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For this forum, choose two discussion questions that ask you to make connections between Murakami and Thoreau. Your responses should refer to details from the text and at least one quote. Your responses should be at least 8 sentences.Question 1: Question: One could view both authors as nature writers — how does each write about nature, but especially Murakami as he moves us back into the urban environment of Boston? How is nature more than just a setting? What is the value of finding nature in the city? How does this contribute to their overall philosophies? Question 2: How do both Murakami and Thoreau phlosophize on what makes a “good” life? Do they meet on any common truths? How do their different historical contexts (1854 and 2007) show up in their cultural and intellectual perspectives? Do these authors reveal anything particularly characteristic of New England?
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One
AUGUST 5, 2005 • KAUAI, HAWAII
Who’s Going to Laugh at Mick Jagger?
I’m on Kauai, in Hawaii, today, Friday, August 5, 2005. It’s
unbelievably clear and sunny, not a cloud in the sky. As if the
concept clouds doesn’t even exist. I came here at the end of July
and, as always, we rented a condo. During the mornings, when
it’s cool, I sit at my desk, writing all sorts of things. Like now: I’m
writing this, a piece on running that I can pretty much compose
as I wish. It’s summer, so naturally it’s hot. Hawaii’s been called
the island of eternal summer, but since it’s in the Northern
Hemisphere there are, arguably, four seasons of a sort. Summer
is somewhat hotter than winter. I spend a lot of time in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, and compared to Cambridge—so
muggy and hot with all its bricks and concrete it’s like a form of
torture—summer in Hawaii is a veritable paradise. No need for
an air conditioner here—just leave the window open, and a
refreshing breeze blows in. People in Cambridge are always
surprised when they hear I’m spending August in Hawaii. “Why
would you want to spend summer in a hot place like that?” they
invariably ask. But they don’t know what it’s like. How the
constant trade winds from the northeast make summers cool.
How happy life is here, where we can enjoy lounging around,
reading a book in the shade of trees, or, if the notion strikes us, go
down, just as we are, for a dip in the inlet.
Since I arrived in Hawaii I’ve run about an hour every day, six
days a week. It’s two and a half months now since I resumed my
old lifestyle in which, unless it’s totally unavoidable, I run every
single day. Today I ran for an hour and ten minutes, listening on
my Walkman to two albums by the Lovin’ Spoonful—Daydream
and Hums of the Lovin’ Spoonful—which I’d recorded on an MD
disc.
Right now I’m aiming at increasing the distance I run, so speed is
less of an issue. As long as I can run a certain distance, that’s all I
care about. Sometimes I run fast when I feel like it, but if I
increase the pace I shorten the amount of time I run, the point
being to let the exhilaration I feel at the end of each run carry
over to the next day. This is the same sort of tack I find necessary
when writing a novel. I stop every day right at the point where I
feel I can write more. Do that, and the next day’s work goes
surprisingly smoothly. I think Ernest Hemingway did something
like that. To keep on going, you have to keep up the rhythm. This
is the important thing for long-term projects. Once you set the
pace, the rest will follow. The problem is getting the flywheel to
spin at a set speed—and to get to that point takes as much
concentration and effort as you can manage.
It rained for a short time while I was running, but it was a cooling
rain that felt good. A thick cloud blew in from the ocean right
over me, and a gentle rain fell for a while, but then, as if it had
remembered, “Oh, I’ve got to do some errands!,” it whisked itself
away without so much as a glance back. And then the merciless
sun was back, scorching the ground. It’s a very easy-tounderstand weather pattern. Nothing abstruse or ambivalent
about it, not a speck of the metaphoric or the symbolic. On the
way I passed a few other joggers, about an equal number of men
and women. The energetic ones were zipping down the road,
slicing through the air like they had robbers at their heels. Others,
overweight, huffed and puffed, their eyes half closed, their
shoulders slumped like this was the last thing in the world they
wanted to be doing. They looked like maybe a week ago their
doctors had told them they have diabetes and warned them they
had to start exercising. I’m somewhere in the middle.
