Yukio Mishima, Sol och Stål (Yukio Mishima: Sun and Steel quotes)

I Patty Winters show diskuterades det idag om Yukio Mishimas verk Sol och Stål (Sun and Steel). Nedan följer lite citat bara...

"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"

"I cherished a romantic impulse towards death, yet at the same time I required a strictly classical body as its vehicle"


"The occasional pain in the muscles of a blow that missed the shield gave rise to instantly to a still tougher consciousness that suppressed the pain, and imminent shortage of breath gave rise to a frenzy that conquered it. Thus I glimpsed from time to time another sun quite different from that by which I had been so long blessed, a sun full of the fierce dark flames of feeling, a sun of death that would never burn the skin yet gave forth a still stranger glow. This second sun was essentially far more dangerous to the intellect than the first sun had ever been. It was this danger more than anything else that delighted me"


"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"

"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"

"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"


"I marveled at the function of the uniform in the army. Just as the finest cloak of invisibility for words is muscle, so the finest cloak of invisibility for the body is the uniform. The military uniform, however, is made in such a way that it refuses to suit a scrawny body or a protruding belly. [...] In the eyes of others the man who donned a uniform became thereby, quite simply, a combatant"


"I learned that the momentary, happy sense of existence that I had experienced that summer sunset during my life with the army could be finally endorsed only by death"