Yukio Mishima Sun And Steel Quotes

The cynicism that regards hero worship as comical is always shadowed by a sense of physical inferiority.

Was I ignorant, then, when I was seventeen? I think not. I knew everything. A quarter-century's experience of life since then has added nothing to what I knew. The one difference is that at seventeen I had no 'realism'.

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

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.

I am one who has always been interested only in the edges of the body and the spirit, 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. What is there, then, at the outer most edge? Nothing, perhaps, save a few ribbons, dangling down into the void.

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!

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 satify 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 earger 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?

Any confrontation between weak, flabby flesh and death seemed to me absurdly inappropriate

It was the sea that made me begin thinking secretly about love more than anything else; you know, a love worth dying for, or a love that consumes you. To a man locked up in a steel ship all the time, the sea is too much like a woman. Things like her lulls and storms, or her caprice, or the beauty of her breast reflecting the setting sun, are all obvious. More than that, you’re in a ship that mounts the sea and rides her and yet is constantly denied her. It’s the old saw about miles and miles of lovely water and you can’t quench your thirst. Nature surrounds a sailor with all these elements so like a woman and yet he is kept as far as a man can be from her warm, living body. That’s where the problem begins, right there—I’m sure of it.

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.

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.

Longing at eighteen for an early demise, I felt myself unfitted for it. I lacked, in short, the muscles suitable for a dramatic death. And it deeply offended my romantic pride that it should be this unsuitability that had permitted me to survive the war.

Only through the group, I realised — through sharing the suffering of the group — could the body reach that height of existence that the individual alone could never attain. And for the body to reach that level at which the divine might be glimpsed, a dissolution of individuality was necessary. The tragic quality of the group was also necessary, the quality that constantly raised the group out of the abandon and torpor into which it was prone to lapse, leading it to an ever-mounting shared suffering and so to death, which was the ultimate suffering. The group must be open to death — which meant, of course, that it must be a community of warriors.

Words are a medium that reduces reality to abstraction for transmission to our reason, and in their power to corrode reality inevitably lurks the danger that the words themselves will be corroded too.

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

The groups of muscles that have become virtually unnecessary in modern life, though still a vital element of a man’s body, are obviously pointless from a practical point of view, and bulging muscles are as unnecessary as a classical education is to the majority of practical men. Muscles have gradually become something akin to classical Greek. To revive the dead language, the discipline of the steel was required; to change the silence of death into the eloquence of life, the aid of steel was essential.

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.

Ordinary bourgeois life held no force sufficiently compelling to drag one out into the chill drizzle without so much as an umbrella.

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.

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. By its subtle, infinitely varied operation, the steel restored the classical balance that the body had begun to lose, reinstating it in its natural form, the form that it should have had all along.

The cynics—well aware that there is nobody who despises the imagination so thoroughly as the dreamer

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.

They were not simply beautiful phrases, but a constant summons to superhuman behavior, words that demanded that the individual stake his very life on the attempt to climb to their own lofty heights.

At one time, I had been the type of boy who leaned at the window, forever watching out for unexpected events to come crowding in towards him. Though I might be unable to change the world myself, I could not but hope that the world would change of its own accord. As that kind of boy, with all the accompanying anxieties, the transformation of the world was an urgent necessity for me; it nourished me from day to day; it was something without which I could not have lived. The idea of the changing of the world was as much a necessity as sleep and three meals a day. It was the womb that nourished my imagination.

Before long, my blood would not permit a halt of even a day or two. Something ceaselessly set me to work; my body could no longer tolerate indolence, but began instantly to thirst for violent action, forever urging me on. Thus for many a day I led a life that others might well dismiss as frenzied obsession.

If my self was my dwelling, then my body resembled an orchard that surrounded it. I could either cultivate that orchard to its capacity or leave it for the weeds to run riot in. I was free to choose, but the freedom was not as obvious as it might seem. Many people, indeed, go so far as to refer to the orchards of their dwellings as “destiny.

