Cycles of Light and Memory:

Reflections on Perfect Days

Christine Lai

Wednesday, May 1st, 2024

In the final half hour of Wim Wenders’s Perfect Days, there is a moment when the calm hitherto exhibited by the protagonist, Hirayama, is disturbed. His coworker, Takashi, quits his job unexpectedly, forcing Hirayama to extend his workday late into the evening. The cycle of working, bathing, and dining that he had so carefully maintained was disrupted, leaving Hirayama vulnerable to the vagaries of an unplanned day.   

Perfect Days is in many ways a film about repetition–of days, of tasks, of images–about the comfort and dependability of daily rhythm, and perhaps also about the loneliness that cyclicity might conceal. Yet it is through repetition that something new is revealed. This evening, upon the second viewing of Perfect Days in the theatre, I noticed that with each recurrence of Hirayama’s day, each return to the familiar spots–the sento, the yakisoba stand, the izakaya–the camera angle shifts to reveal different details about the setting. It is only with repeated viewing that a space becomes whole. 

A film can be a kind of dwelling. Its narrative are walls that enclose the viewer, and its scenes and imagery the furnishings and objects that elicit memory. I have decided to spend a month with Perfect Days, re-watching it once every week, to see if a movie could indeed be a refuge and shelter, a way of shutting out the world. The narrative’s focus on the quotidian invites the diaristic, hence my decision to keep a “film diary.” And since Perfect Days is a film of echoes–echoing books, music, and other films–I will read about it and around it, casting my amateur’s gaze, unschooled in film theory or history, on this single movie. In short, I will attempt a “free-floating reflection,” to borrow Brian Dillon’s term, and weave an interconnected web of affinities. 

Thursday, May 2nd 

I spent this afternoon with an essay by Peter Handke, Wenders’s friend and sometime collaborator. In “An Essay on Quiet Places” (2011, translated by Krishna Winston and Ralph Manheim), Handke recounts his lifelong obsession with Stilles Örtchen, or “quiet little place,” the German euphemism for toilet, washroom, or lavatory. Handke recalls the privy on his grandfather’s farm in the southern Austrian region of Carinthia; the restroom at his boarding school that acted as a refuge; the railroad station lavatory in which he spent a night, with his body coiled around the toilet; and the WCs in which he had washed his face or hair alongside someone else, united with them in the silent act of ablution. Each of these spaces offered Handke respite from the crowd, so that the Stilles Örtchen is more than a physical place, but an idea that “accompanies [him], above and beyond the thing itself and its location.”

One of the most significant Quiet Places is the restroom at the Ryoanji temple in Nara, a place that Handke describes as “not a mere refuge,” but “a site of liberation” that fills him with “invigorating, unfocused energy.” Only by stepping into the temple restroom “did Japan begin to feel like home to [him],” as if the entire country were contained within that space. Following Junichiro Tanizaki’s example, Handke speaks in almost spiritual terms about the Japanese toilet. Near the beginning of In Praise of Shadows (1933, translated by Thomas J. Harper and Edward G. Seidensticker), Tanizaki describes the “tranquil walls and finely grained wood” of the traditional Japanese outhouse, “a place of spiritual repose” and “unsurpassed elegance,” surrounded by greenery and suffused with all the beauty absent in a modern lavatory.

That quality of beauty puts me in mind of the Tokyo Toilets project, the architect-designed public washrooms that are one of the original inspirations for Perfect Days. According to Tanizaki, cleaning is the act of maintaining beauty. Yet the figure of the cleaner is absent from Handke and Tanizaki’s reflections on the WC. I think of the street cleaners in Michelangelo Antonioni’s lyrical documentary, N.U. (1948), the “silent, humble workers that no one speaks to or looks at,” who pick up the trash that others carelessly discard. Antonioni’s film was born of the desire to look at these marginalized figures, to humanize them, and his camera follows them beyond the work day to their private lives. Is Perfect Days born of a similar desire to rivet the camera’s gaze on the work and worker so often overlooked? Does it seek to render visible something hitherto invisible?

Monday, May 6th 

My days are structured around cleaning. The morning begins with cleaning my rabbit’s area, feeding her and bathing her, washing her bedding; then in the evening, we clean her area and body again. She is elderly and disabled, so my husband and I have taken over the act of grooming that is usually reserved for other rabbits. 