I love listening to the Lovin’ Spoonful. Their music is sort of laidback and never pretentious. Listening to this soothing music
brings back a lot of memories of the 1960s. Nothing really special,
though. If they were to make a movie about my life (just the
thought of which scares me), these would be the scenes they’d
leave on the cutting-room floor. “We can leave this episode out,”
the editor would explain. “It’s not bad, but it’s sort of ordinary
and doesn’t amount to much.” Those kinds of memories—
unpretentious, commonplace. But for me, they’re all meaningful
and valuable. As each of these memories flits across my mind, I’m
sure I unconsciously smile, or give a slight frown. Commonplace
they might be, but the accumulation of these memories has led to
one result: me. Me here and now, on the north shore of Kauai.
Sometimes when I think of life, I feel like a piece of driftwood
washed up on shore.
As I run, the trade winds blowing in from the direction of the
lighthouse rustle the leaves of the eucalyptus over my head.
I began living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the end of May of
this year, and running has once again been the mainstay of my
daily routine ever since. I’m seriously running now. By seriously I
mean thirty-six miles a week. In other words, six miles a day, six
days a week. It would be better if I ran seven days, but I have to
factor in rainy days, and days when work keeps me too busy.
There are some days, too, when frankly I just feel too tired to run.
Taking all this into account, I leave one day a week as a day off.
So, at thirty-six miles per week, I cover 156 miles every month,
which for me is my standard for serious running.
In June I followed this plan exactly, running 156 miles on the
nose. In July I increased the distance and covered 186 miles. I
averaged six miles every day, without taking a single day off. I
don’t mean I covered precisely six miles every day. If I ran nine
miles one day, the next day I’d do only three. (At a jogging pace I
generally can cover six miles in an hour.) For me this is most
definitely running at a serious level. And since I came to Hawaii
I’ve kept up this pace. It had been far too long since I’d been able
to run these distances and keep up this kind of fixed schedule.
There are several reasons why, at a certain point in my life, I
stopped running seriously. First of all, my life has been getting
busier, and free time is increasingly at a premium. When I was
younger it wasn’t as if I had as much free time as I wanted, but at
least I didn’t have as many miscellaneous chores as I do now. I
don’t know why, but the older you get, the busier you become.
Another reason is that I’ve gotten more interested in triathlons,
rather than marathons. Triathlons, of course, involve swimming
and cycling in addition to running. The running part isn’t a
problem for me, but in order to master the other two legs of the
event I had to devote a great deal of time to training in swimming
and biking. I had to start over from scratch with swimming,
relearning the correct form, learning the right biking techniques,
and training the necessary muscles. All of this took time and
effort, and as a result I had less time to devote to running.
Probably the main reason, though, was that at a certain point I’d
simply grown tired of it. I started running in the fall of 1982 and
have been running since then for nearly twenty-three years. Over
this period I’ve jogged almost every day, run in at least one
marathon every year—twenty-three up till now—and participated
in more long-distance races all around the world than I care to
count. Long-distance running suits my personality, though, and
of all the habits I’ve acquired over my lifetime I’d have to say this
one has been the most helpful, the most meaningful. Running
without a break for more than two decades has also made me
stronger, both physically and emotionally.
The thing is, I’m not much for team sports. That’s just the way I
am. Whenever I play soccer or baseball—actually, since becoming
an adult this is hardly ever—I never feel comfortable. Maybe it’s
because I don’t have any brothers, but I could never get into the
kind of games you play with others. I’m also not very good at oneon-one sports like tennis. I enjoy squash, but generally when it
comes to a game against someone, the competitive aspect makes
me uncomfortable. And when it comes to martial arts, too, you
can count me out.
Don’t misunderstand me—I’m not totally uncompetitive. It’s just
that for some reason I never cared all that much whether I beat
others or lost to them. This sentiment remained pretty much
unchanged after I grew up. It doesn’t matter what field you’re
talking about—beating somebody else just doesn’t do it for me.
I’m much more interested in whether I reach the goals that I set
for myself, so in this sense long-distance running is the perfect fit
for a mindset like mine.
Marathon runners will understand what I mean. We don’t really
care whether we beat any other particular runner. World-class
runners, of course, want to outdo their closest rivals, but for your
average, everyday runner, individual rivalry isn’t a major issue.
I’m sure there are garden-variety runners whose desire to beat a
particular rival spurs them on to train harder. But what happens
if their rival, for whatever reason, drops out of the competition?