For ideas are, in the long run, essentially foreign to human existence; and the body — receptacle of the involuntary muscles, of the internal organs and circulatory system over which it has no control — is foreign to the spirit, so that it is even possible for people to use the body as a metaphor for ideas, both being something quite alien to human existence as such.

In its essence, any art that relies on words makes use of their ability to eat away—of their corrosive function—just as etching depends on the corrosive power of nitric acid. Yet the simile is not accurate enough; for the copper and the nitric acid used in etching are on a par with each other, both being extracted from nature, while the relation of words to reality is not that of the acid to the plate. Words are a medium that reduces reality to abstraction for transmission to our reason, and in their power to corrode reality inevitably lurks the danger that the words themselves will be corroded too. It might be more appropriate, in fact, to liken their action to that of excess stomach fluids that digest and gradually eat away the stomach itself.

A little thought will make this clear. The sense of existence of a man with a massive physique must, in itself, be of the kind that embraces the whole world; for that man, considered as a object of knowledge, every-thing outside himself (including me) must necessarily be transferred onto the objective outside world experienced by his senses

Yet why must it be that men always seek out the depths, the abyss? Why must thought, like a plumb line, concern itself exclusively with vertical descent? Why was it not feasible for thought to change direction and climb vertically up, ever up, towards the surface? Why should the area of the skin, which guarantees a human being’s existence in space, be most despised and left to the tender mercies of the senses? I could not understand the laws governing the motion of thought—the way it was liable to get stuck in unseen chasms whenever it set out to go deep; or, whenever it aimed at the heights, to soar away into boundless and equally invisible heavens, leaving the corporeal form undeservedly neglected.

The group is a concept of uncommunicable shared suffering, a concept that ultimately rejects the agency of words.

If my self was my dwelling, then my body resembled an orchard that surrounded it.

I svetlost se još širi i ljudi slave dan. Ja se klonim sunca i bacam dušu u tamni bezdan.

The most appropriate type of daily life for me was a day-by-day world destruction;

Words are a medium that reduces reality to abstraction for transmission to our reason, and in their power to corrode reality inevitably lurks the danger that the words will be corroded too.

The reason perhaps why the testaments of the doomed are oddly remote from individual expression, impressing one rather with their stereotyped quality, is that they are the words of the flesh.

muscles. I came to feel that it was precisely because such an abode was required that the average intellectual failed to feel at home with thought that concerned itself with forms and surfaces.

By setting my fetish for reality and physical existence and my fetish for words on the same level, by making them an exact equation, I had already brought into sight the discovery I was to make later. From the moment I set the wordless body, full of physical beauty, in opposition to beautiful words that imitated physical beauty, thereby equating them as two things springing from one and the same conceptual source, I had in effect, without realizing it, already released myself from the spell of words. For it meant that I was recognizing the identical origin of the formal beauty in the wordless body and the formal beauty in words, and was beginning to seek a kind of platonic idea that would make it possible to put the flesh and words on the same footing. At that stage, the attempt to project words onto the body was already only a stone’s throw away. The attempt itself, of course, was strikingly unplatonic, but there remained only one more experience for me to pass through before I could start to talk of the ideas of the flesh and the loquacity of the body.

had always felt that such signs of physical individuality as a bulging belly (sign of spiritual sloth) or a flat chest with protruding ribs (sign of an unduly nervous sensibility) were excessively ugly, and I could not contain my surprise when I discovered that there were people who loved such signs. To me, these could only seem acts of shameless indecency, as though the owner were exposing his spiritual pudenda on the outside of his body.

El intelecto, lejos de ser un valor cultural inofensivo, me había sido otorgado únicamente como un arma, un medio de supervivencia. Así, las disciplinas físicas que más adelante serían tan necesarias para mi supervivencia se podían comparar en cierto sentido al modo en que una persona para quien el cuerpo ha sido el único medio de vida se embarca en un frenético intento de adquirir una educación intelectual cuando su juventud está en el lecho de muerte.