In between bouts of cleaning, I read books or watch films. Today I watched Wenders’s 1989 documentary, Notebook on Clothes and Cities. In this “diary film,” the director follows the fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto as the latter prepares for a fashion show in Paris. Wenders and Yamamoto share an interest in work and craftsmanship. One of the designer’s treasured books is August Sanders’s photobook, People of the Twentieth Century. In the photos, Yamamoto claims, one can discern people’s professions through their outfits. Work clothes, according to Wenders, speak of “an era when people lived by a different rhythm, when ‘work’ had a different sense of dignity” (text of Notebook on Clothes and Cities, translated by Michael Hoffman). The documentary ends with footage of Yamamoto sketching a design, surrounded by his assistants. Wenders likens the assistants to “guardian angels” who, “with all their attentiveness, their care, their fervor […] ensured that the integrity of Yohji’s work remained intact.” 

I have begun to notice, throughout Wenders’s films, a fascination with different professions: the frame maker in The American Friend (1977); the dedicated artist in Pina (2011), The Salt of the Earth (2014) and Anselm (2023); even the angels in Wings of Desire (1987) have a professional demeanor as they undertake the task of watching over those in their care. In Tokyo-Ga (1985), the first of what Wenders calls his “diary films,” he focuses on the craft of movie-making by attempting to find traces of Tokyo as depicted in the films of his cinematic hero, Yasujiro Ozu (to whom Perfect Days pays homage). The documentary later shifts to other examples of craftsmanship: the making of wax foods items; the honing of golf skills; and the performing of different styles of dance in Yoyogi Park. In some ways, Perfect Days is a film about a particular kind of work, Wenders’s latest in a long line of meditations on labor. And it harkens to an era when work signified more than mere economic exchange. 

Tuesday, May 7th 

Warmth is gathering in the atmosphere outside. I undertake the week-long spring cleaning, and as I clean, I listen to Hirayama’s playlist.

I have been thinking more about the depiction of work in Perfect Days; rarely does a film dedicate so much screen time to the labor of cleaning toilets. Richard Brody, in the New Yorker, argues that Hirayama’s job as a toilet cleaner is celebrated uncritically, with a “visually chirpy enthusiasm.” But work, in the film, never elicits fervor or joy. The secondary characters offer a less than romanticized portrayal of the conditions of labor in contemporary Japan: the salaryman passed out in front of the washroom, having most likely spent the night there; the young woman who eats lunch in the same park as Hirayama, whose empty gaze suggests boredom; Takashi, Hirayama’s colleague, who is blatantly discontent; and Aya, Takashi’s girlfriend, who works in a bar, whose eyes intimate sadness and a yearning for a different life.

In a 1991 speech on German society, Wenders points out that one of the few German loan words to be imported into Japanese is arubaito, from arbeit, meaning “work,” used in Japan to refer to short-term, temp jobs. Wenders goes on to write about “the German vacuum…the vacant expressions in supermarkets, in pedestrian precincts, at fast-food outlets…the German way of living at second or third or fourth hand” through automatic cameras. But isn’t such vacantness discernible everywhere in the global marketplace under late-stage capitalism? 

Wednesday, May 8th 

During a break from cleaning today, I read parts of Tone (2024), by Sofia Samatar and Kate Zambreno. In their discussion on Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, they write of the mask-like face worn by women and members of the subservient class: “She must have a blank face, be an empty room.” Hirayama, too, wears a mask. He smiles and bows to those who stumble upon him cleaning the toilet. In a society that prizes cleanliness does no one ask who keeps the spaces clean? Near the beginning of the film, the young mother in the park barely conceals her revulsion as she wipes her child’s hands, as if he has been contaminated by the cleaner. Another woman, later in the film, grimaces slightly as she sees Hirayama. Yet he continues smiling. 

In Kobo Abe’s The Face of Another (1964, translated by E. Dale Saunders), a scientist deformed in a laboratory accident attempts to construct a mask for himself that becomes not only a new face, but a new self; the boundary between the mask and the original face is blurred. In his long meditation on identity, conformity, and the self, the narrator concludes that all faces are a form of disguise, and underneath each layer, there are thousands more. The novel puts me in mind of the Japanese concept of honne (“true feelings”) and tatemae (“public front or attitude”) which refers to the divide between the real self and the façade that everyone is expected to uphold. When facing others, all signs of resentment, rage, and exhaustion must be concealed. 

