Sun And Steel by Yukio Mishima

November 18, 2020

Notable Lines

One day, it occurred to me to set about cultivating my orchard for all I was worth. For my purpose, I used sun and steel. Unceasing sunlight and implements fashioned of steel became the chief elements in my husbandry. Little by little, the orchard began to bear fruit, and thoughts of the body came to occupy a large part of my consciousness. [4]
In the average person, I imagine, the body precedes language. In my case, words came first of all; [4]
First comes the pillar of plain wood, then the white ants that feed on it. But for me, the white ants were there from the start, and the pillar of plain wood emerged tardily, already half eaten away. [4]
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. [4]
I had an unconscious presentiment of the subtle, fastidious laws of words, and was aware of the necessity of avoiding as far as possible coming into contact with reality via words if one was to profit from their positive corrosive function and escape their negative aspect. [6]
The natural corollary of such a tendency was that I should openly admit the existence of reality and the body only in fields where words had no part whatsoever; thus reality and the body became synonymous for me, the objects, almost, of a kind of fetishism. [6]
This antimony rested on the assumption that I myself from the outset was devoid of the flesh, of reality, of action. It was true, indeed, that the flesh came late to me at the beginning, but I was waiting for it with words. [6]
I didn't know that a man's body never shows itself as "existence". But as I saw things, it ought to have made itself apparent, clearly and unequivocally, as existence. It naturally followed that when it did show itself unmistakably as a terrifying paradox of existence - as a form of existence that rejected existence - I was as panic-stricken as though I had come across some monster, and loathed it accordingly. It never occurred to me that other men - all men without exception - were the same. [6]
Those blue skies, though, were unusual skies, such as I might never see again in my life: one moment strung up high aloft, the next plunged to the depths; constantly shifting, a strange compound of lucidity and madness.[9]
...provided certain physical conditions are equal and a certain physical burden shared, so long as an equal physical stress is savored and an identical intoxication overtakes all alike, then differences of individual sensibility are restricted by countless factors to an absolute minimum. [9]
It follows that he who dabbles in words can create tragedy, but cannot participate in it. [10]
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? [16]
With the surface, on the other hand, which is visible to everybody, training of the body must take precedence over training of thought if it is to create and supervise its own ideas. [17]
Both body and mind, through an inevitable tendency that one might almost call a natural law, are inclined to lapse into automatism, but I have found by experience that a large stream may be deflected by digging a small channel. [18]
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. [19]
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.
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 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. [20]
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. [21]
In actual fat words, armed with their abstract function, originally put in their appearance as a working of the logos designed to bring order to the chaos of the world of concrete objects, and expression was essentially an attempt to turn the abstract functioning back on itself and, like an electric current that flows in reverse, summon up a world of phenomena with the aid of words alone. [27]
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! [28]
I had perceived dimply, too, that the only physical proof of the existence of consciousness was suffering. [30]
My only interest lay in following consciousness through to its extreme limits, so as to discover at what point it was converted into unconscious power. That being so, what surer witness to the persistence of consciousness to its outer limits could I have found than physical suffering? [31]
One's own blow, one's own strength, creates a kind of hollow. A blow is successful if, at that instant, the opponent's body fits into that hollow in space and assumes a form precisely identical with it. [31]
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; [33]
If the solemnity and dignity of the body arise solely from the element of mortality that lurks within it, then the road that leads to death, I reasoned, must have some private path connecting with pain, suffering, and the continuing consciousness that is proof of life. [34]
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 thinking of "physical" courage; the "conscience of the intellectual" and "intellectual courage" are no concern of mine here. [36]
I could no longer believe that it was purely an intellectual quality of my own that the copper of excitement should be lined with the silver of awareness. [37]
My ideal style would have had the grave beauty of polished wood in the entrance hall of a samurai mansion on a winter's day. [38]
...by means of a process of diplomatic selection within the spirit, I sought to avoid the morbid influence exerted on men by indulgence in the imagination. [39]
...the two poles within me began to maintain a balance, and the generator of my mind, so to speak, switched from a direct to an alternating current. [40]
In literature, death is held in check yet at the same time used as a driving force; strength is devoted to the construction of empty fictions; life is held in reserve, blended to just the right degree with death, treated with preservatives, and lavished on the production of works of art that posses a weird eternal life. [41]
Of such is the beauty of the suicide squad, which is recognized as beauty not only in the spiritual sense but, by men in general, in an ultra-erotic sense also. [45]
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. [46]
It happened at dusk on May 25, a beautiful day in early summer. I was attached to a parachute squad; [49]
...seeing is the antithesis of existing. [54]
Having concerned myself from the outset of my literary life with methods of concealing rather than revealing myself, I marveled at the function of the uniform in the army. Just as the finest cloak of invisibility for words is muscle, so the fines cloak of invisibility for the body is the uniform. [60]
Two different voices constantly call to us. One comes from within, the other from without. The one from without is one's daily duty. If the part of the mind that responded to duty corresponded exactly with the voice from within, then one would indeed be supremely happy. [61]
...the relationship between the voluptuous lily of dawn and the purity of the body. [64]
The reader is asked to notice that I say nothing of my own everyday life. My intention is to talk only of the several mysteries to which I have been party. [64]
Earlier, I defined the essential function of words as a kind of magic in which the long void spent waiting for the absolute is progressively consumed by writing, much as embroidery slowly covers the pure white of a long sash. [67]
An admirable example in miniature of what happens in such as case is to be found in a collection of letters, written by young men of the suicide squad before setting off on their last mission, that is preserved today at he former naval base of Etajima. [67]
I had already see, in the paradox enacted by the body, the ultimate form of the freedom that comes through literature, the freedom that comes through words. Be that as it may, that which had eluded me was not death. It was tragedy that I had once let slip. [71]
The group was concerned with all those things that could never emerge from words - sweat, and tears, and cries of joy or pain. If one probed deeper still, it was concerned with the blood that words could never cause to flow. 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. [73]
For shared suffering, more than anything else, is the ultimate opponent of verbal expression. [74]
...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. [75]
Opposites carried to extremes come to resemble each other; and tilings that are farthest removed from each other, by increasing the distance between them, come close together. [76]
But body and spirit had never blended. They had never come to resemble each other. Never had I discovered in physical action anything resembling the chilling, terrifying satisfaction afforded by intellectual adventure. Nor had I ever experienced in intellectual adventure the selfless heat, the hot darkness of physical action. [77]
That principle, it occurred to me, was death. [77]
For man to encounter the universe as he is, with uncovered countenance, is death. In order to encounter the universe and still live, he must wear a mask - an oxygen mask. [77]
...Could there be any more glittering insult to the stubbornly sedentary spirit? [81]
Erect-angled, the F104, a sharp silver phallus, pointed into the sky. Solitary, spermatozoon-like, I was installed within. Soon, I should know how the spermatozoon felt at the instant of ejaculation. [83]
...an intellectual limit that lies at the opposite extreme from the outer limit of the intellect. [83]
Anything that comes into our minds even for the briefest of moments, exists. Even though it may not exist at this actual moment, it has existed somewhere in the past, or will exist at some time in the future. [85]
...the resemblance between my midnight study and the interior of the F104, forty-five thousand feet up in the sky. [86]

