The Book That Refuses to End

よるのつき
ことばのあいまに
ときがとまる

yoru no tsuki / kotoba no aima ni / toki ga tomaru
moon at night / between the words / time stands still

Right now, I’m reading The Beginning of Infinity.
It’s not an easy book to read. It’s the kind of book you keep open longer than you mean to, not because the sentences flow, but because they keep interrupting your thoughts. You read a paragraph, then stare at the wall for five minutes, unsure whether you’ve just understood something profound or completely missed the point.

The book is about knowledge, but not in the usual sense. It’s about the idea that progress — real progress — has no limit. That every mystery, every piece of confusion, is just a problem waiting for an explanation that hasn’t been found yet. It argues that the moment a mind begins to create explanations rather than just observe, the beginning of infinity starts.

That idea has been haunting me lately. The thought that human understanding isn’t supposed to end — that everything we call “impossible” is just something we haven’t understood deeply enough. It changes how you see time. It changes how you see yourself.

I used to think of knowledge as something to collect — like coins, or quotes, or moments of clarity. But this book makes me realize that knowledge is something that’s constantly alive. It’s a process. A conversation between what we know and what we still don’t.

Sometimes, late at night, I’ll reread a single chapter. I’ll find myself staring at the same sentence, again and again: “Problems are inevitable. But problems are soluble.”
It sounds simple, almost naïve. Yet when you let it sink in, it feels revolutionary. If that’s true — if every problem carries the seed of its own solution — then despair becomes irrational. The world becomes a kind of open horizon, not a maze.

The book doesn’t offer comfort. It demands something instead — an honesty about how much we don’t know, and a stubborn belief that we can keep getting better at knowing. It’s not a self-help book. It’s a mirror. And sometimes, it shows you how small you are. But other times, it shows you how much possibility fits inside that smallness.

Reading it makes me rethink how I measure progress — not in achievements, or possessions, or even peace of mind, but in how clearly I can see and explain the world around me. The moments when confusion becomes clarity, even for an instant — that’s the real growth.

And maybe that’s why I keep reading it slowly, sometimes out loud, sometimes half-asleep, sometimes on long train rides when the world outside feels endless. Because it reminds me that understanding itself is the journey.

There’s no final destination, no last answer, no perfect wisdom waiting somewhere in the distance. There’s only the continuous unfolding of thought — the small, steady courage to keep asking why.

That, I think, is what The Beginning of Infinity is really about.
Not the promise of knowing everything, but the permission to never stop trying.