If work is, as Samatar and Zambreno write, “an embodied anxiety and queasiness that absents the self,” then what is left of us after work? What remains of the mind, and the body, after hours and hours at a soul-deadening job in which we remain mostly invisible, our labors unacknowledged? Perhaps Hirayama embodies the dream of a work life that leaves the self intact, work that retains integrity, pleasure even. It is a fragile, but necessary, fantasy. 

Saturday, May 11th 

This afternoon, I re-watched Perfect Days. In the evening, I spent some time on Google Maps, searching for the house where Hirayama lives: that two-story building, that parking lot (except on Google Maps, there is no vending machine there). 

From the house, I wandered virtually through the streets of Tokyo, a city that I have visited seven times. Wenders is enamored with cities; not just with urban architecture, but also with the quotidian life of the city. In Silver City Revisited (1969), an early short, there are long static shots of streets and traffic, with nothing save the blinking of the car lights. The metropolis he has captured in all of his Tokyo films is similarly ordinary. Outside the tourist zones, Tokyo can seem prosaic, with its quiet residential streets and small shops tucked in between the Instagram-worthy sites. Beauty in Tokyo must be sought out through wandering. Perhaps what draws Wenders to Tokyo is precisely the absence of an overt kind of beauty (an absence made explicit in Notebooks on Clothes and Cities through the immediate juxtaposition of Tokyo with the more picturesque Paris). The metropolis depicted in Perfect Days is free of clichéd images (the touristic Asakusa area only appears as a metro station and underground shopping street). According to the Japanese writer and designer Yusuke Koishi, “no other film had succeeded in translating the image of Tokyo in the 2020s into a visual language.” 

In a speech on urban landscape, Wenders writes of Tokyo as “a system of islands,” in which one can turn a corner from the busiest street to find “a quiet, tender, restful area. Next to skyscrapers you find alleyways of little houses, with gardens, birds, cats, peace.” This juxtaposition is repeated several times in Perfect Days when the camera tilts to Tokyo Skytree before returning to Hirayama at street level. In the speech, Wenders goes on to reflect on the beauty of the small – the small streets, the small cinema, the small books. “In the city,” he remarks, “the small, the empty, the open are the batteries that allow us to recharge, that protect us against the assault of the big.” Far from rejecting the skyscrapers and towers, Wenders contends that “they are bearable and livable with, if you can step out and find the alternative, the alleyway with a small shop and a small café.” 

The juxtaposition of the small and big also points to the eclecticism of Tokyo’s cityscape. As Wenders points out in an interview, “Nothing there is planned. There’s no style and no idiom and nothing is managed, and it’s just utter chaos […] Everything is a complete muddle.” Tokyo is a city that does not repeat itself. Like Berlin–another metropolis that has played a pivotal role in Wenders’s artistic practice–Tokyo is not a closed system: “All types of planning, by definition, are attempts to impose some kind of homogeneity, where for me a ‘city’ means the opposite of that. A city has to embrace contradictions, a city should be an explosive kind of place.”

Monday, May 20th 

Last week, upon finishing spring cleaning, we started a round of home improvement projects that involved the drastic reshuffling of spaces and things. I read, for short intervals, while cocooned inside towering piles of cardboard boxes and plastic-covered furnishings, the accumulated things of my life as a reader and a bowerbird.

Today, I have finally cleared enough space to re-watch Perfect Days on my laptop. In one scene, Hirayama returns to his room after a work day. I sense his relief. He lays out his futon and blanket and pillow. The lighting in the room is reduced to a single lamp, by which he reads. He seems so at ease. Yet I wonder if Hirayama, who is older than I am, feels the physical pain and aches left over from the day, the pain that accumulates from the repeated bending down to pick up detritus, from the constant wiping, sweeping, and mopping. At the end of a long day of cleaning, I am not able to lie down and read in a similar manner; the pain in my back and my arms simply would not allow me to do so. 

Tuesday, May 21st 

During yesterday’s viewing of the film, I noticed, not for the first time, the sparseness of Hirayama’s room. It is a simple space, in an old building, consisting of the main room, with bookshelves and a dresser; an adjoining room acts as an arboretum; and the lower level contains a small kitchen and storage space. There is no hoard, in the sense of an ever-expanding pile “composed of things that have lost their value,” to quote Samatar and Zambreno. Hirayama collects only specific kinds of objects: books, plants, cassette tapes, and photographs. At the secondhand bookstore, he chooses books on a whim, without caring about the book’s rank in the marketplace, or whether anyone else is reading it. 