Word Meaning

Slake - quench or satisfy
Anathema - something or someone that one vehemently dislikes
the great black bull of toreador
snugly ensconced [32]
insipid - lacking flavour
Assiduously - with great care and perseverance
Antinomy - a contradiction between two beliefs or conclusions that are in themselves reasonable; a paradox
Boorishness
Obeisance - deferential respect
Scrawny - unattractively thin and bony
Magnanimous - generous or forgiving, especially toward a rival or less powerful person
Parsimonious - unwilling to spend money or use resources; stingy or frugal.
Bourgeois - of or characteristic of the middle class, typically with reference to its perceived materialistic values or conventional attitudes
Pithy - (of language or style) concise and forcefully expressive
Spurned - reject with disdain or contempt.
Prodigality
Omniscience - the state of knowing everything
Adumbrated - report or represent in outline
Torpor - a state of physical or mental inactivity; lethargy
Cyanosis - a bluish discoloration of the skin resulting from poor circulation or inadequate oxygenation of the blood
Concomitant - naturally accompanying or associated
Fetters - a chain or manacle used to restrain a prisoner, typically placed around the ankles
Prescience - the fact of knowing something before it takes place; foreknowledge
Slovenly - especially of a person or their appearance) messy and dirty
Aberrant - departing from an accepted standard
Effulgence