At the moment I am full of life, my whole body overflowing with youth and strength. It seems impossible that I shall be dead in three hours’ time. And yet...” When someone seeks to tell the truth, words always falter in this way. I can almost see him now, fumbling for words: not from shyness, nor from fear, for the naked truth inevitably produces this verbal stumbling; but, rather, as a sign of a certain rough quality about truth itself. The young man in question had no long-drawn-out void left in which to await the absolute, nor did he have time to wind things up with words in a leisurely way. As he hurtled towards death, his final everyday phrases seized on a moment when the feeling for life, like chloroform in the strange headiness it produces, had temporarily benumbed his spirit’s awareness of the end, and, like a well-loved dog leaping up at its master, came rushing out upon him, only to be dashed rudely aside.

Por mucho que el filósofo, en la soledad de su cuarto, medite sobre la idea de la muerte, seguirá siendo incapaz, mientras esté disociado del coraje físico que constituye el requisito previo para la conciencia, de empezar siquiera a comprenderla

Why must it be that men always seek out the depths, the abyss? Why must thought, like a plumb line, concern itself exclusively with vertical descent? Why was it not feasible for thought to change direction and climb vertically up, ever up, towards the surface?

[...] corpo e spirito non si fondono mai, non hanno mai potuto diventare simili. Non ho mai scoperto in un'azione fisica la gelida, terrificante soddisfazione dell'avventura intellettuale. Né ho mai assaporato nell'avventura intellettuale l'ardore dell'estasi, la calda tenebra dell'azione fisica. Da qualche parte entrambi dovrebbero congiungersi. Ma dove? [...] In qualche luogo deve esistere un principio più alto, che tenta di unire e di riconciliare il corpo con lo spirito. Pensai che quel principio fosse la morte.

Il principio della letteratura consiste nel controllare la morte e nell'usarla segretamente come forza motrice da utilizzare in false costruzioni, mentre la vita viene sempre tenuta in riserva, immagazzinata, miscelata opportunamente con la morte, irrorata di conservanti e dilapidata nei capolavori letterari che posseggono una lugubre vita eterna. O piuttosto sarebbe preferibile dire che l'arte «marziale» è morire insieme ai fiori, la «letteratura» è coltivare fiori imperituri. E i fiori che non appassiscono mai sono fiori artificiali. Così l' «unione della letteratura e dell'arte marziale» consiste nel riunire fiori che appassiscono a fiori imperituri, nel fare coesistere in se stessi le due esigenze più contrastanti dell'umanità, e quindi i sogni di realizzazione di quei desideri.

Quando tentano di esprimere la verità, le parole balbettano sempre in questo modo. Mi pare quasi di vederle annaspare. Non per vergogna, né per paura, ma perché è inevitabile che la nuda verità provochi un simile balbettare, espressione di una sua certa rozza natura.

The estrangement of body and spirit in modern society is an almost universal phenomenon, and there is nobody—the reader may feel—who would fail to deplore it; so that to prate emotionally about the body “thinking” or the “loquacity” of the flesh is going too far, and by using such phrases I am merely covering up my own confusion.

they gradually developed, they should, I reasoned, begin to assume a universal aspect, until finally they reached a point where they conformed to a general pattern in which individual differences ceased to exist. The universality thus attained would suffer no private corrosion, no betrayal. That was its most desirable trait in my eyes.

However much the closeted philosopher mulls over the idea of death, so long as he remains divorced from the physical courage that is a prerequisite for an awareness of it, he will remain unable even to begin to grasp it. I must make it clear that I am talking of "physical" courage; the "conscience of the intellectual" and "intellectual courage" are no concern of mine here.

If the concept of the hero is a physical one, then, just as Alexander the Great acquired heroic stature by modeling himself on Achilles, the conditions necessary for becoming a hero must be both a ban on originality and a true faithfulness to a classical model; unlike the words of a genius, the words of a hero must be selected as the most impressive and noble from among ready-made concepts.

Specifically, I cherished a romantic impulse towards death, yet at the same time I required a strictly classical body as its vehicle; a peculiar sense of destiny made me believe that the reason why my romantic impulse towards death remained unfulfilled in reality was the immensely simple fact that I lacked the necessary physical qualifications. A powerful, tragic frame and sculpturesque muscles were indispensable in a romantically noble death. Any confrontation between weak, flabby flesh and death seemed to me absurdly inappropriate. Longing at eighteen for an early demise, I felt myself unfitted for it. I lacked, in short, the muscles suitable for a dramatic death. And it deeply offended my romantic pride that it should be this unsuitability that had permitted me to survive the war.