Wenders, who is usually a cinéaste of the open road, here focuses the camera on the interior, at tatami level, with visual language that recalls the works of Ozu. There are thematic echoes as well. Many of Ozu’s early films address questions of success and failure: the new graduates who failed to find a job without the help of a wealthy friend; the single father who struggles to find employment and provide for his child; the son who fails to become a “great man” in Tokyo. I’m reminded of the humbleness of Hirayama’s profession, set against the prosperous metropolis that prizes success (symbolized, in some sense, by the Skytree). 

In Tokyo-Ga, Wenders despairs of not finding the images depicted in Ozu’s films: “The more the reality of Tokyo appeared as a wanton, loveless, menacing, even inhuman proliferation of images, the greater and more potent was the lovingly ordered mythical city of Tokyo in the films of Yasujiro Ozu, in my memory […] Perhaps the hectic inflation of images has already destroyed too much.” But in Hirayama’s modest spaces and his quiet life, Wenders might have found the sense of intimacy that he saw in Ozu’s films. Hou Hsiao-hsien does something similar in Café Lumière (2003)–also set in Tokyo and filmed as an homage to Ozu–by focusing on the commonplace sites and unremarkable lives within the unassuming metropolis. 

In interviews, Wenders has spoken of the need to preserve the small, including the “slow-moving and meditative” small films that were “the cradle of creativity, of new ideas, of daring messages, of human and warm and true stories.” I read Hirayama’s room–bare, unremarkable–as a space that enshrines the small, the small plants and flowers, the small objects. It is also a space of literature: the smaller, quieter kind that exists outside the glittering center. 

Thursday, May 23rd 

My thinking on and around the film continues, whenever I can find space amidst the post-renovation reorganization, the usual bathing and cleaning of the bunny, and the household maintenance–all of which worsen my aches and pains. 

As I clean, I contemplate the portrayal of Hirayama’s life, and I wonder if his routine constitutes a form of flight. I’m reminded of Travis in Paris, Texas (1984), drifting through the barren landscape, a movement through space that is also about fleeing. As numerous critics have pointed out, Wenders’s films often portray peripatetic characters in search of something. The journeys, as Bruce Williams argues, “serve to underscore both travel toward oneself and a sense of alienation.” In a 1988 interview, the director speaks of being on the road, of running away,  as a way of seeking answers: “[…] as it became clear to me why travel – why running away from something – is so important to me, so the question arose whether it’s possible to return, and whether returning might not actually be the whole point of going: getting some distance or perspective on something so as to be able to see it more clearly, or even see it at all.” 

Travis attempts to return, through his reconciliation with his son, and his reuniting Hunter with his mother, though at the end of the film, he remains alone. Hirayama, conversely, does not attempt to return. At the end of Perfect Days, he drives away, as Travis does. And like the fathers at the end of Ozu’s Late Spring (1949) and Tokyo Story (1953), he looks back at the family from afar. There are instances of connection in Hirayama’s life, such as the moments shared with Aya and Niko; the game of tic-tac-toe with the anonymous player; the kinship with the homeless man; and the playing of shadow tag with the dying man. But there is no sustained touch. 

What is Hirayama running from? At a Cannes press conference, a journalist asked Wenders to explain Hirayama’s backstory. The director refused, saying that only he himself, the lead actor, Koji Yakusho, and the co-writer Takuma Takasaki know the answer; no one else needs to know. 

This deliberate occlusion reminds me of the Brandmauern (“fire-walls”), blank walls on one side of a building, left completely exposed because the neighboring house was destroyed. “These empty spaces feel like wounds,” Wenders remarks, “and I like the city for its wounds.” A Brandmauern features prominently in Wings of Desire and also appears in The American Friend. This motif is absent in Perfect Days, but there is an empty urban space to which an old man points and asks Hirayama, “Remember what used to be here?” That plot of land could be a visual representation of the space in Hirayama’s past which remains a blank for the viewer, another kind of Brandmauern. Ellipses in a film, Wenders claims, allow the viewer’s eye to wander, to add something of themselves to the narrative: “Only those films with gaps in between their imagery are telling stories, that is my conviction.” 