Their motivation for running would disappear or at least
diminish, and it’d be hard for them to remain runners for long.
Most ordinary runners are motivated by an individual goal, more
than anything: namely, a time they want to beat. As long as he
can beat that time, a runner will feel he’s accomplished what he
set out to do, and if he can’t, then he’ll feel he hasn’t. Even if he
doesn’t break the time he’d hoped for, as long as he has the sense
of satisfaction at having done his very best—and, possibly, having
made some significant discovery about himself in the process—
then that in itself is an accomplishment, a positive feeling he can
carry over to the next race.
The same can be said about my profession. In the novelist’s
profession, as far as I’m concerned, there’s no such thing as
winning or losing. Maybe numbers of copies sold, awards won,
and critics’ praise serve as outward standards for
accomplishment in literature, but none of them really matter.
What’s crucial is whether your writing attains the standards
you’ve set for yourself. Failure to reach that bar is not something
you can easily explain away. When it comes to other people, you
can always come up with a reasonable explanation, but you can’t
fool yourself. In this sense, writing novels and running full
marathons are very much alike. Basically a writer has a quiet,
inner motivation, and doesn’t seek validation in the outwardly
visible.
For me, running is both exercise and a metaphor. Running day
after day, piling up the races, bit by bit I raise the bar, and by
clearing each level I elevate myself. At least that’s why I’ve put in
the effort day after day: to raise my own level. I’m no great
runner, by any means. I’m at an ordinary—or perhaps more like
mediocre—level. But that’s not the point. The point is whether or
not I improved over yesterday. In long-distance running the only
opponent you have to beat is yourself, the way you used to be.
Since my forties, though, this system of self-assessment has
gradually changed. Simply put, I am no longer able to improve
my time. I guess it’s inevitable, considering my age. At a certain
age everybody reaches their physical peak. There are individual
differences, but for the most part swimmers hit that watershed in
their early twenties, boxers in their late twenties, and baseball
players in their mid-thirties. It’s something everyone has to go
through. Once I asked an ophthalmologist if anyone’s ever
avoided getting farsighted when they got older. He laughed and
said, “I’ve never met one yet.” It’s the same thing. (Fortunately,
the peak for artists varies considerably. Dostoyevsky, for instance,
wrote two of his most profound novels, The Possessed and The
Brothers Karamazov, in the last few years of his life before his
death at age sixty. Domenico Scarlatti wrote 555 piano sonatas
during his lifetime, most of them when he was between the ages
of fifty-seven and sixty-two.)
My peak as a runner came in my late forties. Before then I’d
aimed at running a full marathon in three and a half hours, a
pace of exactly one kilometer in five minutes, or one mile in eight.
Sometimes I broke three and a half hours, sometimes not (more
often not). Either way, I was able to steadily run a marathon in
more or less that amount of time. Even when I thought I’d totally
blown it, I’d still be in under three hours and forty minutes. Even
if I hadn’t trained so much or wasn’t in the best of shape,
exceeding four hours was inconceivable. Things continued at that
stable plateau for a while, but before long they started to change.
I’d train as much as before but found it increasingly hard to break
three hours and forty minutes. It was taking me five and a half
minutes to run one kilometer, and I was inching closer to the
four-hour mark to finish a marathon. Frankly, this was a bit of a
shock. What was going on here? I didn’t think it was because I
was aging. In everyday life I never felt like I was getting physically
weaker. But no matter how much I might deny it or try to ignore
it, the numbers were retreating, step by step.
Besides, as I said earlier, I’d become more interested in other
sports such as triathlons and squash. Just running all the time
couldn’t be good for me, I’d figured, deciding it would be better to
add variety to my routine and develop a more all-around physical
regimen. I hired a private swimming coach who started me off
with the basics, and I learned how to swim faster and more
smoothly than before. My muscles reacted to the new
environment, and my physique began noticeably changing.
Meanwhile, like the tide going out, my marathon times slowly but
surely continued to slow. And I found I didn’t enjoy running as
much as I used to. A steady fatigue opened up between me and
the very notion of running. A sense of disappointment set in that
all my hard work wasn’t paying off, that there was something
obstructing me, like a door that was usually open suddenly
slammed in my face. I named this condition runner’s blues. I’ll go
into more detail later on about what sort of blues this was.
