Yukio Mishima

Anything can become excusable when seen from the standpoint of the result

...living is merely the chaos of existence...

When silence is prolonged over a certain period of time, it takes on new meaning.

One could certainly think of a man not in terms of a body but as a single vital current. And this would allow one to grasp the concept of existence as dynamic and on-going, rather than as static.

I had perceived dimly, too, that the only physical proof of the existence of consciousness was suffering. Beyond doubt, there was a certain splendor in pain, which bore a deep affinity to the splendor that lies hidden within strength.

The instant that the blade tore open his flesh, the bright disk of the sun soared up and exploded behind his eyelids.

He had never looked forward to the wisdom and other vaunted benefits of old age. Would he be able to die young — and if possible free of all pain? A graceful death — as a richly patterned kimono, thrown carelessly across a polished table, slides unobtrusively down into the darkness of the floor beneath. A death marked by elegance.

كان الاضطرار إلى الحياة أكثر سواداً من أشد ضروب السواد افتقاراً للمرح, أن يضطر كل يوم لرؤية رجل يسعى لفهم أعمق شيء بداخله, وينجح في ذلك.

Even though the world might change into the kind I hoped for, it lost its rich charm at the very instant of change. The thing that lay at the far end of my dreams was extreme danger and destruction; never once had I envisaged happiness. The most appropriate type of daily life for me was a day-by-day world destruction; peace was the most difficult and abnormal state to live in.

.... كل ما هنالك ان احداً لم يلحظ الأمر، فنحن أكثر تعوداً مما ينبغي .على عبث الوجود. و ضياع كون ليس جديراً ان يحمل على محمل الجد

The whole house is spic and span and everybody's supposed to be real honest and full of what he calls 'the good'. We even leave food out for the mice in the rafters so they won't have to sin by stealing. And you know what happens when dinner's over? Everybody hunches over and licks his place clean so none of God's grace will be wasted.

Besides, like a man who knows he is dying, he felt a need to be equally tender to all.

Those who believe, believe everything, while those who doubt don't believe a thing.

My blind adoration of Omi was devoid of any element of conscious criticism, and still less did I have anything like a moral viewpoint where he was concern. Whenever I tried to capture the amorphous mass of my adoration within the confines of analysis, it would already have disappeared. If there be such a thing as love that has neither duration nor progress, this was precisely my emotion. The eyes through which I saw Omi were always those of a 'first glance' or, if I may say so, of the 'primeval glance'. It was purely an unconscious attitude on my part, a ceaselesseffort to protect my fourteen-yesr-old purity from the process of erosion.

Could this have been love? Grant it to be one form of love, for even though at first glance it seemed to retain its pristine form forever, simply repeating that form over and over again, it too had its own unique sort of debasement and decay. And it was a debasement more evil than that of any normal kind of love. Indeed, of all the kinds of decay in this world, decadent purity is the most malignant.

Nevertheless, in my unrequited love for Omi, in this the first love I encountered in life, I seemed like a baby bird keeping its truly innocent animal lusts hidden under its wing. I was being tempted, not by the desire of possession, but simply by unadorned temptation itself.

To say the least, while at school, particularly during a boring class, I could not take my eyes off Omi's profile. What more could I have done when I did not know that to love is both to seek and to be sought? For me love was nothing but a dialogue of little riddles, with no answers given. As for my spirit of adoration, I never even imagined it to be a thing that required some sort of answer.

We all know that the world is empty and that the important thing, the only thing, is to try to maintain order in that emptiness.