Death

Whenever I feel bad, I always think of Mishima:

'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.'

Did you know his favorite author was Thomas Mann? Incidentally, Thomas Mann was quite glowing about Herman Hesse's Glass Bead Game, a book I have attempted to read three times. In vain. This failure annoys me beyond anything. I tell myself I am not ready. Just as I'm not ready for Virginia Woolf, except maybe Orlando, and that because of Tilda Swinton and because Borges describes it as 'sparkling'.

Mishima. Never before and never again will there ever be words as elegantly violent. Here was someone who really understood cruelty - cruel love, cruel beauty, cruel silence; even how art can be cruel, un-redemptive. After watching the biopic Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, I was devastated for days. Even now, this pathetic hollowness I find myself in recalls the profound abyss of his work and his life - calls like a false note to his true one. He wrote so beautifully, with such feeling for the sensual world. I think at heart he was a gentle person. It might have been a different life and a different art in another time, or place. But it's lesser artists like me who ever have those kinds of thoughts - always thinking elsewhere, never looking at things where and how they are.

That's why I think about Mishima. He tempers these ridiculous vapours of mine into something sharp, like steel:

'Animals don't need knowledge or anything of the sort to make life bearable. But human beings do need something, and with knowledge they can make the very intorelableness of life a weapon, though at the same time that intorelableness is not reduced in the slightest. That's all there is to it.'