“It often seemed, in fact, that the greatest of all forces in Japan was Time, if only because it was the most implacable. Yes, the Japanese could manage Time, bettter than anyone I knew; yes, they could harmonize themselves with its rhythms and pay homage to it with their rites (a girl becomes a woman no this day, and on this day autum turns to winter); yes, they could make uncommonly good use of Time. But still, Time could not be controlled, as Space, or Nature, or even Truth, could be. That was why, I sometimes felt, the Japanese were such connisseurs of memory, the faculty that allowed them to package Time and turn the bumpy chaos of successive moments to package Time and turn the bumpy chaos of succesive moments into an elegy as beautiful as art. It was also, perhaps, why they excelled so much at slowness and at speed. Most of all, it began to explain why so much of Japan was set up as a retreat from Time, a way to stay Time, ot step out of it. The monastery, where one took off one’s watch as soon as one entered, was the purest expression of this; the water-world, where life was inverted with such Bacchanalian precision that women called out “Good morning!” to one another at midnight, was another”.