Sixties For Susan Sontag

 Sixties For Susan Sontag

TANAKA Akio

On Sixties, Susan Sontag wrote in her book, WHERE THE STRESS FALLS, 2001 as the following.

Perhaps the most interesting characteristic of the time now labeled the Sixties was that there was no little nostalgia. In that sense, it was indeed a utopian moment.
From "Thirty Years Later..." 

Surely I also think that it was a utopian moment, not utopia everlasting.
Someone ever said at a book, " We were loose change." Surely we were all loose change for a utopian moment. This is the great dedication to Sontag from me. We have lived in a same time though I was extremely coward far away than her to the time and myself.

Tokyo
27 September 2012
Sekinan Research Field of Language

[Note]
Sixties are precious times for me though full of exactly heart-breaking events.
At first, using all the university's summer holidays in 1969, I read three times, one of the Japanese classics, Ochikubo Monogatari , in English Dark Hole Story written in Heian Times some 1,000 years ago, faithfully following the teach of  Japanese classic literature's Scholar YAMAGISHI Tokuhei by the precise annotated text. The scholar lent me his valuable collation text of NAKAMURA Shuko in his library. Before beginning the holidays he said to me like admonishment that  selection of one classic in the vast literary heritage was alike a meeting with a  fiancée, walking to the station from the university in the clear summer evening.
And I sometimes read the modern Chinese novels, Luxun or Maodun, thinking on the Beijing's old days, of which CHEN Donghai taught us how to hear the Beijing Opera sitting the chair facing sideways to the stage.
In university I met CHINO Eiichi at the small room for Russian language in 1969.
I met KAJIMURA Hideki at his Korean class and Natary Muravijowa at her Russian class in the next year.
I learnt alone the composition of French by the text of MAEDA Yoichi at the university's library, who indicated me the splendid world of French language and philosophy while reading Pascal's Pensees little by little, almost all the days outside afar a demonstrations, in and outside the campus or streets of Tokyo.
It is the reason for I was Coward in those days.

Tokyo
30 November 2014 Note added
Sekinan Library 

   

  Early summer of Kirigamine Highlands, Nagano, Japan