Great Throughts Treasury

"Count Ayakura?s abstraction persisted. He believed that only a vulgar mentality was willing to acknowledge the possibility of catastrophe. He felt that taking naps was much more beneficial than confronting catastrophes. However precipitous the future might seem, he learned from the game of kemari that the ball must always come down. There was no call for consternation. Grief and rage, along with other outbursts of passion, were mistakes easily committed by a mind lacking in refinement. And the Count was certainly not a man who lacked refinement. Just let matters slide. How much better to accept each sweet drop of the honey that was Time, than to stoop to the vulgarity latent in every decision. However grave the matter at hand might be, if one neglected it for long enough, the act of neglect itself would begin to affect the situation, and someone else would emerge as an ally. Such was Count Ayakura?s version of political theory."

"Creating something beautiful and becoming beautiful oneself are indistinguishable."

"Decided to watch carefully how a person close to the limit that the blink of an eye is estimated to retreat to a distance that cannot be reached"

"Do I, then, belong to the heavens? Why, if not so, should the heavens fix me thus with their ceaseless blue stare, luring me on, and my mind, higher ever higher, up into the sky, drawing me ceaselessly up to heights far, far above the human? Why, when balance has been strictly studied and flight calculated with the best of reason till no aberrant element should, by rights, remain- why, still, should the lust for ascension seem, in itself, so close to madness? Nothing is that can satisfy me; earthly novelty is too soon dulled; I am drawn higher and higher, more unstable, Closer and closer to the sun's effulgence. Why do these rays of reason destroy me? Villages below and meandering streams grow tolerable as our distance grows. Why do they plead, approve, lure me with promise that I may love the human If only it is seen, thus, from afar- Although the goal could never have been love, nor, had it been, could I ever have Belonged to the heavens? I have not envied the bird its freedom Nor have I longed for the ease of Nature, Driven by naught save this strange yearning For the higher, and the closer, to plunge myself Into the deep sky's blue, so contrary to all organic joys, so far from pleasures of superiority but higher, and higher, dazzled, perhaps, by the dizzy incandescence of waxen wings. Or do I then belong, after all, to the earth? Why, if not so, should the earth show such swiftness to encompass my fall? Granting no space to think or feel, why did the soft, indolent earth thus greet me with the shock of steel plate? Did the soft earth thus turn to steel only to show me my own softness? That Nature might bring home to me that to fall, not to fly, is in the order of things, More natural by far than that improbable passion? Is the blue of the sky then a dream? Was it devised by the earth, to which I belonged, on account of the fleeting, white-hot intoxication Achieved for a moment by waxen wings? And did the heavens abet the plan to punish me? To punish me for not believing in myself Or for believing too much; Too eager to know where lay my allegiance or vainly assuming that already I knew all; for wanting to fly off to the unknown or the known: Both of them a single, blue speck of an idea?"

"Doesn?t it seem as though her heart were a green flame? Perhaps it?s the cold green heart of a small green snake, with a minute flaw in it, the kind of small green snake that slithers from branch to branch in the jungle, passing itself off as a vine. What?s more, perhaps when she gave me the ring with such a gentle, loving expression, she wanted me to draw such a meaning from it someday."

"Do all today is not only an imitation? Is the present time it is not just an imitation of reality, everything around us is in fact a make-it-that-is-so. And peace is the only true-to-that-is-peace, and the economic crisis is virtual, not the right, but the war is only an imitation, and imitation and economic progress. But, despite this, millions of people live and die in this apparent world. It goes without saying that they have to live and die; and they are just people. That in itself is quite understandable. Just as in all this make-it-that-is-so you cannot get for what they gave their lives. I am a man who has to do his best, otherwise nothing can be achieved."

"Dreams, memories, the sacred--they are all alike in that they are beyond our grasp. Once we are even marginally separated from what we can touch, the object is sanctified; it acquires the beauty of the unattainable, the quality of the miraculous. Everything, really, has this quality of sacredness, but we can desecrate it at a touch. How strange man is! His touch defiles and yet he contains the source of miracles."

"Even though sailed for many years, not days to get used to the storms, and every time you wonder if you will be deposited life."

"Each instant brought them, more momentous than the explosion of Krakatoa. It was only that no one noticed. We are too accustomed to the absurdity of existence. The loss of a universe is not worth taking seriously."

"Everybody's the same. People are all the same. But it?s the prerogative of youth to think it?s not so."

"Even though still young, I did not know what it was to experience the clear-cut feeling of platonic love. Was this a misfortune? But what meaning could ordinary misfortune have for me? The vague uneasiness surrounding my sexual feelings had practically made the carnal world an obsession with me. my curiosity was actually purely intellectual, but I became skillful at convincing myself that it was carnal desire incarnate. What is more, I mastered the art of delusion until I could regard myself as a truly lewd-minded person. As a result I assumed the stylish airs of an adult, of a man of the world. I affected the attitude of being completely tired of women. Thus it was that I first became obsessed with the idea of the kiss. Actually the action called a kiss represented nothing more for me than some place where my spirit could seek shelter. I can say so now. But at that time, in order to delude myself that this desire was animal passion. I had to undertake an elaborate disguise of mu true self. The unconscious feeling of guilt resulting from this false pretense stubbornly insisted that I play a conscious and false role."

