Who prepares the macaroni dishes at Murakami?

BarcelonaThe Maria Nicolau wrote a fantastic article a few months ago in which he took us back to the working day that Haruki Murakami had described in an interview for the literary magazine The Paris ReviewMurakami gets up early in the morning, works for five or six hours, and in the afternoon, runs and/or swims, reads, listens to music, and finally goes to bed at nine at night. He also spends his time preparing meals, groceries, and the long list of vital logistics a writer would need to be able to work on his narrative and not die of cold, starvation, eviction, or illness.

Researcher Maren Hoff of Columbia University and colleagues have demonstrated the existence of the "vicious cycle of status insecurity": when someone feels insecure about the respect and admiration they receive, they tend to view status as a limited resource and avoid acknowledging the self-destructive nature of it, since sharing credit or thanking for help usually strengthens our image and that of those around us. Thus, the lack of gratitude ends up fueling the initial insecurity and creates a vicious cycle.

Mario Vargas Llosa

A writer who seems to have appreciated the invisible logistics was the recently deceased Mario Vargas LlosaIn his Nobel acceptance speech, he acknowledged that it was his wife who did everything, and did it well: she solved problems, managed the finances, brought order to chaos, kept journalists and intruders at bay, defended his time, arranged appointments and trips, packed and unpacked his suitcases. He also thanked her for putting up with his quirks and neuroses, and their three children. So far, it seems ideal, were it not for the fact that, in the same speech, he takes the opportunity to sneak in several of his political ideas, such as a "cosmopolitan and universal" Barcelona, that is, de-Catalanized, and how nationalisms that aren't his thing are little less than the seed of the devil. The author prides himself on defending freedom, but we know he always showed support for fervent political figures of dictatorships. A few years after the speech, and following that same line of inconsistency between deeds and words, he left his wife in a letter, after half a century of marriage (and secretarial service), to run away with another woman.

He who isn't grateful is a son of a bitch, the saying goes. But gratitude must always, always, be sincere (and not a clumsy attempt to disguise the whitewashing of fascism or infidelity). Otherwise, as studies warn us, our reputation will end up like Murakami's macaroni: invisible.