Gary Kamiya Quotes

I stumbled upon Friedrich Nietzsche when I was 17, following the usual trail of existential candies - Camus, Sartre, Beckett - that unsuspecting teenagers find in the woods. The effect was more like a drug than a philosophy. I was whirled upward - or was it downward? - into a one-man universe, a secret cult demanding that you put a gun to the head of your dearest habits and beliefs. That intoxicating whiff of half-conscious madness; that casually hair-raising evisceration of everything moral, responsible and parentally approved - these waves overwhelmed my adolescent dinghy. And even more than by his ideas - many of which I didn't understand at all, but some of which I perhaps grasped better then than I do now - I was seduced by his prose. At the end of his sentences you could hear an electric crack, like the whip of a steel blade being tested in the air. He might have been the Devil, but he had better lines than God.

I have spent much of my life exploring San Francisco. But perhaps it is better not to see everything. To let a small mystery stand in for the great one. To know that somewhere far below, down where the sea crashes endlessly into the land, is a rock that I will never climb.