Notes
4/5 rating.
- Buddhist elements of beauty & ugly
References:
- Rokuon-ji Temple, Kyoto
- (3) Mishima’s ‘Temple of the Golden Pavilion’ - a review : RSbookclub (reddit.com)
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWmg0245x-I
Quotes
pg 31: Summer holidays during my mourning period; curiously subdued summer holidays during the last phase of the war in 1944. My life as an acolyte passed smoothly and, as I think back on it, I feel that this was the last absolute holiday in my life. I can still vividly hear the cry of the cicada.
pg 32: It was quite natural that wars and unrest, piles of corpses and copious blood, should enrich the beauty of the Golden Temple. For this temple had been unconstructed by unrest, it had been built by numerous dark-hearted owners who had one general in their midst. The uncoordinated design of its three stories, in which the art historian could only see a blend of styles, had surely been evolved naturally from the search for a style that would crystallize all the surrounding unrest. If instead it had been built in one fixed style, the Golden Temple would have been unable to embrace the unrest and would certainly have collapsed long since.
pg 40: For us boys, war was a dreamlike sort of experience lacking any real substance, something like an isolation ward in which one is cut off from the meaning of life.
pg 40: This city was too anxious to preserve its old things just as they were; the multifarious shrines and temples were forgetting the memories of the red-hot ash that had been born from inside.
pg 61: Snow gives all of us a youthful feeling. And it would be quite untrue to say that I, who still had not reached my eighteenth birthday, now felt some youthful stirring within me?
pg 76: Cripples and lovely women are both tired of being looked at, they are weary of an existence that involves constantly being observed, they feel hemmed in; and they return the gaze by means of that very existence itself. The one who really looks is the one who wins.
pg 88: To see human beings in agony, to see them covered in blood and to hear their death groans, makes people humble. It makes their spirit delicate, bright, peaceful. It’s never at such times that we become cruel or bloodthirsty. No, it’s on a beautiful spring afternoon like this that people suddenly become cruel. It’s at a moment like this, don’t you think, while one’s vaguely watching the sun as it peeps through the leaves of the trees above a well-mown lawn? Every possible nightmare in the world, every possible nightmare in history, has come into being like this. But as one sits there in the clear daylight, it’s the idea of bloodstained figures fainting in agony that gives a clear outline of the nightmare and that helps to materialize the dream into reality.
pg 97 The cherry trees in Arashiyama, which were said to have been trans:planted in the thirteenth century from the famous trees on Mount Yoshino, had entirely lost their blossoms and were already putting forth their foliage. When the cherry-blossom season was finished, these trees could only be called by the name that one gives dead beauties.
pg 113: I understood that he disliked lasting beauty. His likings were limited to things such as music, which vanished instantly, or flower arrangements, which faded in a matter of days; he loathed architecture and literature.
pg 148: … an ineffable tenderness arouse within me, and I wondered whether the only human beings whom I was capable of loving were not, in fact, dead people. Be that as it might, how easy dead people were to love compared to those who were still alive!
pg 162: I continued to neglect my studies, and during the lovely days from late spring until early summer I spent my time visiting various shrines and temples that one could enter without paying. I used to walk as long as my legs would carry me.
pg 197: It’s not always so easy. But if you start acting in a different way, people soon come to accept that as being normal for you. They’re very forgetful, you see.
pg 204: The beauty of the individual detail itself was always filled with uneasiness. It dreamed of perfection, but it knew no completion and was invariably lured on to the next beauty, the unknown beauty. The adumbration of beauty contained in one detail was linked with the subsequent adumbration of beauty, and so it was that the various adumbrations of a beauty which did not exist had become the underlying motif of the Golden Temple.
pg 205: Action is now simply a kind of superfluity for me. It has jutted out of life, it has jutted out of my own will, and now it stands before me, like a separate, cold steel mechanism, waiting to be put in motion. It is as if there is not the slightest connection between me and my action.