"Even when we're with someone we love, we're foolish enough to think of her body and soul as being separate. To stand before the person we love is not the same as loving her true self, for we are only apt to regard her physical beauty as the indispensable mode of her existence. When time and space intervene, it is possible to be deceived by both, but on the other hand, it is equally possible to draw twice as close to her real self."

"Everything has turned sour, I?ll never be carried away with joy again. There?s a terrible clarity dominating everything. As though the world were made of crystal so that you only have to flick part of it with your fingernail for a tiny shudder to run through it all.? And then the loneliness?it?s something that burns. Like hot thick soup you can?t bear inside your mouth unless you blow on it again and again. And there it is, always in front of me. In its heavy white bowl of thick china, dirty and dull as an old pillow. Who is it that keeps forcing it on me? I?ve been left all alone. I?m burning with desire. I hate what?s happened to me. I?m lost and I don?t know where I?m going. What my heart wants it can?t have ? my little private joys, rationalizations, self-deceptions?all gone! All I have left is a flame of longing for times gone by, for what I?ve lost. Growing old for nothing. I?m left with a terrible emptiness. What can life offer me but bitterness? Alone in my room ? alone all through the nights ? cut off from the world and from everyone in it by my own despair. And if I cry out, who is there to hear me?"

"For an artist to do creative work, he needs at once physical health and some physio-mental ill health. He needs both serenity and gloom."

"Fall in love with a special privilege granted to a person allows his outward appearance, charm and sensual, and his ignorance of procedure, and the lack of organization, and the absence of perception, to form a kind of picture-fiction from the others."

"For a long time I had not approached the forbidden fruit called happiness, but it was now tempting me with a melancholy persistence. I felt as though Sonoko were an abyss above which I stood poised."

"For me, beauty is always retreating from one?s grasp: the only thing I consider important is what existed once, or ought to have existed."

"Glory, as anyone knows, is bitter stuff."

"For everything sacred has the substance of dreams and memories, and so we experience the miracle of what is separated from us by time or distance suddenly being made tangible. Dreams, memories, the sacred?they are all alike in that they are beyond our grasp. Once we are even marginally separated from what we can touch, the object is sanctified; it acquires the beauty of the unattainable, the quality of the miraculous. Everything, really, has this quality of sacredness, but we can desecrate it at a touch. How strange man is! His touch defiles and yet he contains the source of miracles."

"For clearly it is impossible to touch eternity with one hand and life with the other."

"From the beginning it was all my imagination painted in despair, strangely accomplished and likeness of itself in longing"

"He felt that taking naps was much more beneficial than confronting catastrophes."

"He found himself in the strange predicament all sailors share: essentially he belonged neither to the land nor to the sea. Possibly a man who hates the land should dwell on shore forever. Alienation and the long voyages at sea will compel him once again to dream of it, torment him with the absurdity of longing for something that he loathes."

"He heard the sound of waves striking the shore, and it was as though the surging of his young blood was keeping time with the movement of the sea's great tides. It was doubtless because nature itself satisfied his need that Shinji felt no particular lack of music in his everyday life."

"He was having to life blacker blackness of the most cruel lack for fun, to be forced every day to see a man trying to understand something deeper inside, and succeed in it."

"He was always thinking of death, and this had so refined him that the physical seemed to fall away, freeing him from the pull of earth and enabling him to walk about some distance above its surface. Indeed he felt that even his distaste and hatred for the affairs of the world no longer stirred him deeply."

"Her desire was close to that of the person who drowns himself; he does not necessarily covet death so much as what comes after the drowning?something different from what he had before, at least a different world."

"He'd been mistaken in thinking that if he killed himself the sordid bourgeois world would perish with him."

"He was like a husband so jealous that he insists his wife have the very dreams he has."

"He was in a room of the Gesshuuji, which he had thought it would be impossible to visit. The approach of death had made the visit easy, had unloosed the weight that held him in the depths of being. It was even a comfort to think, from the light repose the struggle up the hill had brought him, that Kiyoaki, struggling against illness up that same road, had been given wings to soar with by the denial that awaited him."

"Her nose was perfect; her lips exquisite. Like a master placing a go stone on the board after long deliberation, he placed the details of her beauty one by one in the misty dark and drew back to savour them."

"Held in the custody of childhood is a locked chest; the adolescent, by one means or another, tries to open it. The chest is opened: inside, there is nothing. So he reaches a conclusion: the treasure chest is always like this, empty. From this point on, he gives priority to this assumption of his rather than to his reality. In other words, he is now a ?grown-up?. Yet was the chest really empty? Wasn?t there something vital, something invisible to the eye that got away at the very moment it was opened?"

"His conviction of having no purpose in life other than to act as a distillation of poison was part of the ego of an eighteen-year-old. He had resolved that his beautiful white hands would never be soiled or calloused. He wanted to be like a pennant, dependent on each gusting wind. The only thing that seemed valid to him was to live for the emotions--gratuitous and unstable, dying only to quicken again, dwindling and flaring without direction or purpose."