It’s been ten years since I last lived in Cambridge (which was
from 1993 to 1995, back when Bill Clinton was president). When I
saw the Charles River again, a desire to run swept over me.
Generally, unless some great change takes place, rivers always
look about the same, and the Charles River in particular looked
totally unchanged. Time had passed, students had come and gone,
I’d aged ten years, and there’d literally been a lot of water under
the bridge. But the river has remained unaltered. The water still
flows swiftly, and silently, toward Boston Harbor. The water
soaks the shoreline, making the summer grasses grow thick,
which help feed the waterfowl, and it flows languidly, ceaselessly,
under the old bridges, reflecting clouds in summer and bobbing
with floes in winter—and silently heads toward the ocean.
After I had unpacked everything, gone through the red tape
involved in moving here, and settled into life in Cambridge, I got
down to some serious running again. Breathing in the crisp,
bracing, early-morning air, I felt once again the joy of running on
familiar ground. The sounds of my footsteps, my breathing and
heartbeats, all blended together in a unique polyrhythm. The
Charles River is a holy spot for regatta racing, and there is always
someone rowing on the river. I like to race them. Most of the time,
of course, the boats are faster. But when a single scull is leisurely
rowing I can give it a good run for its money.
Maybe because it’s the home of the Boston Marathon, Cambridge
is full of runners. The jogging path along the Charles goes on
forever, and if you wanted to, you could run for hours. The
problem is, it’s also used by cyclists, so you have to watch out for
speeding bikes whizzing past from behind. At various places, too,
there are cracks in the pavement you have to make sure you don’t
trip over, and a couple of long traffic signals you can get stuck at,
which can put a kink in your run. Otherwise, it’s a wonderful
jogging path.
Sometimes when I run, I listen to jazz, but usually it’s rock, since
its beat is the best accompaniment to the rhythm of running. I
prefer the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Gorillaz, and Beck, and oldies
like Creedence Clearwater Revival and the Beach Boys. Music
with as simple a rhythm as possible. A lot of runners now use
iPods, but I prefer the MD player I’m used to. It’s a little bigger
than an iPod and can’t hold nearly as much data, but it works for
me. At this point I don’t want to mix music and computers. Just
like it’s not good to mix friends and work, and sex.
As I mentioned, in July I ran 186 miles. It rained two days that
month, and I spent two days on the road. And there were quite a
few days when the weather was too muggy and hot to run. So all
in all, running 186 miles wasn’t so bad. Not bad at all. If running
136 miles in a month amounts to serious running, then 186 miles
must be rigorous running. The farther I ran, the more weight I
lost, too. In two and a half months I dropped about seven pounds,
and the bit of flab I was starting to see around my stomach
disappeared. Picture going to the butcher shop, buying seven
pounds of meat, and carrying it home. You get the idea. I had
mixed emotions about carrying around that extra weight with me
every day. If you live in Boston, Samuel Adams draft beer
(Summer Ale) and Dunkin’ Donuts are essentials of life. But I
discovered to my delight that even these indulgences can be offset
by persistent exercise.
It might be a little silly for someone getting to be my age to put
this into words, but I just want to make sure I get the facts down
clearly: I’m the kind of person who likes to be by himself. To put a
finer point on it, I’m the type of person who doesn’t find it painful
to be alone. I find spending an hour or two every day running
alone, not speaking to anyone, as well as four or five hours alone
at my desk, to be neither difficult nor boring. I’ve had this
tendency ever since I was young, when, given a choice, I much
preferred reading books on my own or concentrating on listening
to music over being with someone else. I could always think of
things to do by myself.
Even so, after I got married at an early age (I was twenty-two) I
gradually got used to living with someone else. After I left college
I ran a bar, so I learned the importance of being with others and
the obvious point that we can’t survive on our own. Gradually,
then, though perhaps with my own spin on it, through personal
experience I discovered how to be sociable. Looking back on that
time now, I can see that during my twenties my worldview
changed, and I matured. By sticking my nose into all sorts of
places, I acquired the practical skills I needed to live. Without
those ten tough years I don’t think I would have written novels,
and even if I’d tried, I wouldn’t have been able to. Not that
people’s personalities change that dramatically. The desire in me
to be alone hasn’t changed. Which is why the hour or so I spend
running, maintaining my own silent, private time, is important to
help me keep my mental well-being. When I’m running I don’t
have to talk to anybody and don’t have to listen to anybody. All I
need to do is gaze at the scenery passing by. This is a part of my
day I can’t do without.
