As an American man of the 1990s writing about a Japanese woman of the 1930s, I needed to cross three cultural divides - man to woman, American to Japanese, and present to past.
Interpretation
The quote reflects the complexity of understanding different cultural perspectives across time and gender.
Arthur Golden's quote highlights the challenges and intricacies involved in bridging cultural gaps when creating narratives that involve diverse identities. It emphasizes how an author must navigate not only gender differences but also national and temporal divides, requiring a deep understanding of the intricate layers that define human experiences across cultures.
In practice
In a discussion about cross-cultural literature, one might say, 'As Arthur Golden noted, bridging cultural divides requires deep understanding.'
We all know that a winter scene, though it may be covered over one day, with even the trees dressed in shawls of snow, will be unrecognizable the following spring. Yet I never imagined such a thing could occur within our very selves.
An en is a karmic bond lasting a lifetime. Nowadays many people seem to believe their lives are entirely a matter of choice; but in my day we viewed ourselves as pieces of clay that forever show the fingerprints of everyone who has touched them.
For a flicker of a moment I imagined a world completely different from the one I'd always known, a world in which I was treated with fairness, even kindness-- a world in which fathers didn't sell their daughters.
The heart dies a slow death, shedding each hope like leaves until one day there are none. No hopes. Nothing remains.
He was like a song I'd heard once in fragments but had been singing in my mind ever since.
I don't think any of us can speak frankly about pain until we are no longer enduring it.
Satan promises the best, but pays with the worst; he promises honor, and pays with disgrace; he promises pleasure, and pays with pain; he promises profit, and pays with loss, he promises life, and pays with death. But God pays as he promises; all his payments are made in pure gold.
Our sins, when laid upon Christ, were yet personally ours, not his; so his righteousness, when put upon us, is yet personally his, not ours.
Child,' said the Lion, 'I am telling you your story, not hers. No one is told any story but their own.
The swiftness of time is infinite, as is still more evident when we look back on the past.
Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately.
Past humanity is not only implicit in each new man born but is contained in him. Humanity is an ever-widening spiral and life is the beam that plays briefly on each succeeding ring. All humanity from its beginning to its end is already present but the beam has not yet played beyond you.
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