was all too aware of how different we were. But just as my own nerves had relaxed considerably since I’d moved into this household, I felt surely K’s heart too would eventually grow calmer here.
K’s will was far steelier than mine. He studied twice as hard, and his mind was a good deal finer. I cannot speak for the later years, when we chose different areas of study, but in the middle and high school years, while we were classmates, he was consistently ahead of me. I used to feel, in fact, that K would best me in everything. But in convincing the stubborn K to move in with me, I was sure I was showing more good sense than he. He failed to understand the difference between patience and endurance, I felt.
Please listen carefully now, I am saying this for your benefit. All our capacities, both physical and mental, require external stimuli for both their development and their destruction, and in either case these stimuli must be increased by slow degrees in order to be effective. But this gradual increase creates a very real danger that not only you yourself but those around you may fail to notice any problems that might develop. Doctors tell us that a man’s stomach is a thoroughly rebellious creature, inclined to misbehave. If you feed it nothing but soft gruel, it will lose the power to digest anything heavier. So they instruct us to train it by feeding it all manner of foods. I don’t think this is just a matter of getting it used to the variety, however. I interpret it to mean that the stomach’s resilience gradually increases as the stimuli build up over time. Now imagine what would happen if the stomach instead grew steadily weaker under this regimen. K was in just such a situation.
Now K was a greater man than I, but he failed to comprehend what was happening to him. He had decided that if he accustomed himself to hardship, then pain would sooner or later cease to register. The simple virtue of repetition of pain, he was sure, would bring him to a point where pain no longer affected him.
In order to bring about a change of heart in K, it was this above all that I would have to clarify to him. But if I spelled it out, he would doubtless resist; he would bring up the example of those stoics and saints of old in his defense, I knew, and I would then have to point out the difference between them and him. That would be worthwhile if he were of a mind to listen to me, but by nature, once an argument reached that point, he would stick to his guns. He would simply assert his own position more vehemently, and having once spoken he would feel obliged to follow through with action. In this respect he was quite intimidating. He was grand in his convictions. He would stride forward to meet his own destruction. In retrospect, the only thing that had any kind of grandeur was the resultant ruin of any hope of success. But there was certainly nothing run-of-the-mill about the process, at any rate.
Knowing his temperament as I did, therefore, I couldn’t utter a word. My sense that he was close to a nervous breakdown also made me hesitate. Even if I did manage to convince him, it would only agitate him further. I didn’t mind quarreling, but I remembered how poorly I had withstood my own sense of isolation, and I couldn’t bear to think of placing my friend in a similar situation, let alone exacerbating it. And so, even after bringing him into the house, I held back from voicing any real criticism. I decided simply to wait calmly to see what effect his new environment would have on him.