murakami, haruki - Norwegian wood

this time I am very, very calm. Clean air, a quiet world cut off from
the outside, a daily schedule for living, regular exercise: those are
what I needed, it seems. How wonderful it is to be able to write
someone a letter! To feel like conveying your thoughts to a person, to
sit at your desk and pick up a pen, to put your thoughts into words like
this is truly marvellous. Of course, once I do put them into words, I
find I can only express a fraction of what I want to say, but that's all
right. I'm happy just to be able to feel I want to write to someone. And
so I am writing to you. It's 7.30 in the evening, I've had my dinner and
I've just finished my bath. The place is silent, and it's pitch black
outside. I can't see a single light through the window. I usually have a
clear view of the stars from here, but not today, with the clouds.
Everyone here knows a lot about the stars, and they tell me "That's
Virgo" or "That's Sagittarius". They probably learn whether they want
to or not because there's nothing to do here once the sun goes down.
Which is also why they know so much about birds and flowers and
insects. Speaking to them, I realize how ignorant I was about such
things, which is kind of nice.
There are about 70 people living here. In addition, the staff (doctors,
nurses, office staff, etc.) come to just over 20. It's such a wide-open
place, these are not big numbers at all. Far from it: it might be more
accurate to say the place is on the empty side. It's big and filled with
nature and everybody lives quietly - so quietly you sometimes feel
that this is the normal, real world, which of course it's not. We can
have it this way because we live here under certain preconditions.
I play tennis and basketball. Basketball teams are made up of both
staff and (I hate the word, but there's no way around it) patients. When
I'm absorbed in a game, though, I lose track of who are the patients
and who are staff. This is kind of strange. I know this will sound
strange, but when I look at the people around me during a game, they
all look equally deformed.
I said this one day to the doctor in charge of my case, and he told me
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