One letter that still remains very vivid in my mind was written in pencil on a piece of rice-paper in a youthful, almost careless scribble. If my memory is not mistaken, it was to the following effect, and broke off abruptly in just this fashion: "At the moment I am full of life, my whole body overflowing with youth and strength. It seems impossible that I shall be dead in three hours’ time. And yet...

a peculiar sense of destiny made me believe that the reason why my romantic impulse towards death remained unfulfilled in reality was the immensely simple fact that I lacked the necessary physical qualifications. A powerful, tragic frame and sculpturesque muscles were indispensable in a romantically noble death. Any confrontation between weak, flabby flesh and death seemed to me absurdly inappropriate.

The acceptance of suffering as a proof of courage was the theme of primitive initiation rites in the distant past, and all such rites were at the same time ceremonies of death and resurrection. Men have by now forgotten the profound hidden struggle between consciousness and the body that exists in courage, and physical courage in particular. Consciousness is generally considered to be passive, and the active body to constitute the essence of all that is bole and daring; yet in the drama of physical courage the roles are, in fact, reversed. The flesh beats a steady retreat into its function of self-defense, while it is clearly consciousness that controls the decision that sends the body soaring into self-abandonment. It is the ultimate in clarity of consciousness that constitutes one of the strongest contributing factors in self-abandonment.

the existence of the muscles vanished into thin air. And yet, it was then that the muscles played their most essential function, grinding up with their sturdy, invisible teeth that ambiguous, relative sense of existence and substituting for it an unqualified sense of transparent, peerless power that required no object at all. Even the muscles themselves no longer existed. I was enveloped in a sense of power as transparent as light.

The earth is surrounded by death. The upper regions, where there is no air, are crowded with death pure and unalloyed; it gazes down on humanity going about its business far below and bound by its physical conditions on earth, yet very seldom does it bring bodily death to man, since those same physical conditions prevent him from climbing this far. For man to encounter the universe as he is, with uncovered countenance, is death.

Before one realizes it, the true face is ravaged by anxiety and emotion; one does not perceive that it drags last night’s fatigue like a heavy chain, nor does one realize the boorishness of exposing such a face to the sun. It is thus that men lose their manliness. The reason is that once it has lost the natural bright- ness of youth, the manly face of the warrior must needs be a false face; it must be manufactured as a matter of policy.

¡Qué ironía! En un período en que el cáliz sin futuro de la catástrofe estaba a rebosar, yo había superado las pruebas para beber de él. Me había ido lejos, y cuando, tras un prolongado adiestramiento, había vuelto pertrechado con todas las aptitudes necesarias, fue para encontrar el cáliz vacío, fríamente visible su fondo; y yo con más de cuarenta años. Por si eso fuera poco, el único líquido que podía apagar mi sed era el que otros habían apurado antes que yo.

Consciousness is generally considered to be passive, and the active body to constitute the essence of all that is bold and daring; yet in the drama of physical courage the roles are, in fact, reversed. The flesh beats a steady retreat into its function of selfdefense, while it is clear consciousness that controls the decision that sends the body soaring into selfabandonment. It is the ultimate in clarity of consciousness that constitutes one of the strongest contributing factors in self-abandonment.

¿Será, entonces, que pertenezco a los cielos? ¿Por qué, si no, persistirían los cielos en clavar en mí su azul mirada, instándome, y a mi mente, a subir cada vez más, a penetrar en la bóveda celeste, tirando de mí sin cesar hacia unas alturas muy por encima de los humanos? ¿Por qué, cuando se ha estudiado a fondo el equilibrio y se ha calculado el vuelo hasta sus últimos detalles de manera a eliminar todo elemento aberrante: por qué, con todo, ese afán de remontarse ha de parecer, en sí mismo, tan próximo a la locura?