I’m often asked what I think about as I run. Usually the people
who ask this have never run long distances themselves. I always
ponder the question. What exactly do I think about when I’m
running? I don’t have a clue.
On cold days I guess I think a little about how cold it is. And
about the heat on hot days. When I’m sad I think a little about
sadness. When I’m happy I think a little about happiness. As I
mentioned before, random memories come to me too. And
occasionally, hardly ever, really, I get an idea to use in a novel.
But really as I run, I don’t think much of anything worth
mentioning.
I just run. I run in a void. Or maybe I should put it the other way:
I run in order to acquire a void. But as you might expect, an
occasional thought will slip into this void. People’s minds can’t be
a complete blank. Human beings’ emotions are not strong or
consistent enough to sustain a vacuum. What I mean is, the kinds
of thoughts and ideas that invade my emotions as I run remain
subordinate to that void. Lacking content, they are just random
thoughts that gather around that central void.
The thoughts that occur to me while I’m running are like clouds
in the sky. Clouds of all different sizes. They come and they go,
while the sky remains the same sky as always. The clouds are
mere guests in the sky that pass away and vanish, leaving behind
the sky. The sky both exists and doesn’t exist. It has substance
and at the same time doesn’t. And we merely accept that vast
expanse and drink it in.
I’m in my late fifties now. When I was young, I never imagined
the twenty-first century would actually come and that, all joking
aside, I’d turn fifty. In theory, of course, it was self-evident that
someday, if nothing else happened, the twenty-first century
would roll around and I’d turn fifty. When I was young, being
asked to imagine myself at fifty was as difficult as being asked to
imagine, concretely, the world after death. Mick Jagger once
boasted that “I’d rather be dead than still singing ‘Satisfaction’
when I’m forty-five.” But now he’s over sixty and still singing
“Satisfaction.” Some people might find this funny, but not me.
When he was young, Mick Jagger couldn’t imagine himself at
forty-five. When I was young, I was the same. Can I laugh at Mick
Jagger? No way. I just happen not to be a young rock singer.
Nobody remembers what stupid things I might have said back
then, so they’re not about to quote them back at me. That’s the
only difference.
And now here I am living in this unimaginable world. It feels
really strange, and I can’t tell if I’m fortunate or not. Maybe it
doesn’t matter. For me—and for everybody else, probably—this is
my first experience growing old, and the emotions I’m having, too,
are all first-time feelings. If it were something I’d experienced
before, then I’d be able to understand it more clearly, but this is
the first time, so I can’t. For now all I can do is put off making any
detailed judgments and accept things as they are. Just like I
accept the sky, the clouds, and the river. And there’s also
something kind of comical about it all, something you don’t want
to discard completely.
As I mentioned before, competing against other people, whether
in daily life or in my field of work, is just not the sort of lifestyle
I’m after. Forgive me for stating the obvious, but the world is
made up of all kinds of people. Other people have their own
values to live by, and the same holds true with me. These
differences give rise to disagreements, and the combination of
these disagreements can give rise to even greater
misunderstandings. As a result, sometimes people are unfairly
criticized. This goes without saying. It’s not much fun to be
misunderstood or criticized, but rather a painful experience that
hurts people deeply.
As I’ve gotten older, though, I’ve gradually come to the realization
that this kind of pain and hurt is a necessary part of life. If you
think about it, it’s precisely because people are different from
others that they’re able to create their own independent selves.
Take me as an example. It’s precisely my ability to detect some
aspects of a scene that other people can’t, to feel differently than
others and choose words that differ from theirs, that’s allowed me
to write stories that are mine alone. And because of this we have
the extraordinary situation in which quite a few people read what
I’ve written. So the fact that I’m me and no one else is one of my
greatest assets. Emotional hurt is the price a person has to pay in
order to be independent.
That’s what I basically believe, and I’ve lived my life accordingly.