"His suffering, which I accept, I have to accept it as a treasure. There is not a gold miner who mined gold only. Washer removed sand from the river bed, blindly, without thinking what's going to pull out of the water. He would like to see it in the sand and gold, but perhaps it will not be at all, he must come to terms with it. No one has the privilege to choose in advance what he wants."

"History knew the truth. History was the most inhuman product of humanity. It scooped up the whole of human will and, like the goddess Kali in Calcutta, dripped blood from its mouth as it bit and crunched."

"How dearly, indeed, I loved my pit, my dusky room, the area of my desk with its piles of books! How I enjoyed introspection, shrouded myself in cogitation; with what rapture did I listen for the rustling of frail insects in the thickets of my nerves!"

"However, whatever frightening mask it might assume, the national spirit in its original state was of pristine whiteness. Traveling through a country like Thailand, Honda realized more clearly than ever the simplicity and purity of things Japanese, like transparent stream water through which one could glimpse pebbles below, or the probity of Shinto rites. Honda?s life was not imbued with such spirit. Like the majority of Japanese he ignored it, behaving as though it did not exist and surviving by escaping from it. All his life he had dodged things fundamental and artless: white silk, clear cold water, the zigzag white paper of the exorciser?s staff fluttering in the breeze, the sacred precinct marked by a torii, the gods? dwelling in the sea, the mountains, the vast ocean, the Japanese sword with its glistening blade so pure and sharp. Not only Honda, but the vast majority of Westernized Japanese, could no longer stand such intensely native elements."

"However, as words become particularized, and as men begin - in however small a way - to use them in personal, arbitrary ways, so their transformation into art begins. It was words of this kind that, descending on me like a swarm of winged insects, seized on my individuality and sought to shut me up within it. Nevertheless, despite the enemy's depredations upon my person, I turned their universality - at once a weapon and a weakness - back on them, and to some extent succeeded in using words to universalize to my own individuality."

"Human beings, Isao realized, could descend to communicating their feelings like dogs barking in the distance on a cold night."

"Human beings ? they go on being born and dying, dying and being born. It's kind of boring, isn't it?"

"Human life is limited but I would like to live forever."

"How oddly situated a man is apt to find himself at age thirty-eight! His youth belongs to the distant past. Yet the period of memory beginning with the end of youth and extending to the present has left him not a single vivid impression. And therefore he persists in feeling that nothing more than a fragile barrier separates him from his youth. He is forever hearing with the utmost clarity the sounds of this neighboring domain, but there is no way to penetrate the barrier. Honda felt that his youth had ended with the death of Kiyoaki Matsugae. At that moment something real within him, something that had burned with a vibrant brilliance, suddenly ceased to be. Now, late at night, when Honda grew weary of his legal drafts, he would pick up the dream journal that Kiyoaki had left him and turn over its pages? Since then eighteen years had passed. The border between dream and memory had grown indistinct in Honda?s mind. Because the words contained in this journal, his only souvenir of his friend, had been traced there by Kiyoaki?s own hand, it had profound significance for Honda."

"I am one who has always been interested only in the edges, the outlying regions of the body and the outlying regions of the spirit. The depths hold no interest for me; I leave them to others for they are shallow, commonplace."

"I come out on the stage expecting the audience to weep, and instead they burst out laughing."

"I cried sobbingly until at last those visions reeking with blood came to comfort me. And then I surrendered myself to them, to those deplorably brutal visions, my most intimate friends."

"I felt as though I owned the whole world. And little wonder, because at no time are we ever in such complete possession of a journey, down to its last nook and cranny , as when we are busy with preparations for it. After that, there remains only the journey itself, which is nothing but the process through which we lose our ownership of it. This is what makes travel so utterly fruitless."

"I do not mean to say that I viewed those desires of mine that deviated from accepted standards as normal and orthodox; nor do I mean that I labored under the mistaken impression that my friends possessed the same desires. Surprisingly enough, I was so engrossed in tales of romance that I devoted all my elegant dreams to thoughts of love between man and maid, and to marriage, exactly as though I were a young girl who knew nothing of the world. I tossed my love for Omi onto the rubbish heap of neglected riddles, never once searching deeply for its meaning. Now when I write the word love, when I write affection, my meaning is totally different from my understanding of the words at that time. I never even dreamed that such desires as I had felt toward Omi might have a significant connection with the realities of my life."

"I do not exaggerate, but as I watched, my knees trembled and my forehead was covered with icy sweat. Once, years after our first meeting its details and overall appearance have contacted my soul in a musical harmony. But now I heard a deep silence, silence sovereignly. Here nothing flowed, nothing changed. Golden Temple stood towering over me like a terrifying pause after captivating harmony of powerful sounds."

"I felt the need to start living. Start living my real life? Even if it should be a simple charade and not my real life, the time had come when I had to take the start and advance in heavily dragging my feet."

"I felt the urgent need to start living. Start living my real life? Even if were to be a masquerade pure and simple and not at all my life, had come also the time when I had to I were on the way, that would pan my muddy feet"