Siempre había pensado que esos signos de individualidad física como un vientre abultado (señal de desidia espiritual) o un pecho liso enseñando las costillas (señal de una sensibilidad indebidamente inquieta) eran de una fealdad considerable, y no pude contener mi sorpresa cuando descubrí que había personas que adoraban esa clase de signos. A mí me parecían puros actos de impúdica indecencia, como si su propietario hubiera expuesto sus partes pudendas espirituales fuera del cuerpo. Representaban una forma de narcisismo que yo nunca pude perdonar.

On the other hand, when art considers itself as the reality and action as the falsehood, it once more envisages that falsehood as the peak of its own ultimate fictional world; it has been forced to realize that its own death is no longer backed up by the falsehood, that hard on the heels of the reality of its own work came the reality of death. This death is a fearful death, the death that descends on the human being who has never lived; yet he can at least dream, ultimately, of the existence in the world of action—the falsehood—of a death that is other than his own.

The nature of this steel is odd. I found that as I increased its weight little by little, the effect was like a pair of scales: the bulk of muscles placed, as it were, on the other pan increased proportionately, as though the steel had a duty to maintain a strict balance between the two. Little by little, moreover, the properties of my muscles came increasingly to resemble those of the steel. This slow development, I found, was remarkably similar to the process of education, which remodels the brain intellectually by feeding it with progressively more difficult matter.

I fasci di muscoli, ormai quasi superflui nella vita contemporanea, sono ancora elementi vitali nella struttura del corpo maschile, ma è evidente la loro inutilità nella vita quotidiana: i muscoli non sono necessari, proprio come non è necessaria un'educazione classica per la grande maggioranza degli uomini pratici. I muscoli erano diventati progressivamente simili alla lingua greca antica. Per resuscitare quella lingua morta era necessaria un'educazione impartita dall'acciaio, per ribaltare il silenzio della morte nell'eloquenza della vita era essenziale l'aiuto dell'acciaio.

Just as muscles slowly increase their resemblance to steel, so we are gradually fashioned by the world; and although neither the steel nor the world can very well possess a sense of their own existence, idle analogy leads us unwittingly into the illusion that both do, in fact, possess such a sense. Otherwise, we feel powerless to check up on our own sense of existence, and Atlas, for example, would gradually come to regard the globe on his shoulders as something akin to himself. Thus our sense of existence seeks after some object, and can only live in a false world of relativity.

Cuando examino atentamente mi primera infancia, me doy cuenta de que mi recuerdo de las palabras precede con mucho a mi recuerdo de la carne. Imagino que, en general, el cuerpo precede al lenguaje. En mi caso, lo primero en venir fueron las palabras; después —tardíamente, a todas luces con la máxima renuencia y ya revestida de conceptos— vino la carne. Estaba ya, huelga decirlo, tristemente malograda por las palabras. Primero viene el pilar de madera, luego la termita que se alimenta de él. Pero en lo que a mí respecta, las termitas estaban allí desde el principio y el pilar de madera surgió más tarde, medio carcomido ya.

To embrace suffering is the constant role of physical courage; and physical courage is, as it were, the source of that taste for understanding and appreciating death that, more than anything else, is a prime condition for making true awareness of death possible. However much the closeted philosopher mulls over the idea of death, so long as he remains divorced from the physical courage that is a prerequisite for an awareness of it, he will remain unable even to begin to grasp it. I must make it clear that I am talking of “physical” courage; the “conscience of the intellectual” and “intellectual courage” are no concern of mine here.

Yet that success lay in being different from others, and was essentially at variance with the origins and early development of words. Nothing, in fact, is so strange as the glorification of the verbal arts. Seeming at first glance to strive after universality, in fact they concern themselves with subtle ways of betraying the fundamental function of words, which is to be universally applicable. The glorification of individual style in literature signifies precisely that. The epic poems of ancient times are, perhaps, an exception, but every literary work with its author's name standing at its head is no more than a beautiful "perversion of words.