Saturday, May 25th 

Yesterday, as I was reading Tomas Espedal’s Bergeners (2013, translated by James Anderson), I came across a passage in which the first-person narrator reflects on his own state of loneliness:

[…] by repeating yourself each day, you survive your lonely self […] A lonely person endures by switching lamps off and on, reading a book, making meals, taking a walk, the same walk every day […] There are days when he doesn’t speak to a living soul […] Sometimes he speaks to cats and birds, to trees and bushes. He can stoop to talk to stones and clouds…

This seems to me an uncanny portrait of Hirayama, and I am struck by the aloneness of his daily actions. When Takashi asks, “Aren’t you ever lonely?” Hirayama does not answer. 

As I scroll through online reviews of Perfect Days, I notice the same phrases used to encapsulate the film: “the simple life,” “the quiet life,” “the beauty of the everyday.” Yet the more I consider the second half of the film, the more I veer away from such readings. Even before the disruption brought about by Takashi’s leaving the job, Hirayama’s routine is unsettled by the appearance of Niko, his niece. Perfect Days is concerned with the family, and this focus is one of the Ozuesque traits of the film. As scholars such as Mark Betz have suggested, Ozu’s influence is discernible in the films in which Wenders explores, as the Japanese director does, the difficulty or impossibility of the nuclear family. Hirayama’s conversations with Niko culminate in the encounter with his sister, Keiko. The short exchange, and Hirayama’s subsequent tears, constitutes the film’s single moment of dismantling. That night, he does not read before bed as he usually does. Beneath the veneer of a seemingly frictionless life, there is shifting ground, emotion unraveling in turbulent waves. What appears like simplicity is, in fact, a delicately balanced way of being in the world. 

Here, I must refer to one of Calvino’s Japan essays, “The Obverse of the Sublime” (1984, translated by Martin McLaughlin), in which he notes the duality inherent in the villas of Kyoto, with their “aesthetic and moral ideal of the bare and unadorned” which “presupposed other houses chock-full of people and tools and junk and rubbish.” Calvino comments on the divide between the wealthy and the poor, between those who dwell in the mess and those who can afford to be “sheltered from catastrophes.” The essay is also about the duality of the urban space, about the distance between the exquisite palaces and the peasant huts (a duality that Perfect Days gestures to, through Hirayama’s journey from the less glamorous Sumida ward to the affluent Shibuya district). 

I would like to borrow Calvino’s idea of the “obverse” to think about Hirayama’s life. His routinized existence of work and simple pleasures presupposes not just a before, but an underneath. The sublime of komorebi, of books and music, is underpinned by the past that is the obverse of simplicity and beauty. Hirayama’s life is defined by this duality, and the routine he has constructed is a method for surviving unspoken loss and affliction, alone, with his family kept at a distance. As critic Sam Sodomsky notes, “Hirayama’s arrival at this contented, pared-down lifestyle is hard-won and colored by loss,” and his vast collection of music “suggests a deep well of emotions.” Cleanliness, then, takes on new meaning, as it implies the scrubbing clean of the surface of one’s life, in order to maintain the bare and unadorned room of existence. I think of Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, obsessively upholding domestic order, until everything implodes. Is Perfect Days about the perfecting of the façade, about routine as solace, as buffer, as armor? 

Monday, May 27th 

This morning, after re-watching Perfect Days for the fourth time this month, I studied the Infinito series by the Italian photographer Luigi Ghirri, composed of snapshots Ghirri took of the sky, one picture per day for a whole year. He captured not only clouds, but the varying shades of the sky, the brilliance of the sun, and the intervals of darkness. The project, Ghirri writes, “constitutes a potential chromatic atlas of the sky.” Hirayama, too, undertakes a diaristic photographic project, practicing what Brian Dillon calls “the mundane miracle of looking” that nevertheless yields something extraordinary. 

Wenders has claimed that Perfect Days is about perception. Seeing, or how people see, is a subject that he has addressed throughout his cinematic oeuvre; Wenders himself is a photographer. As Hubertus von Amelunxen argues, “all of Wim Wenders’ films are about photography, films about images imagined and discarded.” Hirayama sees the sublime in the play of light and shadow, and he attempts to capture that sublime. Although such attempts necessarily expose the limits of photography (many of the photos are discarded), the daily act of taking out the camera, of using it as a recording device, lends photography its meaning. I think of the writer-photographer Philip, from Alice in the Cities (1974) – another character who marks time using photography – who concludes that “taking a picture is a way of proving things.”