In certain areas of my life, I actively seek out solitude. Especially
for someone in my line of work, solitude is, more or less, an
inevitable circumstance. Sometimes, however, this sense of
isolation, like acid spilling out of a bottle, can unconsciously eat
away at a person’s heart and dissolve it. You could see it, too, as a
kind of double-edged sword. It protects me, but at the same time
steadily cuts away at me from the inside. I think in my own way
I’m aware of this danger—probably through experience—and
that’s why I’ve had to constantly keep my body in motion, in
some cases pushing myself to the limit, in order to heal the
loneliness I feel inside and to put it in perspective. Not so much
as an intentional act, but as an instinctive reaction.
Let me be more specific.
When I’m criticized unjustly (from my viewpoint, at least), or
when someone I’m sure will understand me doesn’t, I go running
for a little longer than usual. By running longer it’s like I can
physically exhaust that portion of my discontent. It also makes
me realize again how weak I am, how limited my abilities are. I
become aware, physically, of these low points. And one of the
results of running a little farther than usual is that I become that
much stronger. If I’m angry, I direct that anger toward myself. If I
have a frustrating experience, I use that to improve myself. That’s
the way I’ve always lived. I quietly absorb the things I’m able to,
releasing them later, and in as changed a form as possible, as part
of the story line in a novel.
I don’t think most people would like my personality. There might
be a few—very few, I would imagine—who are impressed by it,
but only rarely would anyone like it. Who in the world could
possibly have warm feelings, or something like them, for a person
who doesn’t compromise, who instead, whenever a problem
crops up, locks himself away alone in a closet? But is it ever
possible for a professional writer to be liked by people? I have no
idea. Maybe somewhere in the world it is. It’s hard to generalize.
For me, at least, as I’ve written novels over many years, I just
can’t picture someone liking me on a personal level. Being
disliked by someone, hated and despised, somehow seems more
natural. Not that I’m relieved when that happens. Even I’m not
happy when someone dislikes me.
But that’s another story. Let’s get back to running. I’ve gotten
back into a running lifestyle again. I started seriously running
and am now rigorously running. What this might mean for me,
now that I’m in my late fifties, I don’t know yet. But I think it’s
got to mean something. Maybe not anything profound, but there
must be significance to it. Anyway, right now I’m running hard.
I’ll wait till later to think about what it all means. (Putting off
thinking about something is one of my specialties, a skill I’ve
honed as I’ve grown older.) I shine my running shoes, rub some
sunscreen on my face and neck, set my watch, and hit the road.
With the trade winds wafting against my face, a white heron up
above, its legs dutifully aligned as it crosses the sky, and me
listening to my old favorite, the Lovin’ Spoonful.
As I was running I was struck by a thought: Even if my time in
races doesn’t improve, there’s not much I can do about it. I’ve
gotten older, and time has taken its toll. It’s nobody’s fault. Those
are the rules of the game. Just as a river flows to the sea, growing
older and slowing down are just part of the natural scenery, and
I’ve got to accept it. It might not be a very enjoyable process, and
what I discover as a result might not be all that pleasant. But
what choice do I have, anyway? In my own way, I’ve enjoyed my
life so far, even if I can’t say I’ve fully enjoyed it.
I’m not trying to brag or anything—who in the world would brag
about something like this?—but I’m not the brightest person. I’m
the kind of person who has to experience something physically,
actually touch something, before I have a clear sense of it. No
matter what it is, unless I see it with my own eyes I’m not
convinced. I’m a physical, not intellectual, type of person. Of
course I have a certain amount of intelligence—at least I think I
do. If I totally lacked that there’d be no way I could write novels.
But I’m not the type who operates through pure theory or logic,
not the type whose energy source is intellectual speculation. Only
when I’m given an actual physical burden and my muscles start
to groan (and sometimes scream) does my comprehension meter
shoot upward and I’m finally able to grasp something. Needless
to say, it takes quite a bit of time, plus effort, to go through each
stage, step by step, and arrive at a conclusion. Sometimes it takes
too long, and by the time I’m convinced, it’s already too late. But
what’re you going to do? That’s the kind of person I am.
As I run I tell myself to think of a river. And clouds. But
essentially I’m not thinking of a thing. All I do is keep on running
in my own cozy, homemade void, my own nostalgic silence. And
this is a pretty wonderful thing. No matter what anybody else
says.
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