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Eventually we ended up at the shelf that held Chaplin's entire back catalog.
I found I was whispering to myself:
"Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot."
The dream I'd had earlier that morning came back to me.
"Th-th-that's from L-Limelight, right?" Tsutaya missed nothing.
In Limelight, the little tramp, played by Charlie Chaplin, tries to stop a ballet dancer, whose hopes have been dashed, from committing suicide. He tells the dancer:
"Life is a beautiful, magnificent thing, even to a jelly-fish."
He was right, even jellyfish are here for a reason-they have meaning. And if that's the case, then movies and music, coffee and pretty much everything else must have some kind of meaning, too. Once you start down that path, then even all those "unnecessary things" turn out to be important for some reason or another. If you're trying to separate out the countless "meaningless things" in the world from everything else, you'll eventually have to make a judgment about human beings, about our existence. In my case, I suppose it's all the movies I've seen, and the memories I have of them that give my life meaning. They've made me who I am.
To live means: to cry and shout, to love, to do silly things, to feel sadness and joy, to even experience horrible, frightening things ... and to laugh. Beautiful songs, beautiful scenery, feeling nauseous, people singing, planes flying across the sky, the thundering hooves of horses, mouth-watering pancakes, the endless darkness of space, cowboys firing their pistols at dawn...
And next to all the movies that play on a loop inside me, sit the images of friends, lovers, the family, who were with me when I watched them. Then there are the countless films that I've recorded in my own imagination-the memories that run through my head, which are so beautiful, they bring tears to my eyes.
I've been stringing together the movies I've seen like rosary beads-all human hope and disappointment is held together by a thread. It doesn't take much to see that all life's coincidences eventually add up to one big inevitability.
"S-s-s-so, I guess that's all, right?"
Tsutaya put Limelight in a bag and handed it to me.
"Thanks.
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