existence of the muscles vanished into thin air. And yet, it was then that the muscles played their most essential function, grinding up with their sturdy, invisible teeth that ambiguous, relative sense of existence and substituting for it an unqualified sense of transparent, peerless power that required no object at all. Even the muscles themselves no longer existed. I was enveloped in a sense of power as transparent as light. It is scarcely to be wondered at that in this pure sense of power that no amount of books or intellectual analysis could ever capture, I should discover a true antithesis of words. And indeed it was this that by gradual stages was to become the focus of my whole thinking.

why must it be that men always seek out the depths, the abyss ? Why must thought, like a plumb line, concern itself exclusively with vertical descent? Why was it not feasible for thought to change direction and climb vertically up, ever up, towards the surface? Why should the area of the skin, which guarantees a human being's existence in space, be most despised and left to the tender mercies of the senses? I could not understand the laws governing the motion of thought—the way it was liable to get stuck in unseen chasms whenever it set out to go deep; or, whenever it aimed at the heights, to soar away into boundless and equally invisible heavens, leaving the corporeal form undeservedly neglected.

On such occasions, something unknown compels me, almost tears me away from the warm fireside. There is no reluctance or hesitation: I gladly go to meet the mes- senger from the ends of the earth (in most cases he has some connection with death or pleasure or instinct) and, in the instant of my departure, I abandon everything that is comfortable and familiar. In the past, though, the voice that had called me from without had not corresponded precisely to the voice from within. This, I believe, is because I was unable to meet the call from without with my body, managing barely to do so with words instead. I was familiar, it is true, with the sweet pain that occurred when it became entangled in the complex mesh of ideas, but I was ignorant as yet of the deep-rooted joy produced when the two types of summons, meeting in the body, find themselves perfectly matched.

According to my definition of tragedy, the tragic pathos is born when the perfectly average sensibility momentarily takes unto itself a privileged nobility that keeps others at a distance, and not when a special type of sensibility vaunts its own special claims. It follows that he who dabbles in words can create tragedy, but cannot participate in it. It is necessary, moreover, that the “privileged nobility” find its basis strictly in a kind of physical courage. The elements of intoxication and superhuman clarity in the tragic are born when the average sensibility, endowed with a given physical strength, encounters that type of privileged moment especially designed for it. Tragedy calls for an anti-tragic vitality and ignorance, and above all for a certain “inappropriateness.” If a person is at times to draw close to the divine, then under normal conditions he must be neither divine nor anything approaching it.

Questo era anche un esempio della corrispondenza tra il nostro corpo e il nostro spirito: il corpo e lo spirito, se governati da un’idea, tendono immediatamente a creare un piccolo universo regolato da un «falso ordine». Benché rappresenti una specie di pausa, questo appare invece come un’attività centripeta quanto mai dinamica. La funzione plastica con cui il corpo e lo spirito creano per un breve intervallo un piccolo universo è simile all’opera di Un’illusione; le sensazioni effimere di felicità della nostra vita devono molto a questo «falso ordine». Si potrebbe anche chiamarlo funzione difensiva della vita contro il caos esterno, simile al modo in cui un porcospino si arrotola su se stesso. Ne conseguiva la possibilità di rompere il «falso ordine», costruirne un altro e, capovolgendo questo solido processo formativo della vita, indirizzarlo verso la realizzazione dei propri desideri. Attuai subito quel «pensiero». Esso, più che un’idea, era un proposito che il sole mi donava giorno per giorno.

How many lazy men's truths have been admitted in the name of imagination! How often has the term imagination been used to prettify the unhealthy tendency of the soul to soar off in a boundless quest after truth, leaving the body where it always was! How often have men escaped from the pains of their own bodies with the aid of that sentimental aspect of the imagination that feels the ills of others' flesh as its own! And how often has the imagination unquestioningly exalted spiritual sufferings whose relative value was in fact excessively difficult to gauge ! And when this type of arrogance of the imagination links together the artist's act of expression and its accomplices, there comes into existence a kind of fictional "thing"—the work of art—and it is this interference from a large number of such "things" that has steadily perverted and altered reality. As a result, men end up by coming into contact only with shadows and lose the courage to make themselves at home with the tribulations of their own flesh.

