Invisible fruit that I've encountered in the last few days, reading 2 of my favorite writers.

This is from Jonathan Franzen's novel "The Corrections" (2001):

His body was what she’d always wanted. It was the rest of him that was the problem. She was unhappy before she went to visit him, unhappy while she sat beside him, and unhappy for hours afterward. He’d entered a phase of deep randomness. Enid might arrive and find him sunk deeply in a funk, his chin on his chest and a cookie-sized drool spot on his pants leg. Or he might be chatting amiably with a stroke victim or a potted plant. He might be unpeeling the invisible piece of fruit that occupied his attention hour after hour. He might be sleeping. Whatever he was doing, though, he wasn’t making sense.

This is from "Barn Burning" — published in 1992 in The New Yorker (and adapted in the current movie "Burning") — by Haruki Murakami:

Young women these days are all studying something or other. But she didn't seem the type who'd be serious about perfecting a skill.

Then she showed me the Tangerine Peeling.... On her left was a bowl piled high with tangerines, on her right, a bowl for the peels. At least that was the idea — actually there wasn't anything there at all. She'd take the imaginary tangerine in her hand, slowly peel it, put one section in her mouth, and spit out the seeds. When she finished one tangerine, she'd wrap up all the seeds in the peel and deposit it in the bowl to her right. She repeated these movements over and over again. When you try to put it in words, it doesn't sound like anything special. But if you see it with your own eyes for ten or twenty minutes... gradually the sense of reality is sucked right out of everything around you....

"It's easy. Has nothing to do with talent. What you do isn't make yourself believe there are tangerines there. You forget that the tangerines are not there. That's all."

 I find chance repetition like this satisfying. I forget that any reason for it is not there.