第一の手記.

then I noticed the pack of cigarettes in my other pocket. I took one out and started smoking. I felt like a man who settles down for a smoke after a job of work. I wanted to live.

it is a rather risky matter to discuss a happiness that has no need of words.

his sighs were sultry like the tidal breezes of full summer, fragrant with a smell of seaweed cast up upon the shore.

it was this combination —— one part unconscious belief, one part unconscious despair —— that so quickened my desires that they appeared to be desperate ambitions.

knowledge, you realise that things are unchangeable and at the same time are constantly being transformed.

what transforms this world is knowledge. do you see what I mean? nothing else can change anything in this world. knowledge alone is capable of transforming the world, while at the same time leaving it exactly as is. when you look at the world with

other people must be destroyed. in order that I might truly face the sun, the world itself must be destroyed.

I admitted to myself that I could never become an Omi and, upon further consideration, that my desire to become like Omi had in fact been love for Omi.

how cursed a thing it was! yes, in the cries of cicadas that echoed from the surrounding hills, I could hear this eternity, which was like a curse on my head, which had shut me up in golden plaster.

they rejected both life and death as I had seen them, for in both of these, the sun had a hand.

the men who indulged in nocturnal thought, it seemed to me, had without exception dry, lusterless skins and sagging stomachs. they sought to wrap up a whole epoch in a capacious night of ideas, and rejected in all its forms the sun that I had seen.

in the pupils of his eyes there lingered the mysterious and eternal horizon that the sea leaves as a keepsake deep in the eyes of all who are born at the seaside and forced to depart from it.

or was the moment teaching me how grotesque my isolation would appear to the eyes of love, and at the same time was I learning, from the reverse side of the lesson, my own incapacity for accepting love?

even the blossoming flowers will eventually scatter, who in this world shall remain unchanged? let us today, cross the mountains of impermanence and no longer have superficial dreams, nor be deluded.

you were born a farmer, weren't you?

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.

knowledge is the sea of humanity, the field of humanity, the general condition of human existence.

anything can become excusable when seen from the standpoint of a result.

I feigned an innocent optimism; I gradually perfected myself in the role of the farcical eccentric.

before the sea's repletion, a loneliness that outwardly resembled his, I wanted to savor it completely, through his very eyes.

my long — felt attraction toward the loneliness that filled Omi's life —— loneliness born of the fact that life had enslaved him —— had first made me want to possess the same quality; and now that I was experiencing, in this feeling of emptiness

my inherent deficiency of blood had first implanted in me the impulse to dream of bloodshed. And in its turn that impulse had caused me to lose more and more of the stuff of blood from my body, thereby further increasing my lust for blood.

such thing as beauty. what makes the illusion so strong, what imparts it with such a power of reality, is precisely knowledge. from the point of view of knowledge, beauty is never a consolation.

the beauty that you love so much —— is an illusion of the remaining part, the excessive part, which has been consigned to knowledge. it is an illusion of the “other way to bear life” which you mentioned. one could say that in fact there is no

exhaustion.

the realistic portion of my mind sensed the artificiality in the eternal protestations with which I persuaded myself that I was in love with her, and it fought back with this spiteful fatigue. there seemed to be some terrible poison in this mental

why, when balance has been strictly studied and flight calculated with the best of reason, till no aberrant elements, by rights, remain—— why, still, should the lust for the ascension seem, in itself, close to madness?

the past does not draw us back to the past. there are certain memories of the past that have strong steel springs and, when we who live in the present touch them, they are suddenly stretched taut and then they propel us into the future.

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?

how cursed a thing it was! yes, in the cries of cicadas that echoed from the surrounding hills, I could hear this eternity, which was like a curse on my head, which had shut me up in golden plaster.