Here, I felt, I was gaining a clue to an inner understanding of the cult of the hero. The cynicism that regards all hero worship as comical is always shadowed by a sense of physical inferiority. Invariably, it is the man who believes himself to be physically lacking in heroic attributes who speaks mockingly of the hero; and when he does so, how dishonest it is that his phraseology, partaking ostensibly of a logic so universal and general, should not (or at least should be assumed by the general public not to) give any clue to his physical characteristics. I have yet to hear hero worship mocked by a man endowed with what might justly be called heroic physical attributes. Facile cynicism, invariably, is related to feeble muscles or obesity, while the cult of the hero and a mighty nihilism are always related to a mighty body and well-tempered muscles. For the cult of the hero is, ultimately, the basic principle of the body, and in the long run is intimately involved with the contrast between the robustness of the body and the destruction that is death.

I sensed in it an absolute rest for the spirit, a beatifica- tion of the flesh. Summer, white clouds, the empty blue of the sky following the final lesson of the day, and the touch of nostalgic sadness tinging the glitter of sunlight filtering through the trees, induced a sense of intoxication. I existed.. . . How complex were the procedures necessary to attain this existence! Within it, a large number of concepts that for me were close to fetishes achieved direct association with my body and senses, quite independently of the agency of words. The army, physical training, summer, clouds, sunset, the green of summer grasses, the white training suit, sweat, muscle, and just the faintest whiff of death. . . . Nothing was lacking; every piece of the mosaic was in place. I had absolutely no need of any others, and thus no need of words. The world I was in was made up of conceptual elements that were as pure as angels; all foreign elements had been temporarily swept aside, and I overflowed with the infinite joy of being one with the world, a joy akin to that produced by cold water on skin warmed by the summer sun.

De este modo, me decía yo, había conseguido pista sobre la comprensión íntima del culto al héroe. El cinismo, que considera cómica toda veneración del héroe, se ve siempre ensombrecido por un sentimiento de inferioridad física. Invariablemente, es el hombre que se considera físicamente desprovisto de atributos heroicos quien se mofa del héroe; y cuando lo hace, cuán infamante es que su grandilocuencia, teniendo ostensiblemente rasgos de una lógica tan universal y general, no ofrezca (o así al menos parece entenderlo el gran público) ninguna pista sobre sus características físicas. Aún no he oído burlarse del culto al héroe a ningún hombre dotado de lo que bien podríamos llamar atributos físicos heroicos. El cinismo fácil, invariablemente, va acompañado de una musculatura fofa o de obesidad, mientras que el culto al héroe y un nihilismo poderoso van siempre acompañados de un cuerpo pujante y unos músculos bien templados. El culto al héroe, en definitiva, es el principio básico del cuerpo, y a la postre guarda una íntima relación con el contraste entre la robustez del cuerpo y esa destrucción que es la muerte.

The group is a concept of uncommunicable shared suffering, a concept that ultimately rejects the agency of words. For shared suffering, more than anything else, is the ultimate opponent of verbal expression. Not even the mightiest Weltschmerz in the heart of the solitary writer, billowing upwards to the starry heavens like some great circus tent, can create a community of shared suffering. For though verbal expression may convey pleasure or grief, it cannot convey shared pain; though pleasure may be readily fired by ideas, only bodies, placed under the same circumstances, can experience a common suffering. Only through the group, I realised—through sharing the suffering of the group—could the body reach that height of existence that the individual alone could never attain. And for the body to reach that level at which the divine might be glimpsed, a dissolution of the individuality was necessary. The tragic quality of the group was also necessary—the quality that constantly raised the group out of the abandon and torpor into which it was prone to lapse, leading it on to ever-mounting shared suffering and so to death, which was the ultimate suffering. The group must be open to death, which meant, of course, that it must be a community of warriors… . In the dim light of early morning I was running, one of a group. A cotton towel with the symbol of a red sun on it was tied about my forehead, and I was stripped to the waist in the freezing air. Through the common suffering, the shared cries of encouragement, the shared pace, and the chorus of voices, I felt the slow emergence, like the sweat that gradually beaded my skin, of that “tragic” quality that is the affirmation of identity. It was a flame of the flesh, flickering up faintly beneath the biting breeze—a flame, one might almost say, of nobility. The sense of surrendering one’s body to a cause gave new life to the muscles. We were united in seeking death and glory; it was not merely my personal quest. The pounding of the heart communicated itself to the group; we shared the same swift pulse. Self-awareness by now was as remote as the distant rumour of the town. I belonged to them, they belonged to me; the two formed an unmistakable “us.” To belong—what more intense form of existence could there be? Our small circle of oneness was a means to a vision of that vast, dimly gleaming circle of oneness. And—all the while foreseeing that this imitation of tragedy was, in the same way as my own narrow happiness, condemned to vanish with the wind, to resolve itself into nothing more than muscles that simply existed—I had a vision where something that, if I were alone, would have resolved back into muscles and words, was held fast by the power of the group and led me away to a far land, whence there would be no return. It was, perhaps, the beginning of my placing reliance on others, a reliance that was mutual; and each of us, by committing himself to this immeasurable power, belonged to the whole.