Hirayama’s photographic practice reminds me of Daido Moriyama, one of Japan’s most renowned street photographers. Moriyama wanders through Tokyo and other cities to capture not only the quintessential images of the city, but also the images of his own past. “My photography,” Moriyama states, “is a journey of walking around aimlessly, searching for the place that corresponds to my memory.” Moriyama evokes the Japanese concept of genkei (“original landscape”), which refers to a distant scene or image glimpsed in childhood, a landscape that exists only in memory. Through photography, the photographer searches for the genkei. The camera reveals the connection between the present scene in front of the photographer and the psychic terrain of the past. In other words, photography and memory are kin. Moriyama frequently references Joseph Nicéphore Niépce’s View from the Window at Le Gras (c. 1827), the world’s earliest photograph made with a camera obscura: “This fossil-like scene is nothing but the memory of light […] I think this single image is a memory about the world […] The one place where all of these cycles of light and memory converge is ‘history’.”

Elsewhere, Moriyama states that Niépce took that photo because he wished to preserve the view. Hirayama’s photographs of light and shadow and of Niko also suggest the impulse to preserve. It is significant that glimpses of the tree, of komorebi, appear in the black-and-white dream installations (comprised of still images taken by the director’s wife, Donata). The dreams are fragments of Hirayama’s day and of the more distant past; they are bits and pieces of memory that compose an archive of his personal history. I’m reminded of the man in La Jetée (1962), Chris Marker’s essayistic meditation on time, obsessed with an image from his past. The physical act of seeing the outside world becomes entangled with the ongoing work of seeing one’s own life.

In an interview, Wenders states that Hirayama’s dreams are the only link between Perfect Days and Anselm, as both address the concept of time. Photography, too, is about temporality. The analogue process that Hirayama uses begins with the moment of capturing the present, followed by the time of waiting for the image to be developed, and ends with the moment of viewing the photo at long last. It is a process that demands repetition, a slowing down, and a cessation of movement. In the midst of the metropolis with its frenetic pace and layering of images, “photography elicits a slowness of vision,” to quote Luigi Ghirri. And by framing and re-seeing the ordinary that might otherwise pass unnoticed, the photographer revitalizes the everyday. In Inventing Peace: A Dialogue on Perception, Wenders writes: “The seeing has the capacity and power to change the seen.”

Tuesday, May 28th 

A final note on photography: Hirayama’s snapshots of the tree, and his subsequent developing and archiving of the photos (in neatly labeled boxes) is, in some ways, his true work, sustained by his paid labor as a toilet cleaner. His life is about the quiet repetition, the slowness, of creative work. It is about making something small and exquisite, with tenderness and dedication, something that exists outside the marketplace. I admire the fact that Hirayama’s photos are never shared with others, never made into products to be publicly admired or denigrated; in private, art-making remains a way of living, of being by oneself, untethered from the expectations and criticism of others. And if the act of photographing and waiting does not yield the desired result, the cycle of searching, seeing, and attempting to capture the ephemeral sublime begins anew, in solitude. In this sense, Perfect Days shares greater affinity with Wenders’s superb documentaries on artists. Photography–and all art-making–involves forms of sustained, impassioned attention to the world, and offers an electrifying way of dwelling in the continuous present. 

I think of the little boy in Edward Yang’s 2000 film, Yi Yi (another film I have started to watch repeatedly), who takes up photography in order to show others the half of reality that they are unable to see. Arguably, this is the function of film, too, of all art: to render visible that which we cannot see, to bring into the light that which had hitherto remained in the shadows. 

Friday, May 31st 

In the time it has taken me to complete this film diary, the dust has accumulated once again, and some of the newly installed bookshelves have become unstable. But I have reassembled my tiny office, wherein I can continue to make a habitat of literature and cinema.

I re-read parts of Handke’s essay, where he speaks of the ability to generate Quiet Places using “one’s own inner resources,” including through the reading of a great book. These intangible Quiet Places–engendered by books, by films, by art–are “present, inside me and within me and especially around me.” Exhausted, my body still weighed down by pain, I crawl back into Perfect Days, into that book-lined room of solitude and contentment.