The steel faithfully taught me the correspondence between the spirit and the body: thus feeble emotions, it seemed to me, corresponded to flaccid muscles, sentimentality to a sagging stomach, and overimpressionability to an oversensitive, white skin. Bulging muscles, a taut stomach, and a tough skin, I reasoned, would correspond respectively to an intrepid fighting spirit, the power of dispassionate intellectual judgement, and a robust disposition. I hasten to point out here that I do not believe ordinary people to be like this. Even my own scanty experience is enough to furnish me with innumerable examples of timid minds encased within bulging muscles. Yet, as I have already pointed out, words for me came before the flesh, so that intrepidity, dispassionateness, robustness, and all those emblems of moral character summed up by words, needed to manifest themselves in outward, bodily tokens. For that reason, I told myself, I ought to endow myself with the physical characteristics in question as a kind of educative process. Beyond the educative process there also lurked another, romantic design. The romantic impulse that had formed an undercurrent in me from boyhood on, and that made sense only as the destruction of classical perfection, lay waiting within me. Like a theme in an operatic overture that is later destined to occur throughout the whole work, it laid down a definitive pattern for me before I had achieved anything in practice. Specifically, I cherished a romantic impulse towards death, yet at the same time I required a strictly classical body as its vehicle; a peculiar sense of destiny made me believe that the reason why my romantic impulse towards death remained unfulfilled in reality was the immensely simple fact that I lacked the necessary physical qualifications. A powerful, tragic frame and sculpturesque muscles were indispensable in a romantically noble death.

In order to explain what that was, I must start by describing the encounter between myself and the sun. In fact, this experience occurred on two occasions. It often happens that, long before the decisive meeting with a person from whom only death can thereafter part one, there is a brief brush elsewhere with that same person occurring with almost total unawareness on both sides. So it was with my encounter with the sun. My first—unconscious—encounter was in the summer of the defeat, in the year 1945. A relentless sun blazed down on the lush grass of that summer that lay on the borderline between the war and the postwar period—a borderline, in fact, that was nothing more than a line of barbed wire entanglements, half broken down, half buried in the summer weeds, tilting in all directions. I walked in the sun’s rays, but had no clear understanding of the meaning they held for me. Finespun and impartial, the summer sunlight poured down prodigally on all creation alike. The war ended, yet the deep green weeds were lit exactly as before by the merciless light of noon, a clearly perceived hallucination stirring in a slight breeze; brushing the tips of the leaves with my fingers, I was astonished that they did not vanish at my touch. That same sun, as the days turned to months and the months to years, had become associated with a pervasive corruption and destruction. In part, it was the way it gleamed so encouragingly on the wings of planes leaving on missions, on forests of bayonets, on the badges of military caps, on the embroidery of military banners; but still more, far more, it was the way it glistened on the blood flowing ceaselessly from the flesh, and on the silver bodies of flies clustering on wounds. Holding sway over corruption, leading youth in droves to its death in tropical seas and countrysides, the sun lorded it over that vast rusty-red ruin that stretched away to the distant horizon.